This conceptual article critiques a popular account of education grounded in Bourdieu's social theories. Specifically, the article shows how Bourdieu overplays competition and underplays ethics, or people's diverse ways of imagining, debating, and living out the good. On a Bourdieusian view of education, it is difficult to see how educators and students sometimes seek not just to advance in social fields, but to discern and pursue the good. To address this problem in Bourdieusian theory, the article draws upon ideas developed recently in the anthropology of ethics. The article presents a way of accounting for ethical dynamics in education and illustrates the usefulness of this approach by using it to generate a more comprehensive analysis of the author's Bourdieusian study of high schools' career portfolio programmes.