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Chapter 3 40 in her 2004 article Pottering in the garden? On human flourishing and education De Ruyter describes similar objective goods, such as for example safety, good health and having intimate social relationships, which a person has to interpret for herself, to be able to give meaning to them (subjective goods). De Ruyter makes clear that these goods should not be interpreted instrumentally in the sense that they are a means to the end of flourishing. The satisfaction of these goods constitutes flourishing. 40 Brighouse refers to the same type of things as ‘central factors influencing our levels of happiness’. 41 The same goods are thus categorized differently. Good health for example is sometimes a basic, instrumental need, sometimes an intrinsic good; sometimes a precondition and sometimes part of flourishing. According to Kristjánsson, it is also not always clear in Aristotle’s own text on eudaimonia which goods are to be seen as constituents of flourishing or rather as preconditions; the categories rather seem to overlap. 42 The goods described above have in common that they are mostly described in a minimal way, or a certain threshold manner; good enough health for example, or safety (being safe enough to be able to flourish), or having intimate relationships (not specifying how much, how long, how deep). Such goods are what we might call the building blocks of a theory of flourishing. Mills argues that ideal theory has to rely on idealisations (to the extent of marginalizing or excluding the actual) to construe its theory. 43 He means with this that ideal theories need external idealising assumptions to be able to make the theory ‘work’. An example is the assumption of full compliance in Rawls’ theory of justice. In so far as the building blocks that we have discussed above (e.g. good health) are constituents of flourishing, they are not external idealising assumptions needed to construct a theory of flourishing, for they are part of the ideal of a flourishing life. However, when it is argued that a building block is an instrumental good, these goods can function as idealising assumptions which the (ideal) theory on education relies upon. For example, White, and Reiss and White give a description of what a school should do in order to equip children to live flourishing lives, i.e. propose a theory on education for flourishing. 44 For the school to be able to commence this task, it ‘needs’ a certain type of child to come to school in the morning, i.e. the theory needs to assume conditions of this child, for example ‘a certain level of health’, ‘respect’ and ‘freedom from attack, arbitrary arrest and other impositions’. 45 In other words, the theory relies on certain idealisations (that the child is healthy, free from attack, etc.) to be able to construe its theory on education for flourishing (i.e. how the school should equip (those) children). 40 De Ruyter 2004, p. 382. 41 Brighouse 2008, p. 60. 42 Kristjánsson 2017, p. 91. 43 Mills 2005, p. 168. 44 See White 2011 and Reiss and White 2013. 45 Reiss and White 2013, p. 7-8.