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Chapter 5 83 indirectly – to what Ramaekers and Suissa describe, in the sense that it raises expectations held by parents with regard to the flourishing of their children. Flourishing as an aim of education doesn’t necessarily imply more than parents having their children’s well-being ‘at heart’, but parents might be inclined to attach much further-reaching conclusions to such a claim. For example, the title of this article might evoke the expectation of a much more precise description of how parents should pursue a flourishing life for their children, which – when for example referred to in a popular magazine, or used as an inspirational source to develop a method (‘the hope method’) – can easily be turned into a claim made on parents, and subsequently internalized by parents. Moreover, we argue that claims can also ‘become blurred’ in a second sense, namely where in texts it is, or has become, unclear whether flourishing as an aim of education should be seen as a goal or as an ideal. The title of a section in Martin Seligman’s (founder of positive psychology) book reads: ‘flourishing as the goal of positive psychology’. 66 As noted before, the book title itself suggests the same: Flourish: A new understanding of happiness, well-being – and how to achieve them . It appears that flourishing is seen as a goal, although the concept itself is explicitly a conception of Aristotelian eudaimonia , in which flourishing is unequivocally seen as an ideal. A different example of how claims can get blurred (in both ways), is when it does not become clear from a certain text at all how to interpret its claims. Wolbert for example saw herself cited as a proponent of education for flourishing in a report on a popular discussion on future education in the Netherlands, in which it was completely unclear who the intended audience for this publication were, and as what kind of concept (ideal, goal, or else) flourishing was proposed. 67 If parents were to read this report (which is quite probable), what should they make of it, other than that they are told that they ought to aim for the flourishing of their children? In addition to contributing to recent theory on education for flourishing by exploring carefully how parents should aim for the flourishing of their children, we also hope that this article contributes to an awareness of how (both theoretical and empirical) claims about child-rearing can turn into claims internalized by parents, with accompanying (problematic) strategies of fulfilling these claims. 66 Seligman 2011, p. 26. 67 See Platform Onderwijs 2032 [Platform Education 2032] 2015, p. 15.

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