In this extra post, Dr Anton Elloway draws on the work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre to reflect on the purpose of a university education. He explores how MacIntyre’s work can help reform universities to recover their capacity to form an educated and deliberative public based on moral formation. Anton is a Teaching Fellow in English Language Education at the Centre for Open Learning.
Introduction
‘Study with us for an extraordinary future’, says the University of Edinburgh’s webpage. But what kind of future does a university education promise – one of personal growth, or merely a means to an end?
Universities themselves rarely address this question. When they do, their response is often framed in terms of social utility, most commonly employability. Such aims are not without value, but they are partial: they do not explain why education is valuable in itself, nor what kind of life it should help us pursue.
The philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, for whom questions of education and the university are integral to his wider philosophical project, identified as early as 1964 a fundamental failure in both society and education: an ‘inability to discover ends, to discover purposes which can furnish a sufficient reason for our activities and so render these activities reasonable and satisfying’ (1964, p.2).
For MacIntyre, the purpose of education is clear. It is not merely to prepare individuals for particular occupations but to form reflective and rational agents equipped to pursue what it means to live well. In what follows, I outline how his account of education and the university illuminates this ideal and the kind of education that can support it.
What is the purpose of education?
MacIntyre’s, The Idea of an Educated Public (1987), draws a distinction between two aims of education: the societal and the educational. The first prepares individuals to occupy roles within existing social structures – for example, law, medicine, or administration. The second cultivates persons who can think for themselves: capable of questioning assumptions, reflecting on their ends, and reasoning about what is good both for themselves and for others.
He later reaffirmed this view in conversation with Joseph Dunne (MacIntyre and Dunne 2002), arguing that education should cultivate capacities for independent reasoning and meaningful participation in family and political life, while fostering virtues necessary to pursue both individual and common goods.
This civic dimension becomes explicit in Replies (2013), where he describes education as:
the making and sustaining of an educated public, a public of plain persons who are able to speak with each other rationally and imaginatively about the decisions on common goods that they will make or that others will make on their behalf (2013, p.208).
Education, then, is both a public and a private good. Its goal is the formation of an educated public – a wider community of rational deliberation in which individuals learn to reason together about the good. Building on this civic ideal, MacIntyre emphasises that while individuals can reason about the good on their own, such reasoning is often most fully developed and tested in communal exchange. Universities should be places where students learn to test, correct, and refine desires and judgements through discussion with others: practical training in shared deliberation and mutual correction.
When societal and educational aims are in harmony, education contributes to the formation of such an educated public. MacIntyre finds something like this realised in eighteenth-century Scotland, where broad civic and intellectual engagement created a shared culture of reasoning and virtue. That harmony, he argues, no longer holds. Today, education primarily serves the first aim: preparing individuals for economic and bureaucratic functions. Yet, the second aim remains the standard by which education should be judged.
The university
Universities should be central to this educative task. But MacIntyre argues that they face structural and teleological obstacles. In The End of Education (2006), he describes the modern university as fragmented: disciplines and sub-disciplines pursue their own ends independently, with little shared purpose. The university has lost any coherent conception of the ends of learning or how disciplines relate to the human good, resulting in a collection of specialised enterprises rather than a unified institution of learning.
He develops this critique further in The Very Idea of a University (2009): the fragmentation reflects a deeper societal loss. Without a common core of learning, students from different fields lack a shared intellectual culture and cannot reason together about questions of wider human significance.
A student educated only within one discipline is typically initiated into one practice. For MacIntyre (2007), a practice is a socially established cooperative activity – such as chess, scientific research, or historical scholarship – through which participants pursue internal goods. Engaging with multiple practices develops both skills and virtues, such as honesty and courage, necessary to pursue internal goods successfully. Learning to participate also involves ordering goods: judging how the standards of one practice relate to those of others and to the good of a whole life. Education confined to a single practice limits moral and intellectual formation.
The remedy
Drawing on MacIntyre’s analysis, several directions for reform could help universities recover their capacity to form an educated and deliberative public:
- Shared core curriculum: ground all students in history, literature, mathematics, and the natural sciences. This provides common intellectual reference points and tools of reasoning, potentially supporting genuine public deliberation.
- Breadth before depth: specialisation should follow a broad foundational education, situating expertise within a larger moral and intellectual framework.
- Cross-disciplinary dialogue and peer discussion: students should learn how their field relates to others and engage in structured discussion with peers, practising shared reasoning and refining judgements collaboratively.
- Explicit initiation into practices: make clear the internal goods and virtues each practice requires and cultivate them through sustained immersion in the practices themselves.
These reforms emphasise both intellectual breadth and moral formation: the education of persons capable of deliberating about the goods and virtues that give unity to a human life. They do not seek to recreate an eighteenth-century model but to recover the university’s moral purpose: to form educated persons capable of reasoning well about the good life and the common good.
The old Scottish university system, as George Elder Davie observed in The Democratic Intellect (1999), once aimed at a general education, in contrast to the English model devoted chiefly to specialised training. What I propose here recalls that earlier Scottish vision – not as a call to return to the past, but as a reminder that breadth and moral formation once stood at the centre of a university education. Only when universities recover this purpose can we again say what they are for.
References
Davie, G.E. 1999. The democratic intellect: Scotland and her universities in the nineteenth century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
MacIntyre, A. 1964. Against Utilitarianism. In: Hollins, T. H. B. ed. Aims in Education: The Philosophic Approach. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 1–23.
MacIntyre, A. 1987. The idea of an educated public. In: Haydon, G. ed. Education and values: the Richard Peters lectures. London: Institute of Education, University of London, pp. 15–36.
MacIntyre, A. 2006. The end of education: the fragmentation of the American university. Commonweal 133(18). Available at: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/end-education [Accessed: 1 November 2025].
MacIntyre, A. 2007. After virtue: a study in moral theory. 3rd ed. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
MacIntyre, A. 2009. The very idea of a university: Aristotle, Newman, and us. British Journal of Educational Studies 57(4), pp. 347–362. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8527.2009.00443.x [Accessed: 1 November 2025].
MacIntyre, A. 2013. Replies. Revue Internationale de Philosophie 264(2), pp. 201–220. Available at: https://shs.cairn.info/revue-internationale-de-philosophie-2013-2-page-201?lang=en [Accessed: 1 November 2025].
MacIntyre, A. and Dunne, J. 2002. Alasdair MacIntyre on education: in dialogue with Joseph Dunne. Journal of Philosophy of Education 36(1), pp. 1–19. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.00256 [Accessed: 1 November 2025].
Anton Elloway
Dr Anton Elloway is a Teaching Fellow in English Language Education at the Centre for Open Learning, and specialises in English for Academic Purposes (EAP). He has recently earned a doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, where he explored the connections between Hannah Arendt’s political and educational work and EAP.
