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Chapter 4 56 his parents had intended to raise is something else than failure as in becoming a drug addict and dying young. Whereas failure in the latter sense equals non-flourishing in any reasonable sense of the term, in the former sense it is still an open question whether someone whose education has ‘failed’ leads a flourishing life or not. And thus, while the child does something different than the parent had aimed for, this is not necessarily not-flourishing. Furthermore, we can imagine that some parents might perceive their child’s life as a ‘happy single accountant’ as not flourishing and therefore be harmed as they experience parental failure, but other parents whose children in their conception of flourishing do not flourish, might see and understand that the child is happy and thus not experience harm in reaction to their ‘failure’. Or consider the following example: Say that the parents of Hannah are liberal parents whose intention it is to raise their daughter to become a free-spirited, autonomous adult who pursues her own happiness. Hannah, however, starts going to church and becomes a member of an orthodox religious commune, which includes giving up her autonomy. This is not what her parents had in mind raising Hannah. But Hannah is happy, she works at the commune farm, marries with children, and successfully sells fruits and vegetables from the farm at local markets. The parents’ intention to raise Hannah as an autonomous adult (in the liberal sense) has failed. It is a different question whether the parents believe that their child lives a flourishing life or not, and yet a different question whether others would think so. The parents might take their daughter’s devotion to the religious commune as a weighty reason to see her as not-flourishing (within their conception of flourishing), but they might also understand and respect that their daughter has a different conception of flourishing. By many people the daughter will be thought to flourish, but for others this will be up for debate. So, in this sense, Bollnow’s existential failure does not exclude the possible flourishing life of the child. We do think that existential failure minimally implies a subjective experience of failure on the side of the parent, and we think that Bollnow had examples in mind that minimally caused a crisis within the pedagogical relationship (such as for example running away from home), where both parent and child feel that there is a crisis, but for reasons of conceptual clarity we will proceed to interpret failure in the broadest way that Bollnow’s text allows, which is when the child does not do or become what the parent has intended. As said, existential failure is something else than making a mistake. First, every parent makes mistakes, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the Erziehung has failed. Moreover, we can learn from our mistakes, so mistakes can contribute to Erziehung . According to Bollnow, also existential failure, or rather coming very close to existential failure, is a window of opportunity for Erziehung , as is every crisis. Parents and children both can have a unique learning opportunity due to a near