I don’t often respond to blog articles directly, but I read this and couldn’t seem to leave a comment locally, so here we are. Being a former educator, I think I can bring a certain perspective to the issue – or at least share my biases. Mainly, I have found that educational institutions earn their money by offering network access. This is why top-tier school can charge what they want. It also argues that other schools may now even be worth the price of admission. The student loan debate in the US may be Exhibit B.
I found this thoughtful and broadly persuasive, especially the treatment of education as a historically contingent field of selection rather than a neutral transmission of knowledge. I agree that institutions do not merely distribute information; they decide what counts as knowledge, competence, legitimacy, and intellectual seriousness.
My hesitation concerns the breadth of education as the organising term. Much of the critique seems directed more specifically at institutional schooling: curricula, examinations, credential hierarchies, universities, tuition, disciplinary structures, and labour-market preparation. Knowledge acquisition, inquiry, intellectual formation, credentialing, and institutional reproduction overlap, but I am not sure they should be treated as one object.
This distinction also sharpens the commodification argument. Elite institutions often charge not because they possess otherwise inaccessible knowledge, since much coursework is now available through books, lectures, open courses, and other online resources, but because they sell positional access: selected peers, faculty patronage, alumni networks, recruitment channels, prestige, and a credential recognised by other gatekeepers. In that sense, the scarce commodity is often less knowledge than institutional membership and social placement.
There are certainly exceptions involving laboratories, archives, specialist supervision, unpublished research, or unusually strong seminars. But these seem insufficient to explain most of the price premium attached to elite undergraduate education. The institution is often selling educational capital rather than education alone.
I also wonder whether the essay first dissolves education as a coherent ontology and then partially restores it through terms such as ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic education’, now defined as critical, emancipatory, interdisciplinary, and resistant to domination. I am sympathetic to that orientation, but it still seems to select one preferred practice from among several rather than recover the essence of education.
Perhaps the more diagnostic vocabulary would distinguish learning, schooling, credentialing, intellectual formation, network access, and institutional reproduction. This would preserve the force of the critique whilst making clearer which function is being criticised at each point.
Philosophics 
Thank you for such a careful reading. I think our disagreement is relatively narrow and concerns the level of abstraction rather than the direction of the argument.
I deliberately use “education” as the organising concept because I am not attempting to produce a sociology of educational institutions but an ontology of education itself. Schooling, credentialing, universities, curricula, examinations, network access, labour-market preparation, and intellectual formation are not, in my view, separate objects that can first be analysed independently and only later connected; they are historically contingent manifestations of how a civilisation chooses to organise the production, validation, transmission, and distribution of knowledge.
I completely agree with your observation about elite institutions. In fact, I would probably formulate it even more sharply. The principal commodity is often not knowledge but legitimacy. The degree certifies not merely what someone knows but who is authorised to be heard. The network certifies not merely relationships but proximity to existing concentrations of institutional power. What is being purchased is symbolic capital capable of reproducing itself through subsequent access to opportunities, influence, and authority. That, to me, strengthens rather than weakens the commodification argument, because it demonstrates that even when knowledge itself becomes increasingly abundant, scarcity simply migrates towards the institutional mechanisms that validate knowledge.
Where I would resist your proposal is in separating learning, schooling, credentialing, intellectual formation, network access, and institutional reproduction into distinct analytical objects. That distinction is undoubtedly useful descriptively, but philosophically I am interested precisely in the mechanisms through which those functions collapse into one another until they become almost impossible to disentangle. A university does not merely teach, certify, socialise, create networks, reproduce institutions, and allocate prestige as parallel activities; each of those functions continuously legitimises the others, producing a recursive architecture in which epistemology, social hierarchy, economic organisation, and political authority reinforce one another.
Your final observation is perhaps the most interesting because it identifies what appears to be a tension in the essay. I do indeed dismantle every stable definition of education and then continue speaking about something that resembles education. That is intentional. The first movement is destructive because inherited definitions conceal the historical relations that produced them. The second movement is reconstructive, but not essentialist. I am not recovering an eternal essence called “true education”; I am proposing a different philosophical category altogether, one in which education ceases to be an institution that prepares individuals for an existing society and instead becomes the permanent process through which humanity critically transforms both itself and the society it inhabits.
In other words, I am not asking, “What is authentic education?” I am asking a prior question: “What conception of humanity would make our present understanding of education appear historically contingent rather than natural?” That shift in the level of analysis is where I suspect our perspectives begin to diverge, although I think we agree on far more than we disagree.
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Indeed. As you are likely aware, my primary lens is language and dis–integration, so my diagnosis is generally deconstructive.
I agree that humans have a tendency to compound, this makes heuristic and even pragmatic sense, but is at the expense of semantic clarity, likely tending toward pedantic.
As your trailing question behaves, you are seeking a construction or reconstruction, but I would argue against adopting language like humanity, understanding, education, or natural. Each of these terms is Contestable, so I would distil them to the cores you mean to defend. That’s just me.
If you got the inclination, run through some of these ‘problematic’ terms through the LIH GPT I published. Here’s what ‘natural’ looks like: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-694018a9bbc88191a8360d65a530e50c-language-insufficiency-gpt/c/6a67a947-9334-83ea-8d7c-348c19aabfd3
tl;dr?
Replace natural with the specific claim intended: unprocessed, non-synthetic, innate, common in nature, spontaneous, or traditional.
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