The aim of the article is to posit the question whether, or under what conditions ‘instrumentalism’ can be seen as a viable target of the philosophical critique of education. Firstly, I will briefly review and compare three critical conceptions in modern philosophy that interpreted Western civilization as a form of instrumentalism, yet, at the same time, used the concept perhaps too sweepingly: Adorno and Horkheimer (instrumental reason), Heidegger (calculative thinking) and Arendt (means-ends logic in politics). Secondly, I will discuss the exact sweeping moment in those thinkers’ ways of pursuing their critiques of instrumentalism and the way it can, in fact, weaken the pedagogical impact of their analyses. We face a paradox here: if we consistently follow Heidegger and Adorno (Arendt as well, but the situation looks much better with her, as usual), we are prone to ignore the actual perils for freedom in, for example, subsuming education to the global market economy, because it appears to be only a contingent or occasional (ontic) phenomenon that has its ontological roots as early as Homer or Plato. Conversely, if we ignore their analyses, we endanger our critique with inevitable shallowness, i.e. with a tendency to moan about the obvious circumstances without a real understanding of their ontological, historical and cultural backgrounds. This paradox can be translated as a general paradox of the relationship between philosophy and education. To conclude, I will illustrate this by referring to the leading question of this volume: ‘what (is education) for?’, or, to put it differently, to the problem of the purpose of education. If we assume that within the problem itself instrumentalism is inscribed (as all the three philosophers would), we still face the pedagogical and concrete problem of discerning different types of instrumentality. This problem corresponds with the various ways we describe our educational aims and goals.

中文翻译：

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工具主义：教育哲学一个值得批评的概念吗？

本文的目的是提出一个问题，即“工具主义”是否或在什么条件下可以被视为教育哲学批判的可行目标。首先，我将简要回顾和比较现代哲学中的三个批判性概念，它们将西方文明解释为一种工具主义形式，但与此同时，也许过于笼统地使用了该概念：Adorno和Horkheimer（工具性理性），Heidegger（计算性思维） ）和阿伦特（意思是政治中的逻辑）。其次，我将讨论那些思想家追求工具主义批评的确切时机，以及它实际上可以削弱他们的分析的教学影响的方式。我们在这里面临一个悖论：如果我们始终如一地关注海德格尔和阿多诺（阿伦特，但她的处境要好得多，像往常一样），例如在将教育纳入全球市场经济的过程中，我们很容易忽略自由的实际风险，因为它似乎只是一种偶然的或偶发的（本体的）现象，其起源可追溯到荷马时代。或柏拉图。相反，如果我们忽略他们的分析，就会不可避免地变得肤浅，从而危及我们的批评，即倾向于对明显的情况抱怨而又不真正了解他们的本体论，历史和文化背景。这种悖论可以翻译为哲学与教育之间关系的一般悖论。最后，我将通过参考本卷的首要问题来说明这一点：“（教育）是为了什么？”，或者换句话说，是关于教育目的的问题。如果我们假设在问题本身内是工具主义被铭刻的（就像所有三位哲学家一样），我们仍然会面临辨别不同类型工具主义的教学和具体问题。这个问题与我们描述我们的教育目的和目标的各种方式相对应。