In Paul Smeyers and Nicholas Burbules’ article “Education as Initiation into Practices” they develop a view of practices that is meant to balance a conservative and reproductive understanding of practices with an understanding of them as arbitrary and groundless and as such perpetually subject to radical changes. According to Smeyers and Burbules balancing these views of practices both depend on and lead to interesting views of education. In this paper I aim to complicate Smeyers and Burbules’ account by reworking their notion of practice. I will do so by turning to the early work of John Rawls and the late work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The turn to Rawls will let me shed light on how certain pictures of practices and two-level structures of actions may be far too rigid to give a useful account of the role of practices in human life and education. The turn to Wittgenstein, and in particular his notion form of life, will emphasise that a view of practices to be useful as an account of education must take into account both social and conventional, as much as biological and animal aspects of human growth and education.