Education cannot mean that the young are the product of the activities of their teachers. At the same time, we do not speak of education if students would simply learn something irrespective of the activities of their teachers. In this paper we focus on the question: How is education possible? Our aim is to contribute to a social theory of education, a theory that does not reduce our understanding of educational processes and practices to underlying "constituting elements" but rather tries to understand the social nature of education as a reality sui generis.