In contemporary times, the picture of the unified self is variously attacked. The directions from which criticisms flow are manifold; feminist, philosophical, postmodernist; psychoanalytical and sociological, to name a few. Each, in their own way, argues against unity and for multiplicity; against wholeness and for fragmentation. What I want to do here is to draw together, in a very loose way, some common threads in the highly disparate presentations on "Identity and the Sell" in order to (i) suggest that, for education, the traditional philosophical literature concerning personal identity is tangential; (ii) resist some postmodernist claims regarding multiple identities; (iii) eschew a certain use of national identity; and (iv) salvage the notion of fragmented and competing values that education must make help educands make sense of.
Received wisdom has it that there are two basic routes to express the nature and contents of personal identity. The third person perspective approaches the question by treating me as just another object in the world. Whereas the third person account of identity rests, most commonly -following Williams (1972)on bodily continuity, this tells us precious little about the other dimension of the question which relates to the property of "being me" in the world. Williams's well-known concern is with identity over time. It seems that if we follow the path tread by Williams there is no real educational tale to tell. Whatever could be made or remade, one's personal identity (in Williams's sense) cannot be a candidate, where numerical identity is expressed as "Is object X identified at time T 1 the same F as object Z at time T2?" This approach to the problem of identity understood by tracking material properties seems less that illuminating for philosophers of education. As teachers and lecturers, we take for granted bodily continuity and a range of observable performances: answering the register, performing a somersault or seminar upon request, as criteria for Smith being the same thing/person this week as last (and, for that matter, next). To interrogate this subjective dimension of the "being me" problem, a more helpful direction may consist in an examination of the "specific nature and substantive content of the various states, traits, dispositions and behavioural patterns which, purely by virtue of possessing the right kinds of connectedness are sufficient" to unveil one's sense of self understanding (Flanagan, 1991, pp. 134-135). Now, to begin probing in this direction requires that the subject has the wherewithal appropriately to reflect. This is the point at which postmodernist critiques gain a foothold. If the sources that shape my identity are now so various and conflicting, then one can see how the answer to central questions such as "Who am I?" and "What kind of life should I lead?" can be deeply problematic. Does