The Fine Inflected Educational Landscape And Special Educational Needs In Schools: A Note on Metaphysics, Logic and Epistemology in Philosophy of Education (10)

Let's take stock and see where we've got to. So maybe a good way to see what all this machinery is doing is to take a single educational claim that sounds perfectly ordinary, almost too ordinary to deserve metaphysical attention, and then slowly unpack it. Consider the claim, “This class cannot yet have a genuinely open discussion of the novel.” Any teacher will recognise the sort of judgement. It might be said about a Year 8 class reading Of Mice and Men, or a sixth form group reading Beloved, or an undergraduate seminar reading Fanon or Woolf. It sounds practical, almost obvious. The class is not ready. The discussion cannot yet happen properly. One might think that nothing more needs to be said.

But once one pauses, the claim is already doing a remarkable amount of work. It is modal, because it is not merely saying what is happening now but what can and cannot happen. It is educational, because it concerns a specific form of intellectual and pedagogical activity, namely a genuinely open discussion. It is evaluative, because it contrasts that with some lesser thing, perhaps recitation, hesitant talk, parroting, or teacher-led prompting. It is developmental, because the word “yet” implies change over time. And it is relational, because it concerns not one student but a class. In one short sentence, then, there is already a picture of ability, sequence, educational form, and collective possibility.

Without any metaphysical machinery, one might deal with the sentence in one of two familiar ways. One way is loose practical talk. The teacher simply means that the class is immature, underprepared, distracted, or lacking confidence. On this view, the sentence is useful but blurry. The other way is empirical reduction. One tries to translate the claim into measurable variables, perhaps prior knowledge scores, participation rates, vocabulary range, behavioural incidents, or teacher assessments of confidence. On that view, the sentence becomes a rough shorthand for a data pattern. Both approaches have some value, but both leave a great deal out. 

The first leaves the judgement under-analysed. The second flattens it. What the Finean machinery does is neither mystify nor scientise the claim. It differentiates it. It asks what kind of thing is being claimed, what sort of modality is involved, what grounds the truth of the claim, what is essential to the educational activity in question, and what belongs merely to current conditions. Once one does that, the educational thought becomes much sharper. We might start with the most basic distinction, the one between ordinary modality and metaphysical or more special modality. “This class cannot yet have a genuinely open discussion of the novel” is, first of all, an ordinary modal claim. It is like saying that the car cannot yet do 100 miles per hour, or that I cannot now ride a bicycle because there is no bicycle available. It is not immediately a metaphysical claim about what education or discussion is in the deepest sense. It is a circumstantial claim. It says that under present educational conditions, something is not yet possible. That is already useful, because it stops us making a crude mistake. If we hear the teacher’s claim as if it were a claim about the essence of the class, we may slide into thinking that these students are simply incapable of open discussion. The Finean and Vetterian distinction between ordinary and stronger modality blocks that. The impossibility may be entirely circumstantial. The class cannot yet do this, but that says nothing by itself about what they are by nature.

Now ask what conditions are relevant. Here Fine’s refinement of Vetter becomes illuminating. The teacher’s sentence does not explicitly name the conditions, but it tacitly appeals to them. The class may lack the relevant vocabulary. They may not yet trust one another. They may not understand the historical setting of the novel. They may still be waiting for the teacher to tell them what the right answer is. The room may be arranged in rows, making collective exchange awkward. The norms of the class may still be strongly recitational, so students treat discussion as guesswork rather than joint inquiry. Once these conditions are brought into view, the original claim becomes more precise. It is no longer a floating impossibility. It is an ordinary modal truth relative to a structured set of educational conditions. Without the machinery, one might say vaguely, “They are just not ready.” With the machinery, one can begin to say, “Given their current norms of authority, limited conceptual vocabulary, weak historical background, and lack of mutual trust, it is not yet possible for this class to sustain the specific educational form of genuinely open literary discussion.” That is already a much more fruitful thought. It is more exact, more charitable, and more actionable.

But the machinery does not stop there. It now asks, what is this educational thing, “a genuinely open discussion of the novel?” Is it a legitimate educational kind, or just a teacherly impression. This is where the earlier Rosen-Fine questions return. Before we ask what is essential to such a discussion, we need to know whether it is the sort of thing that can bear essence at all. In this case, it looks like a legitimate educational kind. Not because it has a simple explicit definition, but because it is a reasonably stable educational form. It is not just noise, nor just any speaking in class. It has recognisable features. Students address one another’s interpretations. The teacher is not simply eliciting pre-known answers. Contributions alter the direction of inquiry. Reasons are given. Ambiguity is tolerated. The text is treated as something to be interpreted rather than decoded into one correct message. This is enough to make “genuinely open discussion” a plausible educational kind, even if it is not explicitly definable with strict necessary and sufficient conditions.

This is where the idea of implicit definition and conservativity becomes useful. The educational kind is not magical. It is conservative over more basic practices. It is built out of turn-taking, textual attention, trust, interpretive risk, reason-giving, and a certain distribution of authority. That is why it is a serious educational category and not mere vibe. A teacher’s judgement that open discussion is not yet possible is a judgement about whether the lower-level conditions needed to generate that higher-level educational form are in place.

At this point one can see another important distinction, the difference between generated entities and loose aggregates. A class discussion is not just many students talking. A genuinely open discussion is something generated by relations among students, text, teacher, norms, time, and space. It is a derivative but real educational event. Once we see it that way, the original modal claim takes on new richness. The teacher is not merely saying that individuals lack some internal skill. She is saying that a certain generated educational entity cannot yet come into being under the present relational structure. This is a major advance over the ordinary non-metaphysical rendering. Without the machinery, one might oscillate between blaming the students and blaming the teacher. Either “they can’t do it,” or “I haven’t taught it well enough.” With the machinery, one can see that the relevant object is relational and generated. The impossibility concerns the non-generation of a certain educational form under current conditions. That is more accurate than either individual blame story. 

Now the Finean distinctions can go still further. One can ask whether some aspects of the impossibility are merely ordinary and circumstantial, and whether some are linked to deeper educational essence. For example, it may be part of the ordinary circumstances that the class lacks key vocabulary or that the seating arrangement is poor. Those are circumstantial and alterable. But it may also be true that a genuinely open literary discussion, by its very educational nature, requires some degree of mutual intelligibility, some capacity to treat others as co-inquirers, and some shared orientation to reasons rather than mere guessing. Those are not merely accidental conditions. They begin to look more essential to the educational form itself. If so, then the teacher’s judgement can be split. Some obstacles are practical and local. Others concern what the activity is. This is one of the places where the Finean approach is especially fruitful. It shows that one sentence can involve more than one layer of modality. At one layer, there is an ordinary impossibility tied to local circumstances. At another, there are more structural truths tied to the nature of the educational activity. Without the machinery, these layers easily collapse into one another. A teacher may mistakenly treat a local barrier as if it were a deep truth about students, or treat a deep constitutive requirement of the activity as if it were just a temporary inconvenience. The theory helps prevent both errors.

One can now see how grounding enters. What makes it true that the class cannot yet have this discussion. Not in the causal sense only, but in the stronger explanatory sense. The truth of the claim is grounded in a number of lower-level facts, limited prior knowledge, fragile norms of listening, weak interpretive confidence, perhaps a teacher history of closed questioning, perhaps a culture of answer-chasing. Those facts do not merely correlate with the impossibility. They ground it. They are what in virtue of which the higher-level modal truth holds.

Again, compare this with the untheorised alternative. Without the metaphysical vocabulary, one may simply say, “They’re weak,” or “the class dynamic isn’t there,” or “they need more scaffolding.” Each of those may be half-right, but they blur different levels together. The Finean machinery lets us ask which of these are grounding conditions, which are merely symptoms, and which belong to the nature of the activity itself. 

The discussion becomes even richer if we shift from one class to possible tensions between educational goods. Suppose someone now says, “Then the teacher should abandon open discussion and move to more direct instruction.” Another says, “No, that would reinforce passivity and dependence on authority.” A third says, “The curriculum should be decolonised first, because the students do not yet see themselves in the novel.” A fourth says, “No, the issue is demasculinising the classroom discourse, because the boys dominate and perform certainty.” Without the machinery, this quickly becomes a clash of slogans or instincts. With the machinery, one can ask what educational forms each proposal is trying to generate, what conditions they require, and whether these forms are compossible under current conditions. One might find, for instance, that a strongly teacher-guided phase is ordinarily necessary now in order to generate later openness, even if a permanently teacher-centred pedagogy would be at odds with the educational essence of open discussion. Or one might find that a decolonising reframing of the novel and a demasculinising restructuring of classroom talk are both trying to alter the grounds of the same impossible discussion, but in different ways. Or one might even discover that in this setting the two projects partially compete because each demands a different redistribution of authority and relevance. What was, without the machinery, an undifferentiated argument about “what the class needs” becomes a structured inquiry into conditions, generated entities, essential features, and modal tensions.

I think the real power of the Finean approach lies exactly here. It does not merely add jargon. It turns an educational judgement from a compressed practical impression into an articulated object of thought. It helps us see that a teacher’s sentence may contain an ordinary modal claim, grounded in local conditions, about the non-generation of a legitimate educational form, whose deeper constitutive features may themselves reflect more essential truths about discussion, authority, and learning. It also helps us distinguish between what could be changed tomorrow, what would require a slower restructuring of norms, and what belongs to the very nature of the educational activity at stake. And the contrast with what happens without the machinery is stark. Without it, one tends to get either sentiment, “they’re not ready,” “the vibe isn’t there,” “we need more confidence,” or bureaucracy, “their reading ages are below threshold,” “the discussion success criteria were unmet,” “participation metrics remain low.” Both capture something, but neither tells us what exactly is impossible, for whom, in virtue of what, under what conditions, at what level, and whether the impossibility is merely circumstantial or partly structural. The Finean framework, especially once enriched by the later discussions of ordinary modality, grounding, generated entities, and definitional discipline, gives us a way of asking all those questions.

One can put the point quite starkly. Without the machinery, educational thought often lurches between vibes and flattening. With the machinery, it can become discriminating. It can distinguish a generated educational form from a loose impression, a circumstantial impossibility from a deeper structural one, a local ground from an essence, a changeable condition from an invariant constitutive feature. That is why this theory is genuinely fruitful for education. It does not pull us away from classroom life. It lets us see what classroom life already contains but usually leaves unanalysed.

Of course the example here is admittedly artificial, but because we have slowed down one ordinary classroom sentence and opened it with more care than teachers usually have time to do in the moment, the gain becomes easier to see. The artificiality is methodological, not distorting. It reveals the hidden architecture of educational judgement. Once that architecture is visible, even if one never again speaks of essence, ground, generated entities, or ordinary modality in the staffroom, one can think more clearly about what one is really claiming when one says that a class can, cannot, must, or might do something educationally significant. That is already a substantial addition to educational thought.

Special Educational Needs and disabled learners are domains in education where ordinary language is thick with modal claims, ontological assumptions, and badly sorted distinctions, yet where the conceptual stakes are unusually high. Teachers, parents, psychologists, policy makers, and students themselves are constantly saying things like, “He cannot access this task independently”, “She needs a quieter environment”, “They are able to show understanding orally but not in writing”, “This pupil is not ready for whole class discussion”, “He will always need support”, “Her difficulty is specific”, “This is a barrier created by the classroom, not by the child”, “The curriculum is inaccessible”, “The child can do it, just not in that form”. Each of these is already a dense philosophical judgement. Each mixes claims about capacity, environment, dependence, identity, possibility, necessity, and educational form. A non-metaphysical model often forces us either into bureaucratic categories or into loose goodwill. The Finean machinery allows us to separate what is otherwise collapsed, and in doing so it opens genuinely new possibilities of thought and practice.

To see this, begin with a very ordinary sentence. A teacher says, “This pupil cannot yet show her understanding in timed written essays.” Without any philosophical machinery, this may be heard in one of several crude ways. It may be heard as a simple deficit claim about the child, she cannot do it. It may be heard administratively, she is below expected standard in written expression under timed conditions. It may be heard therapeutically, she has anxiety around timed writing. Or it may be heard politically, the assessment format is exclusionary. Each of these may capture something, but they pull in different directions and often generate mutual suspicion. The Finean approach does not dissolve the disagreement, but it lets us ask what is being claimed at each level. 

The first distinction is again between ordinary modality and stronger, more structural necessity. “This pupil cannot yet show her understanding in timed written essays” is, first, an ordinary modal claim. It is not yet a claim about the essence of the pupil, nor about what understanding is as such. It says that under present conditions something is not possible. The “yet” matters. It indicates temporality and alterability. The impossibility is not being stated as absolute. That is already educationally important, because discussions of Special Educational Needs and disability are constantly damaged by a slide from circumstantial impossibility to essential incapacity. A Finean distinction blocks that slide. The teacher’s sentence, properly understood, says first of all that given current conditions, the relevant educational outcome is not possible. We can now ask what the relevant conditions are. Here Fine’s and Vetter’s machinery becomes immediately fruitful. The inability may depend on several interacting conditions, the time pressure, the physical act of writing, the demand to organise thought rapidly under surveillance, the sensory environment of the examination hall, the relation between this assessment form and the pupil’s specific processing profile, the norms of what counts as acceptable essay performance, and the history of previous failure or distress that now structures the task. 

Once these conditions are named, the teacher’s sentence becomes much more precise. The pupil is not simply unable in a general sense. Rather, under this configuration of conditions, the educational form of timed written demonstration is not presently accessible. Without the machinery, one may say only, “She can’t do essays,” or, on the other side, “The system is failing her.” Both may be too blunt. The Finean frame lets us say instead that a specific ordinary modal truth holds relative to a structured field of conditions. This helps one resist both essentialising the learner and dissolving the issue into vague rhetoric about inclusion.

The next step is to ask what sort of thing the target educational activity is. “Showing understanding in timed written essays” looks at first like a simple outcome, but metaphysically it is more complicated. It is not identical with understanding. Nor is it merely the physical production of text. It is a generated educational form, one in which understanding, temporal regulation, linguistic production, orthographic control, physical inscription or typing, and institutional norms of assessment are brought together into a single recognised performance type. That is crucial. The task is not a pure window onto understanding. It is a derivative but real educational entity generated by a complex set of relations. Once one sees that, the common educational mistake of treating failure in that generated form as direct evidence of lack of understanding becomes much easier to expose.

This allows us to distinguish between the essence of an educational good and a particular generated form through which that good is institutionally displayed. Understanding may be the educational good. Timed written essay performance is one generated display-form. If those are collapsed, then a pupil who cannot realise the second is judged to lack the first. A Finean analysis separates them. It asks whether the generated assessment form is conservative over the educational good or whether it introduces additional demands that are not essential to the good itself. In many SEND cases, that is exactly the issue. Take a pupil with dysgraphia, motor difficulties, or significant working-memory constraints. The school may say that she cannot produce a coherent essay under timed conditions. Finean metaphysics asks, what follows from that? Does it follow that she cannot interpret a poem, compare two historical causes, or understand a philosophical argument? No. It follows only if one has already, often tacitly, identified the generated display-form with the educational capacity itself. Once the distinction is in place, one can ask whether the timed essay is an exhaustive measure of the educational property in question. Often it is not. It may be a perfectly legitimate generated form for some purposes, but not one whose failure exhaustively tracks the absence of understanding.

This point can be sharpened further using the idea of grounding. What grounds the truth of the claim that the pupil cannot yet show understanding in that format. It may be grounded in a mixture of motor demand, processing speed, anxiety, sensory overload, and curricular pacing. Those are the lower-level facts in virtue of which the higher-level modal truth holds. Once those grounds are visible, it becomes possible to ask two new questions that are often obscured in non-metaphysical models. First, which of these grounds are alterable? Second, which of them belong to the generated assessment form rather than to the educational capacity itself? These questions are no longer asking simply whether the child can or cannot. One is asking what grounds the impossibility and where that grounding relation sits.

The social model of disability has of course taught education to attend to environmental barriers rather than treating disability simply as a property internal to the individual. That is a major achievement. But a Finean model can deepen even that insight. It does so by showing that “barrier” itself is too coarse a category unless one asks barrier to what, in virtue of what, relative to which generated educational form, and whether the blocked form is itself essential to the educational good. A noisy classroom may be a barrier to this child’s sustained attention. But is sustained attention being blocked in general, or only a particular classroom form of it. Is the barrier grounding an ordinary impossibility for this task, or exposing that the educational arrangement has built non-essential demands into what it treats as normal participation? The metaphysical machinery does not replace the social model. It refines it.

Consider another example. A school says, “This pupil cannot participate in whole class oral discussion.” Again, without the machinery one may get two crude interpretations. Either the pupil has a social communication deficit, or the class is failing to include him. The Finean approach begins by asking what “participate in whole class oral discussion” is. It is not just speaking. It is a generated educational practice involving auditory processing, turn-taking, shared attention, public timing, recognition of cues, tolerance of unpredictability, and a distribution of authority in which one joins a live collective exchange. That is already a complex educational form. For some disabled learners, especially some autistic learners, learners with language processing difficulties, or those with trauma-related hypervigilance, the ordinary modal truth that this form is not currently possible may be entirely correct. But now we can ask, what in the form is essential, and what is merely contingent packaging.

Is real participation in literary or conceptual inquiry essentially oral, immediate, and public? In some cases, perhaps not. The essence of the educational good may lie instead in responsiveness to reasons, interpretive engagement, and contribution to shared understanding. If so, then asynchronous written contribution, pre-prepared intervention, paired discussion, digital chat mediation, or teacher-brokered exchange may instantiate the educational good while altering the generated form. Here the metaphysical distinction between educational essence and contingent generated form becomes practically transformative. It allows one to redesign participation without imagining that one is simply lowering standards or inventing kindness. One is asking whether the institution has mistaken one generated normal form for the educational thing itself.

This is especially important in SEND because educational systems often turn one conventional generated form into the apparent essence of learning. Sitting still, taking rapid verbal turns, coping with background noise, writing at speed, making eye contact, tolerating abrupt transitions, decoding dense visual text, processing multi-step spoken instructions in real time, these are all often treated as if they were part of what it is to learn properly. A Finean analysis makes that identification visible and contestable. It asks in each case, is this really essential to the educational activity, or is it just part of the historically sedimented form in which the system has chosen to package the activity? Once one asks that question, many disabled learners become more intelligible to the system, not because they are suddenly fixed, but because the ontology of the educational practice becomes less crude. 

The same machinery also helps with a notoriously difficult issue in SEND, the relation between difference and deficit. Non-metaphysical models often oscillate here. Some present disability primarily as a deficit relative to norms of functioning. Others, reacting against that, emphasise difference and reject deficit language altogether. The Finean approach enables a more discriminating account. It allows one to say that a learner may differ in ways that alter what educational forms are ordinarily possible under given conditions, without thereby inferring a deep deficit in educational capacity. It also allows one to acknowledge that some generated educational forms really are inaccessible to some learners under current conditions, and perhaps permanently so, without taking that to settle the larger ontological question of what the learner can know, become, or do educationally. This is where the distinction between ordinary and stronger necessity again matters. A teacher may truthfully say, “Under standard timed examination conditions, this pupil cannot produce extended written analysis.” That may be an ordinary necessity relative to the current form, given the current profile and conditions. But it does not follow that it is essential to the learner that she cannot analyse, or that it is essential to the discipline that analysis must be shown in exactly that way. The machinery helps keep those claims apart. It protects against both sentimental denial of difficulty and premature ontological sealing of the learner’s future.

There is another major fruit here. The Finean framework lets us analyse support itself more carefully. Schools often speak as if support were an external aid added onto an otherwise standard educational process. But in many cases support is not merely external. It is part of the conditions under which a certain educational entity can be generated. A visual timetable, a communication device, reduced sensory load, pre-teaching of vocabulary, live scribing, movement breaks, co-regulation, flexible timings, these are not always “extras.” They may be constitutive conditions for the emergence of a certain educational possibility for this learner. Once this is seen, support no longer looks like compensation for weakness alone. It becomes part of the ground of educational form.

This is particularly helpful for resisting a familiar injustice. A learner achieves well with support, and the system says, “But that was only because of the support.” As if the support somehow disqualified the educational reality of the achievement. Finean metaphysics allows one to answer that more sharply. The achievement was real, but its generation depended on a structured set of conditions that included support. The relevant question is not whether support was present, but whether the educational good generated under those conditions is genuine. If the support allowed the learner to instantiate understanding, interpretive participation, mathematical reasoning, or historical explanation, then the support belongs to the grounds of the achievement, not to its negation. This also changes how one thinks about the ontology of “need” in Special Educational Needs. A need is often treated either administratively, a threshold for additional provision, or morally, something to which one should respond compassionately. The Finean apparatus lets us see a need as a relation between a learner, an educational good, and the conditions required for the generation of a form in which that good becomes accessible. In that sense, a need is not merely a trait of the learner nor merely a demand on the institution. It is a structured dependence relation. That helps explain why the same learner may have a significant educational need in one setting and not in another. The need is partly constituted by the mismatch between the learner’s profile and the generated forms through which the institution organises access to the good.

Here again the contrast with non-metaphysical models is striking. Without the machinery, one may say either “the child has high needs” or “the environment is disabling.” With the machinery, one can say something more exact. The child depends for access to this educational good on the presence of these conditions because the currently dominant generated form builds in demands not essential to the good but ordinary to the institution. That is a richer, fairer, and more action-guiding thought.

The approach also has power in relation to diagnosis and category. SEND practice depends heavily on categories, autism, dyslexia, ADHD, speech and language difficulty, sensory impairment, learning disability, and so on. A non-metaphysical model may either take these as straightforward natural kinds or dismiss them as administrative constructs. Fine’s machinery allows a middle route. Some may be partially real categories with mixed grounding, biological, developmental, social, pedagogical, and institutional. But the crucial educational question is often not the category as such. It is what follows from the category, if anything, about the generated educational forms that are possible, impossible, fragile, or robust for this learner under these conditions. In other words, the category should not be mistaken for the educational ontology itself. It may help track patterns of dependence and possibility, but it does not settle them exhaustively. This is especially fruitful because many educational harms arise when diagnostic labels are treated as if they directly expressed educational essence. “He is autistic, therefore he cannot do group work.” “She has dyslexia, therefore she cannot be a serious reader.” “He has ADHD, therefore he cannot cope with quiet study.” These are precisely the sorts of slides the Finean distinctions help block. A diagnosis may ground some ordinary modal truths under some conditions. It does not by itself yield the essence of the learner, nor the fixed boundaries of educational possibility.

The framework can even illuminate a difficult moral and political issue in disability education, the tension between accommodation and transformation. A school may ask whether it should adjust conditions for the disabled learner or redesign the educational form itself. Without metaphysical clarity, this can become a culture-war style argument, standards versus inclusion, realism versus ideology and so forth. Finean machinery asks a more exact question. Which aspects of the generated educational form are essential to the educational good and which are contingent institutional accretions. Accommodation modifies conditions so that the learner can access the same form. Transformation alters the generated form itself because some of its ordinary features were never essential. The right answer will vary by case, but now the choice is no longer conceptually crude.

Suppose a blind pupil cannot access a diagram-heavy science lesson. One option is accommodation, provide tactile materials or descriptive mediation so that the same educational object becomes accessible. Another is transformation, redesign the lesson so that visual presentation is no longer treated as the default mode of scientific intelligibility. The metaphysical machinery helps one see that the dispute is not merely practical. It concerns what belongs to the essence of the scientific educational activity and what belongs to a historically contingent generated form of schooling that happened to privilege sight.

Perhaps the deepest fruit of all is this. Non-metaphysical models in SEND often move between compassion, data, rights, and evidence, but they lack a way of articulating the ontology of educational access itself. Finean metaphysics supplies that missing layer. It allows us to say that disabled learners are often excluded not simply because they lack something, nor simply because the world is unjust, but because institutions have built educational goods into generated forms whose ordinary conditions are too quickly mistaken for their essence. Once that mistake is visible, new possibilities of justice and design appear.

This does not make everything easy. The machinery will not abolish scarcity, conflicting goods, or genuine hard limits. Some educational forms may remain inaccessible for some learners, and some educational goods may genuinely depend on forms that cannot be endlessly revised without changing the subject. Fine’s framework is not sentimental. It helps distinguish those cases too. But even there it is fruitful, because it tells us whether the difficulty lies in the essence of the good, in the current generated form, in the grounding conditions, or in their present combination. That is a far more useful map than the usual opposition between deficit and inclusion.

So one can say, without exaggeration, that Finean metaphysics gives us new fruits in thinking about SEND and disabled learners because it makes possible a finer educational justice. It distinguishes learner from condition, educational good from generated display-form, ordinary impossibility from essential incapacity, support from distortion, category from destiny, and barrier from essence. Without those distinctions, educational thought is constantly tempted either to pathologise the learner or to romanticise inclusion. With them, one can think more truthfully about what a learner can do, under what conditions, in virtue of what, and whether the thing the institution is demanding is really the educational thing that matters. That is not a small gain. It is one way of making educational thought genuinely more intelligent.