A number of different languages or discourses are evident in contemporary Irish educational policy, debate and theory: the grammar of commodity and marketisation, the poetry of "Bildung" and culture, the prose of Christian formation and revelation together with the ubiquitous rhetoric of personal developmental psychology. These are among the languages and dialects vying for descriptive, and more significantly, normative dominance. All of these languages claim both to describe and legitimise the reality of education while tensions and antagonism between these understandings divide the educational community, politicians and social commentators. They also function as "formative discourses" shaping the way in which we view and imagine learners. Reading these languages as examples of dialectical ideology types as proposed by Slavoj Zizek together with the application of his critique of ideology suggest a new way of illuminating the languages of education. In the course of this critique a novel notion of the subjectivity of the learner that eludes dominance by language and the symbolic order is proposed. (Contains 8 notes.)