This article offers a way to salvage the ideal of the autonomous person from the predicament besetting it and to reclaim it as a worthy and respectable ideal. Carefully maneuvering around this ideal, jettisoning its obsolete qualities while reaffirming its sound ones, the authors offer outlines for a conception of personal autonomy suitable for postmodern democratic education. A key concept which is introduced and developed in this article is that of "flexible control". The authors show that this concept can assist in avoiding the pitfalls encumbering the traditional concept of personal autonomy, while allowing to salvage its propitious aspects for use in postmodern democratic education. This concept has three main features: (1) it recognizes the capacity of the agent to exercise different levels of control; (2) these levels do not indicate distinct and closed phases, but are placed on a continuous temporal axis; and (3) the agent may shift from a minimal level of control, or from absence of control, to a maximal level of control, as the circumstances may decree. The authors argue that when the necessary qualifications are made, the ideal of the autonomous person and the idea of self-control associated with it can, firstly, accommodate the previously mentioned and well-grounded concerns, and secondly, be unproblematically adopted as a legitimate goal of education. (Contains 1 table and 8 notes.)