In this article, I argue that educating for autonomy requires the inculcation of a disposition to take responsibility for one's commitments, including one's evaluative commitments, rather than the inculcation of an attitude of entitlement to those commitments. Drawing on pioneering work of R.F. Dearden, I argue that taking responsibility for one's commitments requires world-directed concern for reasons and appropriate responsiveness to critical perspectives on one's beliefs and values. Educating for autonomy thus means bringing developing agents to see their beliefs and values as answerable to shared norms of assessment. The cognitive and normative capacities that are required, for such answerability, develop gradually over the course of childhood and adolescence. The question of how best to foster their development in school settings, which are inevitably characterised by asymmetries in power and authority, emerges as an important area for further inquiry.Perhaps autonomy is like happiness in this respect: that you do not achieve it by making it your primary objective. 1 Over the last decade or so, I've encountered and thought about formal education from at least three different perspectives: first, as a parent of elementary school children enrolled in local public schools; second, as an educator who teaches philosophy at a state university; and third, as a citizen observing a trend of dwindling state support for public education at all levels. Fiscal austerity, in recent years, has all too often been accompanied by a rhetorical devaluation of educators and what they do, and, at the college level, by the idea that education in the liberal arts fails to prepare students for the workforce or to fill labour market needs and has no practical purpose but to indoctrinate students into points of view popular with their professors. Taking these various strands of public policy and discourse together, we find ourselves in an atmosphere quite sharply inhospitable to the sort of aims and values that many educators hold dear.Both as a parent and as an educator, I have tended to assume that educators aim to develop and support the autonomy of their students. (Educators' self-understanding, in this regard, is sharply at odds with the popular perception, just noted, that they are engaged in 'indoctrination'.) Many philosophers writing on education agree that the promotion of autonomy is a worthy, and perhaps even central, goal of education. But there is less agreement over any detailed conception of what it is to promote autonomy through education, perhaps in part because there is so little consensus over what autonomy itself is. My aim in this article is to make a start on saying what it would be to educate for autonomy, given what I take autonomy to require. My thesis is relatively modest and can be briefly stated: educating for autonomy requires the inculcation of a disposition to take