"Summary '/titleb Summary: In the tradition of German philosophy, the field is delimited on the one hand by the idea of a general theory (or general pedagogy) of education and on the other by the concept of Bildung as training of the cultural and social subject. The 1960s saw the break-up of the unitary model under the thrust of social sciences (of education) in their plurality, but the philosophical question remained. The problem of the last 15 years then becomes the problem of rebuilding the field in a rational way, in three directions: epistemological, anthropological and with a renewed Bildung perspective. Today, there is a lot of research, but the central issue is: how and under what conditions is it possible to think of the cultural and social foundations of education in the light of the dual, post-modern, epistemological plurality and the ‘death of man’?