The institutional autonomy of education

This paper develops a liberal contextualist account of schooling that balances institutional autonomy with public accountability under conditions of reasonable pluralism. First a conceptual obstacle is discussed: the tendency to conceive educational autonomy according to the false dilemma of instrumentalism versus non-instrumentalism. Then an alternative is advanced-the contextualist picture-that places education's institutional autonomy in its proper Eight. The conclusion raises and then responds to important objections to the contextualist picture.