A lot of money is being spent by the educational bureaucracies that are restructuring the European school and university system to create new instruments of state control. One of the most evident signs of this restructuring is the multiplication of evaluation and examination measures. If one wants to hold onto the emancipatory power of the concept of education against these control measures, it makes sense to seek freedom beyond all examination processes. Education would then be the opposite of examination. The main thesis of this book is that this separation of educational and examination concepts leads into an argumentative dead end. Drawing on the classical Enlightenment philosophies of Kant and Hegel, it is shown that moments of examination and self-examination already shape everyday experience. As informal processes of validation, they form an important point of attack.