Educational philosophy, broadly speaking, has turned sharply in the direction of nonideal theorizing in recent years. The thesis of this paper is that this turn is premature, and will ultimately bear very little fruit for educational philosophy as a discipline. The author's argument proceeds through a discussion of the history of nonideal theory in political philosophy, and the particular and unique historical milieu out of which it developed. This paper argues that educational philosophy has not developed in an even relatively analogous way to political philosophy, and that the historical and contemporary distance between the two fields gives us good reasons to be suspicious of the wholesale appropriation of methods and insights of the one for use in the other. The author issues a call to retain ideal theorizing--and even privilege it--in educational philosophy, and argues that a critical factor in the development of nonideal theory in political philosophy is precisely the fact that the discipline first had to pass through a long and arduous period of ideal theorizing. This connection underscores the need for philosophers of education to turn toward the foundational, the originary, and the primal questions of the field of educational philosophy rather than to the practical questions of application which have preoccupied many philosophers of education lately. These fundamental questions are where philosophers of education find the fertile ground that is uniquely theirs and where their philosophical roots should be planted.