There is a sense in which contemporary approaches to education and to training teachers for a career in educating have for the most part forgotten the philosophical question of the meaning of education; namely, the question of why it is that humans by nature require education. It will be the aim of this article to go back to and re-interpret the metaphysical foundations of the question of what education means through an analysis of the ontological principle first expressed by Aristotle: that ‘being is always the being on an entity’. Through this return to and re-reading of the metaphysical foundations of the question of the meaning of education the article will argue that education, in an ontological sense, signifies the formation of identity, the formation of our activities of existing in community, and the formation of our activities of being in relation to entities in the world.