ABSTRACT
Education has, until recently, been neglected somewhat by analytical political and moral philosophers. Yet it is impossible fully to evaluate an education system, or a proposal for reform, without making judgments about what values ought to guide educational institutions. Political and moral philosophy, then, have an essential role to play in responsible thinking about educational institutions. Three relevant categories of value can be discerned; values concerning how educational opportunities should be distributed across the population, values concerning what content those opportunities should have, and values concerning how to manage tradeoffs between the values guiding education and other important social values when they are in conflict.
