The concept of human dignity arguably has great relevance to education as it is mentioned in several human rights and education policy documents on the national and international level, providing their moral justification. However, when the concept is discussed within philosophical research, it is often seen as consisting of two different conceptions - intrinsic dignity and attributed dignity. The paper seeks to challenge this binary through a reconstructive interpretation of Martha Nussbaum's conception of dignity, proposing inflorescent dignity, as a more fully fledged way of understanding dignity and how it relates to education. Through use of a fictional example, I argue that inflorescent dignity, grounded in intrinsic dignity, has relevance to education because it gives rise to moral, relational, and thus pedagogical, demands on education to be primarily focused on human flourishing as well as the acknowledgement of human actuality and potential, and for this to permeate all levels of education.

Dignity has often been used to signify a ground for a particularly serious kind of moral consideration, the scope of which has been debated. Therefore, I argue that an inclusive conception of dignity is central in determining the normative aims of education, and the moral responsibilities that adult teachers should have in learning relationships with children. The aim of the paper is to argue for a view of dignity as a regulative ideal beyond the dichotomy of moral agents and patients that can be (imperfectly) realized through moral perfectionism. In this article I show how commonly held neo-Aristotelean and neo-Kantian interpretations that view dignity as an intrinsic value grounded in certain capacities, mainly the capacity for reason, can have limiting implications for the view of children as moral subjects. By presenting alternative interpretations of Aristotle and Kant, I will seek to challenge these limited views on dignity and expand the conception of dignity to not only being grounded in certain capacities of moral agents and patients, but in morality itself. The argument leads to problematizing moral perfectionism in education that is not counter-balanced by moments of transcending our own intentions to be good.

In educational research there is a plethora of propositions on different ways to address the problem of too narrow and merely/mainly extrinsic and futureoriented aims of education such as the one of producing citizens who can contribute to national competitiveness in a global capitalist market system.Several approaches counterbalance such narrow aims by offering more holistic aims such as cosmopolitan, democratic citizenship, flourishing and liberation.However, in addition to broadening the range of possible aims of education, there is also a need to address the underlying ethical and relational problem of how aims in themselves, even though holistic, still always run the risk of becoming stagnant and reified. In this paper, I argue together with Gert Biesta and Sharon Todd that the unavoidable fact of educational aims involving the risk of becoming stagnant can have detrimental effects on relationships in classrooms. However, I re-frame the problem from an ethical viewpoint. I propose dignity-awareness as a practice of ethical relational attunement to educational aims where these are left open for renewal and dynamic coexistence, not merely through a process of strenuous self-reflection and pedagogic dialogue, but through artfulness and playfulness. I suggest dance as a metaphor for an ethical awareness/interaction in which the relative importance of educational aims is acknowledged and appreciated.