This contribution departs from the diagnosis of an increasing politicization of the fields of education in terms of its instrumentalization and bureaucratization, driven especially by means of governmental categories employed in describing what counts as knowledge in the fields of education. In this way, a pedagogical situation is prepared for engineering purposes. These developments awake the desire to return to pedagogy’s roots by changing its ruling categories. This vision is being followed up by e.g. referring to the prominent pedagogical visionary, Jean Jacques Rousseau. By stressing the children’s learning through their actual relationship to the world, at the same time seeing the need to anticipate their yet unknown future, Rousseau was one of those who substantially shaped the tradition of European Continental education and didactics. This tradition will be approached in basic terms. The methodological procedure is rooted in a Continental tradition of philosophical inquiry, with a focus on a historical reconstruction and theoretical analyses of philosophical, epistemological and anthropological assumptions about pedagogy. This work is associated with the European Continental approach of Pedagogical Anthropology, which develops a vision of education by departing from the question of `what it is to be human´.