Ideas of Education Philosophy and Politics From Plato To Dewey Christopher

Ideas of Education
There has always been a strong relationship between education and philosophy –
especially political philosophy. Renewed concern about the importance and effi-
cacy of political education has revived key questions about the connections
between the power to govern and the power to educate. Although these themes
are not always prominent in commentaries, political writings have often been
very deeply concerned with both educational theory and practice. This invalua-
ble book will introduce the reader to key concepts and disputes surrounding
educational themes in the history of political thought.
The book draws together a fascinating range of educational pioneers and think-
ers from the canon of philosophers and philosophical schools, from Plato and
Aristotle to Edward Carpenter and John Dewey, with attention along the way
paid both to individual authors, such as Thomas Hobbes and Mary Wollstonecraft,
as well as to intellectual movements, such as the Scottish Enlightenment and the
Utopian Socialists. Each thinker or group is positioned in their historical context,
and each chapter addresses the structure of the theory and argument, consider-
ing both contemporaneous and current controversies. A number of themes run
through the volume:
• an analysis of pedagogy, socialisation, schooling, and university education, with

particular relation to public and private life, and personal and political power;
• references to the historical and intellectual context;
• an overview of the current reception, understanding, and interpretation of
the thinker in question;
• the educational legacy of the theories or theorists.
This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and scholars of education,

as well as to students and teachers of political theory, the history of political
thought, and social and political philosophy.
Christopher Brooke is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Bristol, UK.
Elizabeth Frazer is Official Fellow and Tutor in Politics at New College,

Oxford, and Lecturer in Politics at the University of Oxford, UK.
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Ideas of Education
Philosophy and politics from
Plato to Dewey
Edited by Christopher Brooke

and Elizabeth Frazer
First published 2013
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2013 C. Brooke and E. Frazer
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial
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nation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Ideas of education : philosophy and politics from Plato to Dewey /
edited by Christopher Brooke and Elizabeth Frazer.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Education—Philosophy. I. Brooke, Christopher, 1973- editor of
compilation. II. Frazer, Elizabeth, editor of compilation.
III. McPherran, Mark L., 1949- Socrates, Plato, Eros and liberal
education.
LB14.7.I34 2013
370.1—dc23
2012047750
ISBN: 978-0-415-58252-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-81754-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Galliard
by Cenveo Publisher Services
Contents
List of contributors vii

Credit list xi
Introduction: education and political theory 1

C H RI S TO P H E R BRO O KE A ND EL IZA BET H FR AZ ER
1 Socrates, Plato, erôs, and liberal education 6

M ARK L. M C P HERRA N
2 Aristotle’s educational politics and the Aristotelian

renaissance in philosophy of education 21
RAN D ALL CU R REN
3 Philosophy and education in Stoicism of the

Roman imperial era 38
G . RE Y D AM S - S CH IL S
4 Medieval theories of education: Hugh of

St Victor and John of Salisbury 52
B RI AN D . F I TZ GERA L D
5 Education, Erasmian humanism, and More’s Utopia 66

J O H N M . PARRIS H
6 Teaching the Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on education 83

TERES A M . BEJA N
7 Locke on education and the rights of parents 103

AL EX TU CKN ES S
vi Contents
8 Rousseau’s philosophy of transformative,
‘denaturing’ education 115
PATRI C K RIL EY
9 Educational theory and the social vision of the

Scottish Enlightenment 129
R YAN PATR ICK H A NL EY
10 Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay

on education 145
E L I ZAB ETH FRA ZER
11 Self-cultivation (Bildung) and sociability between

mankind and the nation: Fichte and Schleiermacher
on higher education 160
AL EXAN D E R S CH MIDT
12 Education and utopia: Robert Owen and

Charles Fourier 178
D AVI D L EO P O L D
13 Harriet Martineau and the Unitarian tradition

in education 194
RU TH WATT S
14 J. S. Mill on education 209

AL AN R YAN
15 Feminist thinking on education in Victorian England 224

LAU RA S C HWA RT Z
16 Idealism and education 237

AN D REW VINCENT
17 ‘Affection in Education’: Edward Carpenter,

John Addington Symonds, and the politics of Greek love 252
J O S EP H I N E CRAWL EY Q U INN A ND CHRIS TOPHER BR OOK E
18 John Dewey: saviour of American education

or worse than Hitler? 267
RI C H ARD PRING
Index 285
Contributors
Teresa M. Bejan is a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the

Humanities and a visiting lecturer in the Department of Political Science at
Columbia University. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and an M.Phil.
from Cambridge. Her principal research interests lie in early modern Anglo-
American political thought, particularly concerning issues of toleration, educa-
tion, and civility. Her article on Roger Williams recently appeared in History of
European Ideas. In 2014, she will join the Department of Political Science at
the University of Toronto Mississauga as an Assistant Professor.
Christopher Brooke is Lecturer in Politics in the School of Sociology, Politics

and International Studies at the University of Bristol and the author of
Philosophic pride: Stoicism and political thought from Lipsius to Rousseau
(Princeton, 2012).
Randall Curren is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester, in

New York, Chair of Moral Education at the University of Birmingham, and
Professor at the Royal Institute of Philosophy, London. He is author of
Aristotle on the necessity of public education (2000) and editor of The Blackwell
companion to the philosophy of education (2003) and the journal Theory and
Research in Education.
Brian D. FitzGerald is a D.Phil. candidate in Medieval History at Lincoln

College, Oxford. His doctorate is on scholastic and humanist debates about
prophecy and divine inspiration, and recent publications include articles on
Hugh of St Victor’s theory of history and on Franciscan mysticism. Among his
research interests are medieval intellectual history, medieval literary theory,
and the classical tradition.
Elizabeth Frazer is Official Fellow and Tutor in Politics at New College,

Oxford, and Lecturer in Politics at the University of Oxford. Her research
interests include the problems of political education, and normative theories
of politics.
viii Contributors
Ryan Patrick Hanley is Associate Professor of Political Science at Marquette
University. His research in the history of political philosophy focuses on the
Scottish Enlightenment. He is the author of Adam Smith and the character of
virtue (Cambridge, 2009) and editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Adam
Smith’s Theory of moral sentiments (2010) and the forthcoming Princeton
guide to Adam Smith.
David Leopold is University Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of

Oxford, and a Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford. He has interests in both
contemporary political philosophy and the history of political thought. His
publications include an edited volume (co-edited with Marc Stears), Political
theory: methods and approaches (Oxford, 2008), and a monograph, The young
Karl Marx. German philosophy, modern politics, and human flourishing
(Cambridge, 2007).
Mark L. McPherran is Professor of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University.

He is the author of The religion of Socrates (Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1996), and numerous articles, including: ‘Socratic religion’ in The
Cambridge companion to Socrates (forthcoming); ‘Medicine, magic, and reli-
gion in Plato’s Symposium’ in Plato’s Symposium: issues in interpretation and
reception (CHS/Harvard, 2006); ‘Platonic religion’ in A companion to Plato
(Blackwell, 2006); and ‘The piety and gods of Plato’s Republic’ in The
Blackwell guide to Plato’s Republic (Blackwell, 2006). He is currently the
Director of the Annual Arizona Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy.
John M. Parrish is Associate Professor of Political Science at Loyola Marymount

University and studies political theory, political ethics, and the history of
political thought. He is the author of Paradoxes of political ethics: from dirty
hands to the invisible hand (Cambridge, 2007). He is currently engaged (with
co-author Alex Tuckness) in a book-length study of the historical development
of mercy as a political concept.
Richard Pring was Director and Professor of Educational Studies at the

University of Oxford, 1989–2003, and Lead Director of the Nuffield Review
of Education and Training for England and Wales, 2003–9. His most recent
book was recently published by Routledge, The life and death of secondary
education for all.
Josephine Crawley Quinn is University Lecturer in Ancient History in the

Classics Faculty of the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester
College. Her current work concentrates mainly on the Phoenician world and
the cultural history of North Africa, and she co-directs the Tunisian-British
excavations at Utica.
Contributors ix
G. Reydams-Schils is Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies at the
University of Notre Dame, USA, and holds concurrent appointments in
philosophy and theology. She specialises in the traditions of Platonism and
Stoicism. She is the author of Demiurge and providence: Stoic and Platonist
readings of Plato’s ‘Timaeus’ (Brepols, 1999) and The Roman Stoics: self,
responsibility, and affection (Chicago, 2005). She is the editor of Plato’s
‘Timaeus’ as cultural icon (Notre Dame, 2003), and of a collection of essays
on Stobaeus (Brepols, 2011). She also directs the Notre Dame Workshop on
Ancient Philosophy.
Patrick Riley is Oakeshott Professor of Political Philosophy Emeritus at the

University of Wisconsin-Madison and Lecturer in the Department of
Government at Harvard University. He is the author of several books on
modern political thought, including Will and political legitimacy (Harvard,
1982), The general will before Rousseau (Princeton, 1986), and Leibniz’
universal jurisprudence (Harvard, 1996), and editor of The Cambridge
companion to Rousseau (Cambridge, 2001).
Alan Ryan teaches at Princeton and is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory at

the University of Oxford. He has written extensively on J. S. Mill, Bertrand
Russell, and John Dewey, and is the author of Liberal anxieties and liberal
education (1998) and, most recently, The making of modern liberalism and
On politics (both 2012).
Alexander Schmidt is a Junior-Professor of Intellectual History at Friedrich

Schiller University, Jena. He is the author of Vaterlandsliebe und
Religionskonflikt: politische Diskurse im Alten Reich 1555–1648 (Brill, 2007).
His articles have appeared in The Historical Journal, History of Political
Thought, Modern Intellectual History, Francia, and elsewhere. He is currently
writing a book about Enlightenment debates concerning the promotion of
sciences and letters.
Laura Schwartz is Assistant Professor of Modern British History at the

University of Warwick. She is the author of A serious endeavour: gender,
education and community at St Hugh’s 1886–2011 (Profile, 2011) and Infidel
feminism: secularism, religion and women’s emancipation in England, 1830–
1914 (Manchester, 2013). She is currently working on a history of ‘Feminism
and the Servant Problem’.
Alex Tuckness is Professor of Political Science at Iowa State University. He is

the author of Locke and the legislative point of view (Princeton, 2002). His
articles have appeared in a variety of journals including the American Political
Science Review, Journal of Political Philosophy, American Journal of Political
Science, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Journal of Politics, and Journal of
x Contributors
the History of Ideas. He is currently engaged (with co-author John M. Parrish)
in a book-length study of the historical development of mercy as a political
concept.
Andrew Vincent is Honorary Professor at Cardiff University and Emeritus

Professor of Political Theory at Sheffield University. He is a political theorist
specialising in political philosophy, ideologies, human rights, and philosophical
idealism. Recent publications include Comparative political thought: theorizing
practices (with Michael Freeden, 2012) and British idealism: a guide for the
perplexed (with David Boucher, 2011).
Ruth Watts is Emeritus Professor of History of Education at the University of

Birmingham. She has published much on the history of education and gender.
Her books include Gender, power and the Unitarians in England, 1760–1860
(Longman, 1997) and Women in science: a social and cultural history
(Routledge, 2007), for which she won the History of Education Society Anne
Bloomfield Book Prize in 2010. She is an honorary life-member of both the
History of Education and the International Standing Conference for the
History of Education (ISCHE), Chair of the Martineau Society, and a member
of the Women’s History Network in Britain.
Credit list
McPherran, M. L. (2010) Socrates, Plato, erôs and liberal education, Oxford Review of
Education, 36, 527–541.
Curren, R. (2010) Aristotle’s educational politics and the Aristotelian renaissance in
philosophy of education, Oxford Review of Education, 36, 543–559.
Reydams-Schils, G. (2010) Philosophy and education in Stoicism of the Roman imperial
era, Oxford Review of Education, 36, 561–574.
FitzGerald, B. D. (2010) Medieval theories of education: Hugh of St Victor and John of
Salisbury, Oxford Review of Education, 36, 575–588.
Parrish, J. M. (2010) Education, Erasmian humanism and More’s Utopia, Oxford Review
of Education, 36, 589–605.
Bejan, T. M. (2010) Teaching the Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on education, Oxford
Review of Education, 36, 607–626.
Tuckness, A. (2010) Locke on education and the rights of parents, Oxford Review of
Education, 36, 627–638.
Riley, P. (2011) Rousseau’s philosophy of transformative, ‘denaturing’ education, Oxford
Hanley, R. P. (2011) Educational theory and the social vision of the Scottish
Enlightenment, Oxford Review of Education, 37, 587–602.
Frazer, E. (2011) Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay on education, Oxford
Leopold, D. (2011) Education and utopia: Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, Oxford
Watts, R. (2011) Harriet Martineau and the Unitarian tradition in education, Oxford
Ryan, A. (2011) J. S. Mill on education, Oxford Review of Education, 37, 653–667.
Schwartz, L. (2011) Feminist thinking on education in Victorian England, Oxford Review
of Education, 37, 669–682.
Quinn, J. C. & Brooke, C. (2011) ‘Affection in education’: Edward Carpenter, John
Addington Symonds and the politics of Greek love, Oxford Review of Education, 37,
683–698.
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Introduction
Education and political theory
Christopher Brooke and
Elizabeth Frazer
This book collects together specially commissioned chapters which cover a series
of political philosophical theories of education: Plato and Socrates, Aristotle, the
Roman Stoics, the Scholastics Hugh of St Victor and John of Salisbury, Erasmus
and More, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, the Scottish Enlightenment, Macaulay and
Wollstonecraft, Fichte and Schleiermacher, the Utopian Socialists, Owen and
Fourier, Martineau and the Unitarians, J. S. Mill, nineteenth-century British
feminists, the Idealists, Symonds and Carpenter, and Dewey. The initial
intellectual impetus for our project was the observation that political and social
theories and philosophies inevitably are imbricated with some theory of or, more
modestly, ideas about, education. So we asked contributors to place accounts of
pedagogy, curriculum, socialisation, schooling, university and scholarship into
the context of political and social philosophy and theory, considering the
relationships between education and the concerns about public and private life,
political and personal power, as they had been understood by prominent thinkers
and groups of intellectuals.
The close relationship between educational and political theory may, of
course, come as news to some scholars and theorists in both disciplines.
Disciplinary specialisation and departmentalisation mean that the academic study
of education and of political theory or philosophy can proceed in mutual
disregard or even ignorance of one another. In any case, the place of the one in
relation to the concerns of the other varies tremendously, and certainly cannot
be determined in advance of close textual and theoretical study. Further, there
will invariably be interpretive dispute about the structure and coherence of any
thinker’s work, and therefore about how the themes of education and political
power relate therein.
Let us take as an example a thinker whose work is not covered by any of the
contributors to the present volume, because he is outside our timeframe. John
Rawls in his 1971 book A theory of justice says rather little about the education
of young people, although he does not say nothing.1 The paucity of his direct
engagement with the theme, though, is of course consistent with the interpreta-
tion that actually education must be a critical contributor to a Rawlsian just
society. Exactly what its contribution is, however, is a matter of interpretation
and dispute between critics and philosophers.
2 Christopher Brooke and Elizabeth Frazer
Like those of other systematic political thinkers, Rawls’s model relies on a
balance between four factors. First is the rational or philosophical justification of
certain patterns and standards of conduct. The idea is that participants in the
society and state will be rationally motivated to behave in desirable ways, simply
because of the truth or validity of proposals that they should behave in those
ways. Second are the institutional and structural incentives that constrain
and urge citizens and rulers to conduct themselves in particular desirable ways.
The idea here is that people behave appropriately not so much because they are
convinced of the independent rightness of appropriate behaviour, but because
the institutions of reward, taxation, and punishment of the society make such
behaviour instrumentally rational. Third is the cultivation of a culture of values
and standards which governs individuals and groups, as it were, informally. The
norms of conduct to strangers, friends, and kin, the values that are celebrated in
cultural forms like music, food, and sociability, are a necessary element of a social
system that is stable and just. Fourth and finally, there is the overt socialisation
of individuals with a specific emphasis on socially oriented and state-endorsed
education, in particular of young people. Just and stable societies educate
individuals to be the kinds of characters who participate appropriately in the just
society.
Exactly how the balance between rational motivation, structural incentives,
culture and education, is, can be, and should be, struck and maintained is a
problem that looms large in the now legendarily voluminous literature on
Rawlsian political theory.2 Commentators argue about what Rawls himself actu-
ally thought about this question, and critics wonder whether Rawls’s solution, or
any solution that is consistent with Rawls’s theory, is really valid or feasible. A
Rawlsian worry about education, especially of young people, is that socialising,
disciplining, incentivising, and acculturating individuals to be ‘the right kind of
individual’ for the society can seem to be an unjustifiable, or, worse, sinister,
imposition of society’s values on what ought to be autonomous individuals.
Others worry that it is an unwarranted intrusion on what should be the prerog-
ative of parents, or cultural community. For others, the idea that a just society
can be established and maintained simply by incentivising adults, engaging in
philosophical argument about right and wrong, and promoting a public culture
is evidently inadequate: education, of children and adults, must be a necessary
condition of any project of social and political stability.
Many theorists and thinkers from the ‘political thought’ canon, of course, say
a good deal more about education, as such, than did Rawls. For many, a treatise
on education is a prominent part of the work – for instance, Erasmus, Locke,
Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Fichte, and Dewey. For others – for example, More,
Hobbes, or Carpenter – ideas about education are much more interwoven with
the general social or political philosophy. In some cases, essays explicitly address-
ing educational policy and philosophy can be put into the context of more
general social and political theory, as in the cases of Mill and Fichte. In other
cases, an intellectual and political position has its origins in struggles over
education; this is true for the Unitarians, for example, and, arguably, a good deal
Introduction 3
of feminist thought and action. Either way, problems of interpretation regarding
the exact place of education in the theory arise. How, exactly, we should read and
understand works or remarks on education in relation to those on epistemology,
political power and governmental legitimacy, ethics and metaphysics is invariably
contentious.
The ‘philosophy of education’ raises the same kind of conundrums and
disputes as have been rehearsed with reference to other branches of philosophy.
For some, philosophy consists of an enquiry into metaphysics and epistemology,
or into the nature of being, what there is, and our understanding or knowledge
of it. Some philosophers accordingly treat works that are ostensibly about ‘ethics’
or ‘politics’, or about ‘education’ or ‘science’, as ‘really’ about knowledge and
existence, and hence about the human condition. The question whether we treat
philosophical analysis of education and politics (and ethics, science, etc.) as
autonomous fields of study with their own concepts, methods (and nowadays of
course departments, conferences and journals), or as derivative of some more
fundamental philosophical enquiry, is one with which our project engages.
Our discussion of Rawls’s political philosophy earlier treats ‘education’ as one
element in a theory of state and social stability and justice – one that is analyti-
cally distinct from truth, economic rationality, and culture. That it is analytically
distinct from these others does not in itself settle the question of its necessity, nor
its sufficiency, as a critical element of a theory. Nor does analytic distinctiveness
imply that education is wholly autonomous from economy or culture. But denial
that it is wholly autonomous does not licence the view that it is simply derivative,
an epiphenomenon, or some kind of reflex. And analogous considerations apply
to the question of the philosophies of education, politics and epistemology and
metaphysics. Commentators and critics ask whether we should treat Rousseau’s
Emile separately or together with The social contract and the Discourse on
inequality; or whether we should read Locke’s Essay on human understanding,
his Two treatises of government, and Some thoughts concerning education
separately, in the context of distinct philosophical enterprises, or together as part
of ‘the same’ problem.3
These questions then – how philosophy of education relates to other kinds of
philosophical enquiry, and the place of education in particular in relation to
other elements in philosophy and theory of state and social, public and private,
political and personal power – are at the basis of our project. From the Stoic
philosophers, to utopian experimenters, we meet, in the chapters that follow, a
range of philosophical analyses of the relationship between education and the
self, and the society, the polity, values, and knowledge.
The term education itself, of course, covers a wide range of processes and
concerns. The chapters here show how focus shifts over time and from thinker
to thinker. Analyses variously focus on the purposes and methods of scholarship;
the nature of a ‘university’ or a ‘school’; the rearing and socialisation of children;
and the learning and politicisation aspects of religious observance. For some of
the philosophers and thinkers considered here, education is connected above all
to questions of equality and autonomy. Some focus on the relationships internal
4 Christopher Brooke and Elizabeth Frazer
to education itself – between students, between teacher and pupil; others
consider education, and the institutions within which it proceeds, in terms of
their effects on polity and society.
We have decided to present the chapters in the traditional chronological order,
although in the course of the project we considered some alternative schemes.
The historical order naturally conduces to a reading of changes over time, and
across intellectual and political contexts, in how education is conceptualised.
This way of putting it signals dissent from some recent methodological positions
in the history of ideas. It has been argued that an idea in its local context, formed
as it is in response to very specific questions and problems, can hardly be treated
as the ‘same idea’ as that which is denoted by the same word in a context many
centuries distant.4 Notwithstanding the undoubted value of interpretive caution,
about stability of meaning, about the nature of intellectual influence, and about
the ‘development’ of ideas over time, we work on the basis that the past, distant
though it may be, is never completely left behind by those who come after. It
might be that the situations of educators like Socrates, Aristotle, or the Stoics,
mean that their view of education as a public concern is dramatically different
from the view that education, including the education of girls, must be a matter
of public interest as that is articulated by Catharine Macaulay and Mary
Wollstonecraft in the eighteenth century. But the contrasts can be over-
emphasised, for eighteenth-century thinkers were well aware of the concepts,
analyses, and arguments of the classics, and used them as resources in their own
thinking. Macaulay, for example, defended ‘stoicism’ at length, and modelled
herself (in portraits and sculpture) as a Roman woman. Rousseau’s Emile can be
read as a complex dialogue with both Plato and Seneca. Similarly, a particular
understanding of the nature of medieval scholarship and education in the
universities – critically constructed as ‘scholasticism’ – was an important counter
in the fashioning of a new idea of the relationship between state sovereignty and
education in the work of Hobbes, and after him Locke and Rousseau.
These ‘conversations’ across time are an important aspect of our project. We
don’t think of the transformation of ideas across time as teleological – develop-
mentally directed to a greater understanding. But nor do we think of ideas as
occurring purely locally, in specific historical contexts. History is not just one
great philosopher, with her or his ideas of education and politics, in relation to
their own time and place, after another. The transformation of ideas across
contexts and across time is a matter of contestation, rejection, inspirational
refashioning, and reinvention.
From the point of view of some philosophers of education and historians of
educational thought, this collection of essays might look incomplete. Important
eighteenth-century educationalists such as Johann Pestalozzi, or nineteenth-
century figures like Maria Montessori, should surely figure in a collection of
essays entitled ‘Ideas of Education’. We have to say that our intentions from the
outset in this project have been to explore the relationship between thought
about public and private power, politics and government and about education,
and that our approach has been unabashedly based on a traditional canon.
Introduction 5
So Rousseau is here, but Pestalozzi not; Mill is in, but not Montessori, simply
because Rousseau and Mill are among the standard list of significant political
thinkers, and our question about the place of education in their schemes is
clearly posed. This is not to say that we here offer a complete canonical guide. A
larger reader or encyclopaedia would encompass a much longer list of thinkers
than ours.
The chapters published here are not encyclopaedic, either, in their approach
or format. We asked contributors to consider the nature of educational ideas as
well as their place in the broader context of the theory and philosophy of the
individual or group in question, and to consider, where appropriate, the educa-
tional legacy or continuing salience of the work. But we also asked for independ-
ent views of the theme and treatments of the subject. The results are gratifyingly
non-standard, although we have tried to achieve a certain uniformity in the
provision of dates, references, allusions to critical disputes, and to changes in the
reception of the theories in question, in order to help interested readers who
wish to pursue their study further.
Notes
1 Rawls, 1999: two sentences in §17, one in §39, and a paragraph on instruction in moral
autonomy in §78.
2 Some notable contributions in this framework are Gutmann, 1987; Callan, 1997;
Brighouse, 1998; Levinson, 1999; Macedo, 2000.
3 On Rousseau, see Bloom’s introduction to Emile in which he warns against treating; it
as a book ‘for teacher training schools’: Rousseau, 1979, p. 4. On the question of the
relationship between Locke’s Treatises and the epistemology, see Waldron, 2002, pp. 50ff.
4 Skinner, 2002, p. 86.
References
Brighouse, H. (1998) ‘Civic education and liberal legitimacy’, Ethics, 108, 719–745.
Callan, E. (1997) Creating citizens: political education and liberal democracy (Oxford,
Clarendon Press).
Gutmann, A. (1987) Democratic education (Princeton, Princeton University Press).
Levinson, M. (1999) The demands of liberal education (Oxford, Oxford University Press).
Macedo, S. (2000) Diversity and distrust: civic education in a multicultural society
(Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press).
Rawls, J. [1971] (1999) A theory of justice (Oxford, Oxford University Press).
Rousseau, J.-J. [1762] (1979) Emile, or on education (ed. A. Bloom) (Harmondsworth,
Penguin).
Skinner, Q. [1969] (2002) Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas, in: Visions
of politics vol. 2 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
Waldron, J. (2002) God, Locke, and equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political
Thought (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
1 Socrates, Plato, erôs, and
liberal education
Mark L. McPherran
Introduction
Although modern educators and educational theorists often credit Socrates and
Plato for their ground-breaking contributions to educational methods, theory,
and reform, they often misunderstand them. They also commonly relegate them
to the history of education, rather than seeing them as still relevant to the theory
and practice of teaching at secondary and post-secondary levels. This is
understandable, especially if one has some understanding of the current state of
secondary and post-secondary teacher education.1
There are several useful outlines of the nature and uses of Socrates’ (469–399
BCE) notorious ‘Socratic Method’ – and many contemporary discussions of the
logical side of its several puzzling aspects.2 There are also several good outlines
of Plato’s (428/427–348/347 BCE) educational theory – especially as it is
deployed in his portrait of the perfect city in his Republic.3 In this paper, I want
to focus on a more neglected topic, namely, the non-logical, psychologically-
astute pedagogical methods of Socrates, mentioning briefly what Plato did with
that inheritance.
It has been said that the first axiom of Socratic teaching is ‘Start where the
students are’ (Swardson, 2005, p. 178). Given where some students really are
these days, however, this will strike some of us as a very challenging invitation.
For although Aristotle (384–322 BCE) may have been right in his own time and
place that ‘It is easy to get starting points with men of good upbringing’
(Nicomachean Ethics, Bk I, 1095b7-8), such points are now harder to find in the
post-everything era of the present – even among the very best of the breed. For
although undergraduates may not actually believe that four-sided triangles exist,
some very bright ones are nevertheless willing to assert that very possibility until
one can per impossibile prove otherwise. Others seem not to have any committed
beliefs on philosophical topics to appeal to in discussion. So even though the
Socratic method – the elenchos – is frequently presented as a relatively theory-free
teaching device, suitable for use in all disciplines from art to law to engineering
as a way of testing student knowledge claims, it needs always to be recognised
that its subjects must at least possess a commitment to the law of non-
contradiction for the game to even get going. Moreover, the effective use of the
Socrates, Plato, erôs, and liberal education 7
elenchos requires a full consideration of the psychological, cultural, and ethical
factors surrounding the relationship between the elenchos-wielder and his or her
interlocutor.
Socrates and his methods

One of the best and most time-honoured ways to approach such topics is to turn
to the fountainhead of the elenchos: Socrates, as represented to us by Plato. In
such dialogues as the Charmides and Gorgias, for example, we find Socrates
operating as a subtle diagnostician of Charmides’ (446–403 BCE) attraction to
intemperance and Callicles’ (450/445–404/403 BCE) attraction to tyrannical
hedonism, as part of his inquiry into the nature of the virtues. Indeed, Socrates’
examinations are portrayed as being so attentive to the specific characteristics of
each individual interlocutor that Socrates and Plato have been credited with
being the inventors of scientific verbal psychotherapy, beside whom ‘Gorgias
[485–380 BCE] and Antiphon [479–411 BCE] are mere prehistory’ (Entralgo,
1970, p. 137; cf. p. 126). However, once we begin to study the methods of
Plato’s Socrates we must confront a host of puzzles generated by the way
Socrates relates his elenctic method to a revolutionary moral theory, and to his
equally revolutionary religious commitments. Modern sensibilities can likewise
be disconcerted by Socrates’ seemingly antidemocratic tendencies, and by his
disingenuous and cruel use of shame, irony and erôs in the pursuit of his thera-
peutic, educational mission.4 Modern educators must ask themselves: Ought we
really to risk the ire of the Dean, let alone law suits and so on, in order to model
ourselves as modern day Socrateses grilling and publicly humiliating our own
reluctant Alcibiadeses (451–404 BCE)?5
I wish here to explore briefly several of these puzzles and difficulties in an
attempt to begin to locate the nature and place of Socratic and Platonic
pedagogical methods and their use of erôs as they might be deployed in the
modern classroom. It was Socrates who allegedly ‘first called philosophy down
from the sky’ (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 5.4.10) by investigating not the
nature of the physical cosmos, but rather, the human virtues of courage, temper-
ance, piety, justice, and wisdom, and their contribution to human happiness,
human flourishing; that is, eudaimonia.
The basic elements of Socrates’ revolutionary moral theory (later developed
by Plato, Aristotle and others) can be summarised like this:
1 Every kind of creature desires/aims by nature to achieve that kind’s particu-

lar good (e.g., acorns ‘aim to be’ successful oak trees).
2 Thus, every person aims to achieve the human good for him or herself (every
person desires to be an agathôs; a good, successful person).
3 A person is not his or her body, but is, rather, a soul (psuchê) = a rational
mind (nous).
4 The human good is eudaimonia (‘happiness’ in an objective sense; human
flourishing, ‘success’ – ‘being well’ and ‘doing well’). All other goals such as
8 Mark L. McPherran
health and wealth are subordinate at best and only insofar as they promote
eudaimonia (they are not what eudaimonia consists in).
5 The means to the human good are the virtues (aretai: ‘excellences’); the
canonical virtues being: courage, temperance, piety, justice, and wisdom.
6 The virtues are kinds of craft-knowledge (of how to produce virtuous actions).
7 Knowledge of the virtues is best obtained by means of philosophising
(beginning with the elimination of the conceit that one already has such
knowledge when one does not).
8 Thus, the happiest life belongs to the philosopher.
The philosophising mentioned in item (7) most closely associated with Plato’s
Socrates is the elenchos. The general pattern of an elenchos is roughly this:
1 the advancement of a moral proposition p by some interlocutor,

2 prodded by Socrates, the interlocutor admits that he or she holds moral
propositions q and r,
3 through the assistance of Socrates, the interlocutor concedes that q and r
entail not-p,
4 whereupon Socrates claims that p has been shown inconsistent with the
interlocutor’s belief-set and
5 hence, that the interlocutor does not have the expertise that led him or her
to advance thesis p as something that they know as a matter of their expertise
(see, e.g., Euthyphro, 7a-8b; G. 475a-d).
There is no clear scholarly consensus on how Socrates’ method was actually

supposed to work – whether it is as negative as this summary implies, whether it
is more positive than that, or whether, actually, there can be said to be any such
thing as ‘the Socratic method’ or, rather, whether Socrates’ questioning of his
interlocutors was not always ad hoc and not ‘methodical’ at all.
Whatever the correct account of the elenctic method might be, we have no
reason to believe that Socrates was the first to use it. He was preceded by other
thinkers in cultivating the systematic use of the procedure. That explains why,
when Aristotle assessed Socrates’ contributions to the development of
philosophical methodologies, he did not mention the elenchos per se as a Socratic
innovation but picked out instead Socrates’ introduction of the search for
definitions of universal ethical terms and inductive or epagogic argumentation
(arriving at a general claim by adducing examples) (Metaphysics, 1078b). Plato
and Xenophon (430–354 BCE) also focus on epagogic reasoning as an innovative,
distinguishing mark of Socratic methodology when they have Socrates’
interlocutors complain that Socrates prattles on far too much about ‘his favorite
topics’ (Memorabilia, 1.2.37) – blacksmiths, cobblers, cooks, physicians and
other such banal craftspeople – in order to generate and test general analogical
principles concerning the alleged craft of virtue (McPherran, 2007).
This overall approach to ethics has been both criticised and defended by recent
commentators. In this article I aim to respond critically to these controversies in
a way that will help us to appreciate more fully the groundbreaking and
perennially relevant aspects of Socratic and Platonic teaching, beyond their mere
logical forms.6
Socrates, and other ancient philosophers’ positions can be characterised as
‘eudaimonistic’, meaning that philosophical analyses and understandings, and
ethical decisions and conduct, should be both justified and explained by
reference to human flourishing (or ‘happiness’). This position can be criticised in
the same way that modern consequentialism can – it can be said to suffer from
the flaw of ‘ethical egoism’. That is to say, it implies the general rule that one
ought to take one’s own self-interests as the overriding guide in one’s moral
decision-making (Vlastos, 1991, p. 177). Against this, though, Socrates can also
be interpreted as not endorsing any such egoistical, self-serving point of view.
After all, the argument goes, in Socrates’ case it was piety, not eudaimonistic
reasoning or justification that motivated and explained his own philosophising
and teaching (Vlastos, 1991, p. 177). According to his own account, as told by
Plato in the Apology, he received a report that the Delphic oracle had said that
‘Socrates is the wisest of the Athenians’, and it is for this reason that he became
a ‘street philosopher’, buttonholing and deflating the presumptions of all those
interlocutors who laid claim to exact knowledge of the virtues (Apology,
20e-23b). Socrates had already arrived at a partial definition of piety according
to which it involves not so much close attention to the correct performance of
religious rituals as to serving the gods by improving the state of our souls by
means of philosophising. Since piety as a virtue is then a means to the personal
end we all seek – namely eudaimonia – then we serve ourselves even by serving
others just insofar as we labour to improve their own intellectual grasp of the
virtues, and thus, their own possession of eudaimonia (McPherran, 1996).
This is a plausible interpretation of the story. However, I do not believe it is
sufficient either to square eudaimonistic reasoning with piety and refute an
egotistical account, or as a complete account of Socratic philosophy and educa-
tion. It must be acknowledged that in the Apology Socrates certainly tells the
story this way. An overly-enthusiastic Chaerephon went to the Delphic Oracle to
ask if anyone was wiser than Socrates (Ap., 20c-23c) and got the response, ‘No
one is wiser’ (21a5-7). This report, however, was at odds with Socrates’ own
conviction that he possessed no great knowledge of the virtues, and so he was
provoked to conduct a long interpretive effort that would somehow preserve
Apollo’s veracity. The result is the thesis that the god actually meant that Socrates
is wisest by best grasping his own lack of genuine, divine wisdom concerning the
virtues. This, in turn, is taken to mean that Apollo has – like a general – stationed
Socrates in Athens, ordering him to philosophise and examine himself and others
(28d10-29a2). And since one ought always to obey the command of a god at all
costs, Socrates is obliged to philosophise regardless of any dangers (29d; cf.
Republic, 368b-c). Despite their scepticism and outrage, then, Socrates’ jurors
should ‘know well’ (Ap., 30a5) that the Oracle’s pronouncement marked a
turning point in his life so profound that he now philosophises under a unique
divine mandate (29c-30b, 33c).
10 Mark L. McPherran
Attractive though Socrates’ account is, many scholars who have found his
uncompromising allegiance to rational philosophy attractive have been just as
repelled by his grounding it on such shady religious origins. This puzzlement
is legitimate, at least insofar as Apollo’s response to Chaerephon’s question is
clearly and explicitly descriptive (describing the nature of Socrates’ wisdom), not
prescriptive (telling Socrates what to do with his wisdom). In any case, it would
appear that well before Chaerephon’s trip to Delphi Socrates had already been
pursuing a life of refutational philosophy – that is what prompted Chaerephon’s
long and difficult journey in the first place. Hence, the pronouncement of the
Oracle could not have been what initiated his philosophical career. No wonder,
then, that some have found Socrates’ ‘derivation’ of his alleged divine obligation
to philosophise as analogous to pulling a rabbit from a hat: a rabbit concealed
within the hat by the magician himself (Vlastos, 1991, p. 171).
Why does Socrates not end his interpretive quest after discovering the god’s
meaning in saying that he is the wisest, but rather go on to try to convince his
hapless interlocutors via the elenchos that they lack the expert knowledge they
originally lay claim to? In particular, why do this when he knows that public
refutation brings shame to his interlocutors, shame that breeds in turn the kind
of hostility that will eventually land him in court on trial for his life (Ap.,
22e-23a)? (Even now such responses plague the life of the ‘disrespectful’ Socratic
teacher.) In any case why does Socrates give the slightest hoot about what these
ignoramuses believe about themselves? We can imagine Socrates offering several
plausible reasons.
First, we are told in the dialogue Crito that Socrates loves – has philia for –
Athens in the way that a child loves his or her parents (e.g., Crito, 49e-52d).
Socrates has even fought and risked his life for Athens. And since a politician – or
any citizen for that matter – stands to harm Athens if he acts out of an unaware,
hubristic assumption that he possesses sufficient wisdom to counsel the city,
Socrates must for reasons of natural affection and filial piety attempt to convince
that person of their lack of wisdom. Socrates chooses a politician as his initial
candidate for testing by the elenctic method (Ap., 21 b-c).
Secondly, Socrates does indeed declare that the demands of piety require him
to serve the gods by convincing the politician of his or her ignorance. But it is
important to note that the story of the Oracle is the story of how Socrates in
particular came to realise his unique status as Apollo’s missionary, a divine gift to
Athens, set upon her as a gadfly, scourge and midwife who – unlike all other
Athenians – is under an obligation to philosophise free of virtually all the mitigat-
ing or restraining factors present in the case of other people. His story simply is
not our story since we lack his unique philosophical gifts, and it is certainly not
the story of harmful bumblers like Euthyphro or ill-intentioned Sophists like
Thrasymachus whose defeat by the Socratic method is reported in the Republic.
Neither Apollo nor the demands of prudential self-interest require of any other
Athenian – nor of any of us moderns – that they or we step outside the bound-
aries of the pressing project of promoting our own eudaimonia. This is made
clear by Socrates’ comparison of himself to a soldier who has been stationed at a
battle-post by a general (Ap., 28d-29a) – that is, he is acting under orders, and
hence, not simply out of a philanthropic impulse. That is also what explains
Socrates’ willingness to override his normal inclinations to live a fairly normal
human life (Ap., 23b, 31a-c).
Third, moreover, there is no general principle inherent in the virtue of piety
that must force us to look beyond our own personal good. We can satisfy the
demands of piety that we attempt to instantiate goodness in the universe just
insofar as we look to improving our own souls or minds. We need not go off
trying to play would-be Socrateses to our unreceptive, possibly anti-intellectual,
neighbours. From their perspective, after all, it is unclear whether or not the
relentlessly-examined life is all that worth living. So it seems as though I must
only pursue the project of coming to know the virtues, and need not be
distracted from that aim by the incessant demands of all those potential objects
of my charity. There is no obvious link between say, being a dutiful professor of
the humanities and staying past office hours for the sake of tardy students.
If all this is right, then I suggest that we must look elsewhere for a way to save
Socratic moral theory – and our own students – from the ‘spiritual toxins’ of
ethical egoism. We need to know what to say to students who ask sceptically
about the value of self-examination and liberal education, especially in view of
the pleasures of self-deception and the pain self-examination can involve. We will
receive guidance on this if we look to Socrates’ and Plato’s conceptions of
love – both philia and erôs – and their relation to the inherent presuppositions of
Socrates’ and Plato’s educational methods.
Elenchos, philia, and erôs

I begin with a famous and – for some modern students – scandalous scene from
Plato’s Charmides. Returning after a long absence from his service in the heavy
fighting at Potidaea, Socrates seeks out the pleasures of a familiar gymnasium.
After recounting items of recent military news (Charmides, 153b-d), Socrates
then asks whether there are any young men distinguished for their wisdom, their
physical beauty, or both – instantly introducing the topic of the mind and the
body, and implicitly their relation. When young, handsome Charmides is then
presented to him as just such a specimen, Socrates fastidiously insists that before
Charmides allows Critias (460–403 BCE) and himself to admire his physique he
must first strip off his entire body so as to display his soul. Socrates then also
confesses that he is no judge of physical beauty, since ‘almost all young persons
appear to be beautiful in my eyes’.
Nevertheless, Socrates proceeds to join the mob in a more than cerebral
appreciation of Charmides. First, Socrates jostles with the others on his bench –
toppling the end-man off sideways – in order to make a place for Charmides next
to himself. Then, once seated, Charmides’ close physical proximity causes
Socrates to lose first his ‘previous bold belief in his powers to converse naturally,
and then – when Socrates is presented to Charmides as a physician with a cure
for his morning headaches – Socrates becomes further unsettled by Charmides’
full gaze. Finally, suddenly glancing past Charmides’ cloak at the no-doubt
manly chest within, Socrates loses his last vestiges of control, becoming suddenly
inflamed with an attraction more than mental. Feeling ‘frozen like a fawn before
a powerful hungry beast’, Socrates experiences a virtual loss of self and becomes –
even to himself – mere flesh (Xenophon, Mem., 1.3.11-15).
This image is very familiar to readers of Plato, but it is also deeply complex,
signalling both expected and unexpected claims. First, the way in which Socrates’
behaviour contradicts his claimed impartiality to physical beauty amounts to an
admission that even he does not possess full self-knowledge. Nevertheless, we are
still reminded that we are in the presence of Socrates-the-hero-of-self-control,
since instead of casting himself in the expected ancient role of an erastês – an
older lover – Socrates withdraws inside himself, assuming instead the passive
stance of a young erômenos – a young beloved (Xenophon, Mem., 1.3.11-15).
Plato thereby also gives us a peek into Socrates’ cloak and soul, providing a direct
view of his erôs, and an indirect gauge of its intensity. For, knowing as we do the
almost superhuman self-control that Socrates brings to any encounter, the fact
that he, the master-steersman of all conversations, is brought to speechlessness –
barely able to avoid the clutches of the beast beside him – allows us to infer that
within Socrates there exists an equally superhuman erôs (Cicero, On fate, 5.10;
Tusc., 4.37.80).
Socrates is, of course, able to recover his composure, and then responds to
Charmides’ request for a headache-cure by claiming that he possesses a leaf and
charm that will heal him. He next goes on to subtle diagnosis of both Critias’
and Charmides’ characters. Critias is revealed to be a plotter of the sort who is
willing to deceive even his own cousin, Charmides, despite the fact that he
is obliged to serve as his guardian (Plato, Charmides, 155a). Moreover, he is
shown to have irresponsibly failed to detect the most likely cause of Charmides’
headache: namely, over-indulgence in wine (especially improperly-mixed wine) –
brought on, one suspects, by Charmides’ status as the current beau of the ball.
Charmides in turn fails to see that knowledge of Socrates’ medicinal charm
might be reserved to those who are qualified to apply it, since its non-harmful
application to a patient may well require prior training and expertise in both
diagnosis and the application of magical charms.
Finally, by the conclusion of the dialogue (176a-d) the tables have been
entirely turned. The experience of undergoing repeated interrogations at the
hands of Socrates has had the effect of turning Charmides into just another one
of Socrates’ suitors, with Socrates having replaced him as the new beau of the
ball. For Charmides – and Critias as well – are presented as having become
convinced that Socrates possesses charms of exactly the sort they have experi-
enced; namely, mental gymnastics to match the physical ones surrounding them.
So beguiling is this sort of argumentative encounter for them that they now
desire to be charmed in this fashion every day, and so intense is their desire for
such an association with Socrates – and so free of the restraints that kept Socrates’
own attraction to Charmides in check – that they are willing to plot and use force
to obtain it (176a-d).
There is little dispute that Plato (and Xenophon) are eager to reveal the erotic
side of Socrates. Part of this project is driven, I suspect, by a desire to explain and
so justify Socrates’ disingenuous and cruel use of erôs in the pursuit of his educa-
tional mission. That is, he often flatters his interlocutors and students, letting
them believe that he finds them interesting on the basis of their bodily as well as
their intellectual or psychological charms, and then – as he takes them through
the process of self-examination via his notorious method of questioning – they
suddenly find that the tables have been turned. The importance of their bodies
has been dismissed and it is now they who are infatuated, and shamefully so,
since Socrates is the ugliest man in Athens. Plato gives voice to this process of
reversal with the speech he attributes to the Alcibiades of his famous dialogue on
erôs, the Symposium (212c-223b).
We find the same reversal in Xenophon (Mem. 3.11), in the charming and
illustrative story of a beautiful courtesan named Theodotê – a hetaira, not an
everyday pornê – who ‘was ready to keep company with anyone who pleased her’.
Socrates visits her and begins by flattering her, but by the end of his investigation
into the exact nature of her vocation, she demands that he ‘come to see her
often’ for more useful conversation. However, Socrates demurs, saying that he is
too busy with his many other girlfriends to whom he is teaching what he terms
‘potions, spells, and magic love wheels’. ‘Lend me your magic love wheel, then,
that I may draw you to me’, she begs; to which the Socratic reply is ‘But, I don’t
want to be drawn to you; rather, I want you to come to me’ (my emphasis). And,
so, the scene concludes with Theodotê exclaiming: ‘Oh, I’ll come alright: but
just make sure that you welcome me when I do!’
Just as in the Charmides, Socrates has turned the tables: the object of erôs has
become the subject of erôs, but the erôs is no longer what it was for in the first
instance. Desire for the beautiful body has been replaced by a desire for the
beautiful words and arguments that only a knowledgeable – that is, beautiful –
soul can produce. The big joke is that Socrates and Theodotê are comparable to
each other, as neither of them have any visible means of support and so count on
the generosity of their ‘friends’ (Plato, Ap., 38b). Both are also, of course,
proposing seductions – though of radically different sorts, one intellectual and
one with a strong corporeal element. What is more interesting, though, is that it
has taken Socrates only a very few ironic, argumentative moves to turn a profes-
sional seductress into an eager lover of whatever it is that she now thinks she can
obtain from the founder of Western moral theory. If she goes to him thinking
that she will increase her profit-line by attending to him, we can be sure that
Socrates will soon be having her inquiring into her own, limited conception of
what it is to truly ‘profit’.
But what useful lesson are we lesser mortals to take away from all this? This, I
think. We have wondered how to find a way out of the self-absorbed attitude that
moral eudaimonism can appear to take as a given. Western culture began in its
Grecian childhood and that is where most of us still start off as children (if, that
is, we are raised in a loving home and supportive culture) – namely, with a robust
sense of self that takes itself to be at the centre of a universe whose central
purpose was to bring our glorious little selves into existence. Alas, those unlucky
enough never to transcend that childhood point of view at a reasonable pace
then go on to cause us and themselves a wide range of troubles. The healthy
trick, as parents know, is to nurture the nascent self without becoming too
entangled in its pain as it begins the long journey toward a rational and
psychologically-integrated understanding of its proper place in a universe much
larger than any self can yet adequately comprehend. There are many key events
in this often-painful unfolding, running the gamut from being weaned and
toilet-trained to encountering one’s first unexpected schoolyard snub or grade
B, to one’s first job, or war, or death, or mid-life crisis. But Socrates seems to
know that chief among these things is love.
The Socratic theory of love that we can locate within his general moral theory
goes something like this. Socrates holds that the desire for self-knowledge is a
natural feature of eudaimonistic self-love and self-regard: we can only best
achieve eudaimonia by understanding and harmonising our own belief-systems,
since we must employ our beliefs in our everyday deliberations as to how we
must act in respect of both ourselves and others so as to obtain and maintain
eudaimonia. In a social system that derives from our natural constitution, we
begin with an acquaintance with the rewards and demands of parental and close-
acquaintance philia that alert us to the needs and existence of others. However,
these others rarely demand full reciprocity or any abrupt reorientation of our
self-centred desires and projects. But at some point in our early lives something
very odd and even frightening makes its presence known to us, something very
much beyond our rational control and hence normal sense of self. This is the
fierce desire for direct acquaintance with and possession of a beauty that is at
once both material and yet always just a bit beyond our actual grasp. Yet as every
popular music station attests, despite its many attractions this initial form of
erotic intimacy is in itself just as much an obstruction to what we take to be our
eudaimonia as it is its fulfillment. That sort of beauty cannot be made our own
by simply snuggling up to it (Plato, Symposium, 175c-e). It resists acquisition by
its very nature and by virtue of its possessing a will of its own. Nevertheless, from
the Socratic point of view the many failures of this form of erôs are precisely its
central function in the psychological economy of a human life. Rough as it may
sound, romantic erôs is for Socrates and Plato only the prelude to a larger life and
kind of love for those who can bear to see this.
So it seems that what interlocutors such as Alcibiades complain of is that
Socrates is able to take the natural desire for close contact with beauty – and all
other forms of passionate, erotic desire – and redirect, rechannel, a good measure
of it towards desire for intellectual beauty as it is manifested in the soul of the
virtuous human being. This is the move that takes us away from ourselves and
toward others, because I simply cannot examine and improve my belief-system –
and hence, my means of obtaining eudaimonia – without attempting to see how
others see me and assess my own beliefs. It is only by engaging with others at the
deepest levels of my own self that I have any hope of becoming more intellectu-
ally, psychologically beautiful in a way that goes beyond mere appearances.
Philia by itself in its first instances is insufficient to break through the safe
boundaries of the familiar. Absent erôs, we almost always become friends with
people like ourselves and those to whom we are bound – as Vlastos says – by
‘blood or fortune’. Philia is more ‘up to us’ than not, and so we pick and choose
and reject our friends when we are more or less in our right minds. But erôs has
the delightful but also terrifying power to immobilise the rational will and put us
into close association with those outside our normal circle of potential associates;
those to whom we might well never of our own rational accord have drawn close.
Then as now the phenomenon of infatuation has the positive power to break
through the narrow circle drawn by our self-regarding eudaimonistic impulse by
making us keenly aware of the existence and needs of another – so much so that
we can lose ourselves and all our boundaries in the Beloved, if only for a very
brief moment. This is again, then, one of the benefits the experience of
unrequited erôs can bring: one’s sense of entitlement and worth can receive just
the lashing it requires when such central and powerful desires are thwarted.
To escape the bonds of self-love and acquire genuinely friendly philia seems
to require that we become somehow motivated or forced to include the self-
interests of others within the bounds of our own self-interest (cf. Aristotle,
Nichomachean Ethics, Bks 8, 9). The only way we can begin to want what is good
for the sake of another without mixed motivations is by finding ourselves able to
place ourselves within the position of the other. Yet to learn to see how a situa-
tion looks from the vantage point of another we must begin to see the other as
relevantly similar to ourselves. That is precisely what erôs can lead us to see as we
attempt to come to terms with the otherness of a beloved. This very same thing
is what effective use of the Socratic method in the necessary quest for self-
understanding requires: I cannot teach or philosophise in a fully successful
fashion without trying to put myself into a student’s psychological position so as
to see what crucial premise it is that is driving that person to a puzzling or oppos-
ing conclusion. We see Socrates do this with Euthyphro when he is able to elicit
Euthyphro’s belief in warring gods so as to show that it is at odds with
Euthyphro’s own other beliefs (Plato, Euthyphro, 5d-11b). But once I do begin
to reposition myself, I will be hard-pressed not to see how very similar my own
self is to the selves of others. And this understanding, plus whatever natural
psychic drive to remain rationally-self-consistent we already have, can generate
that fellow-feeling of brotherly and sisterly affection we call philia – that is, for
Socrates at any rate. From that vantage point, then, we can begin to see that our
love of self translates into love of wisdom which then translates into love of
others. I am suggesting, then, that the Socratic method can yield good results
for those who use it in examining others.
As I engage with others in my attempt to secure psychic beauty – thereby
doing myself a good – I will realise that I have an intrinsic interest in including
others within the sphere of my conception of what a eudaimôn life is. Eudaimonia
consist entirely in the process of acquiring, possessing and manifesting the only
true good – wisdom (Euthydemos, 277d-282e). That process strictly requires a
full valuation of another individual as a potential bearer of wisdom. Hence, I
have complete motivation for regarding another’s essential interests as part and
parcel of my own as well. If I desire – as I must – to possess the sort of genuine
beauty I spot in another, then the only way I can satisfy that desire is by pursuing
a self-educational project that looks beyond the borders of what I conceive
myself to be at present. Trying to obtain wisdom and beauty for myself alone – as
I might try to obtain all the food on the table just for myself – is incoherent if
that project requires that I discover and value its presence in others, and then
generate it in others. The being well and doing well of eudaimonia must, it
seems, simply include the state of loving well.
It is Socrates’ position here that since due to erôs one simply must have a desire
for friendship, and since to have friends one must have the self-control bestowed
by the virtues, and since self-control requires the psychic harmony that the
elenchos can instil, one can come to see that one’s desires need to be redirected
so that the primary beloved becomes philosophy (or, liberal learning, if you like).
But as many of his aporetic, elenctic encounters demonstrate, there is a boot-
strapping problem here insofar as being logically led to see this need for a love of
consistency requires that one already have a love of consistency. For example, in
Euthyphro Socrates can only get the discussion on track by offering friendly help
and unwarranted flattery (Plato, Eu., 11a-e). It is thus an extra-logical skill
possessed by Socrates that allows him to redirect his interlocutor’s erôs away from
transient and inconstant objects of love – whether they be people or activities or
material goods – and towards a love of elenctic self-examination. On close
analysis, it turns out that when it comes to the elenchos, style and substance are
inseparable.
Now, let us ground this view of Socratic philia, erôs, and self-examination in a
concrete elenctic encounter. Socrates’ examination of Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias
is ideal for this purpose. A key theme of the Gorgias is its emphasis on the need
for the psychic harmony of belief consistency that the elenchos can expose and
provide. Socrates’ examination of Callicles, for example, offers us a case of a split
personality characterised as ‘Callicles not agreeing with Callicles’. Here Socrates
emphasises the value of internal harmony, saying that it is better to be in contra-
diction with the vast majority of people than to be at odds with oneself (Plato,
Gorgias, 482b). This section of text also connects the importance of possessing
psychic harmony with erôs and with the value of having harmonious relations
with others.
At 481c Socrates notes that he and Callicles have the common experience of
being in love with two loves, Socrates with Alcibiades and philosophy, and
Callicles with Demos and the demos. Callicles, however, is entrapped by his two
loves into continual inconsistency. Whenever he is with Demos, he says what
Demos wants to hear, even if it is at odds with his own views. Whenever he is in
the Assembly, he says whatever will win approval, even if it is at odds with his
own views. Socrates, by contrast, is a constant lover, always preferring philosophy
to Alcibiades (Plato, Gorgias, 481d-482b). Since, unlike Alcibiades, Demos and
the demos, philosophy always says the same things about the same things,
Socrates is able to maintain a relatively harmonious soul by loving the constant,
psychologically-consistent things that philosophy says (such as that ‘doing what’s
unjust and not paying the penalty for it is the ultimate evil’).
However, by speaking of his two loves, he indicates that despite the fact that
philosophy is his special darling (482a4), he is able to maintain a constant love
for another, even someone as internally inconstant (and yet brilliant) as Alcibiades
(a man who is at one moment drawn to Socrates and at another repelled) (Plato,
Symposium, 216b-c).
This same point is present at the conclusion of Socrates’ argument against
Callicles at 507c-508a. Here Socrates supports the worth of justice and self-
control by maintaining that without them a person cannot be a partner to
another person, and hence, will be unable to be a friend to another. The clear
assumption is that friendship is in some way valuable, though how it is valuable
is left up to us as a problem. Here, I think, the answer is that erôs is being treated
in the Gorgias as a distinct and basic psychic force. As we saw before, from the
Socratic perspective regarding the true self that we all have, one must simply have
loves to have eudaimonia; the question then becomes what one ought to love.
Socrates’ love of philosophy as his central beloved over and above other people
involves the love of logical consistency that the elenchos requires and cannot itself
supply (Woolf, 2000, p. 32). It is Socrates’ position here that since due to erôs
one simply must have a desire for friendship, and since to have friends one must
have self-control, and since self-control requires the psychic harmony that the
elenchos can instill, one can come to see that one’s desires need to be redirected
so that the primary beloved becomes philosophy.
Plato and education

In his middle and late periods Plato developed positive methods of philosophis-
ing (for example, dialectic), but it seems that he retained the elenchos as a way of
purging the mind of false beliefs before beginning the process of instilling
positive doctrine (for example, Sophist, 229d, 231b). The shame of refutation
experienced by Socrates’ interlocutors and the shame of erotic failure that he
exploits are both merely means that Socrates will use in the service of his
overarching educational and therapeutic project. We are all bidden to join in this
project just insofar as we are able to recognise that we cannot do otherwise given
that genuine eudaimonia is our unavoidable goal.
Twenty-first century students commonly find Socrates’ and Plato’s analogies
between everyday infatuation and passionate intellectual longing to be a strained
one at the very best, and also find these teachers’ worries about everyday erôs to
be quaint and perhaps even a bit pathological. This is because, sad to say, overly-
sexualised cultures like ours trivialise genuine erôs. However, with just a bit of
work on teachers’ parts, students can come to appreciate the force of what Plato
says about learning in his Republic:
A real lover of learning strives by nature for what is … He does not linger
over each of the many things that are believed to be, but keeps on going,
without dulling his erotic passion or desisting from it, until he grasps what
the nature is of each thing itself with the part of his soul that is fitted to grasp
a thing of that sort because of its kinship with it. Once he is drawn near to
it, has intercourse with what really is, and has begotten understanding and
truth, he knows, truly lives, is nourished, and – at that point, but not
before – is relieved from his labor pains. (490a9-b7).
This is precisely why it is more important than ever to have high school and
college students confront texts such as the Symposium: for such texts give them
the language and the theories that will allow them to confront and integrate the
great forces that those years unleash, and whose long-term consequences can
be more than devastating.
I should here make some brief relevant points about Plato’s larger, positive
educational theory. As Plato sees it, education is not something that can be
simply instilled in a manner analogous to ‘putting sight into blind eyes’ (Plato,
Republic, 518b-c). On the contrary, the educator grants that sight is there,
though not turned in the right way or looking where it should look, and
contrives to redirect it appropriately (518d). Education, then, is the craft
concerned with ‘this very turning around … with how this instrument [by which
we learn] can be most easily and effectively turned around, not of putting sight
into it’ (518d). The instrument in question, here, is our rational element (580d).
That element, together with appetite (439) and spirit (thumos; 439e, 581a-b)
constitutes the entire embodied human soul. As a result, education cannot
accomplish its task of reorienting reason without reorienting the whole soul, any
more than an eye can be turned around except by turning the whole body
(518c). So although Platonic educational practice is primarily targeted on
reason, it must also concern itself with appetite and spirit. And, as I have here
argued, we can now see that it must concern itself also with love.
The lesson of Plato’s dialogues is that we must somehow lead students to
desire to come to visit us (and each other), as Socrates does with Theodotê. This
must be instead of us chasing after them and their often transitory, job-oriented
goals. We can try to grasp just what it is they think they desire, and then connect
it as best we can in our teaching styles with a desire for the subject matter at
hand, the argumentative skills that subject involves, and even, perhaps, the
psychic harmony that must be a component of their actual, genuine, inchoate
Desire.
Acknowledgements
Previous versions of this chapter have been presented at the Socrates or Rousseau?
Ancient and Modern Perspectives on Liberal Education conference, The Daniel
Webster Program, Dartmouth College, November; Vancouver Island University,
September 2009; and the University of San Francisco, March 2010. My thanks
to my audiences for their comments. I am also grateful to my colleague at USF,
Marjolein Oele, for her comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
Notes
1 A recent (tough-minded) article on the current state of the liberal arts in the United
States is Slouka (2009).
2 See, e.g., Scott (2002).
3 See, e.g., Reeve (2010).
4 Erôs is most commonly observed at work in those who are sexually infatuated with
a beloved, whereas friendly affection (philia) can be had for friends and family. On
Socrates’ use of irony, Vlastos (1991), ch. 1; for his use of shame, Brickhouse & Smith
(2010), pp. 53–62, and Sanderman (2004).
5 Slouka (2009) argues that ‘upsetting people is arguably the very purpose of the arts and
perhaps the humanities in general’.
6 My argument in these paragraphs is engaged in particular with Vlastos (1991).
References
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Dialogues and beyond (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press).
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Loeb Classical Library (London, Heinnemann).
2 Aristotle’s educational
politics and the Aristotelian
renaissance in philosophy
of education
Randall Curren
Introduction
The only extended discussion of education in the Aristotelian corpus is in Book
VIII of the Politics, where Aristotle advocates that schooling be publicly provided
and ‘one and the same for all’ (VIII.1 1337a23). Isolated remarks about
education appear in earlier books of the Politics, and a few can be found in the
Nicomachean Ethics and elsewhere. With enough effort, these scattered passages
can be understood in relation to one another and in light of the overall plan of
the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) and Politics (Pol.).1 The former concerns ethics,
obviously enough, and the latter concerns ‘legislative science’ (nomothetikê), but
they are closely related to each other as parts of the larger enterprise Aristotle
calls ‘political science’ (hê politikê epistêmê or hê politikê; NE I.2, X.9; Adkins,
1991). As Aristotle conceives it, the general aim of political science is to
determine the truth about human happiness (eudaimonia) – ‘the highest of all
goods achievable by action’ (NE I.4 1095a15-20) – and to guide societies (Pol.
IV.1 1288b21-89a7, III.8 1279b12-25; NE VII.11 1152b1-2) and households
(NE X.9 1180a25 ff.) toward happiness.2 A central claim about happiness in the
Nicomachean Ethics is that it requires the possession and exercise of intellectual
and moral virtues, and a central related feature of the Politics is its identification
of education that cultivates these virtues as the primary tool of statesmanship
(Pol. VIII.1). Education is as important to Aristotle’s conception of a political
community as it is to Plato’s, though Aristotle would seem to have had less
patience with spelling out the details.
A revival of interest in Aristotle’s ethics was well underway in the 1970s (see
Cooper, 1975; Barnes et al., 1977; Rorty, 1980), and a revival of his politics
followed (see Keyt & Miller, 1991; Yack, 1993; Miller, 1995), yielding more
integrated readings of the texts and topics that span them (see, e.g., Cooper,
1999; Curren, 2000; Kraut, 2002; Roberts, 1989, 2009).
An Aristotelian renaissance in philosophy of education has meanwhile devel-
oped largely as an offshoot of the virtue ethics movement associated with the
revival of Aristotle’s ethics. This has arguably done much to advance our under-
standing of moral development and education (see Pincoffs, 1986; Carr, 1991;
Carr & Steutel, 1999; Curren, 2002a; Kristjánsson, 2007), and to reestablish
22 Randall Curren
human flourishing as a theorised aim of education (White & White, 1986;
Kupperman, 1987; Hirst, 1998; Strike, 2003; Brighouse, 2006; Nussbaum,
2006; Curren, 2009a). Apart from and substantially prior to the virtue ethics
movement, interest in Aristotle’s account of practical reason yielded a significant
literature on teacher competence and curriculum (Schwab, 1969; Green, 1976;
Fenstermacher & Richardson, 1993). The limitation of an Aristotelian renais-
sance largely independent of scholarship in ancient Greek philosophy is not
inconsequential, however. Opportunities have been missed and mistakes have
attracted a substantial following.
My aim in this paper is to survey Aristotle’s educational thought, noting some
interpretive controversies, commenting on related developments and missed
opportunities in contemporary educational thought, and questioning the
Aristotelian credentials of a major body of recently influential work in philosophy
of education. The work I will question concerns the nature of teaching and
denies that phronêsis (practical wisdom, good judgment) has for Aristotle the
‘universal’ element, or element of systematic knowledge of principles, he says it
has (Dunne, 1997; McLaughlin, 1999; Smith, 1999; Maclntyre & Dunne,
2002; Dunne & Pendelbury, 2003; Hogan & Smith, 2003; Carr, 2005). It
deploys this understanding of phronêsis, together with some related claims about
crafts and practices, to defend the professional autonomy of educators against
managerial encroachment. I shall challenge the Aristotelian credentials of this
work, but also suggest how a more accurate understanding of Aristotle’s philos-
ophy of education can be harnessed to much the same end. The universal
element in phronêsis was obscured by some of the interpretations of the 1980s,
sometimes in constructing particularist forms of virtue ethics, but to say that
phronêsis ‘ is concerned not only with universals but with particulars, which
become familiar from experience’ (NE VI.8 1142a13-15; cf. 1141b14-16) is to
assert unequivocally that it is concerned with universals.3
Political science
The Nicomachean Ethics and Politics are records of lectures intended to equip
Aristotle’s students with the universal element of phronêsis, or a systematic
understanding of the human good and how to promote it.4 Students must have
been ‘well brought up in good habits’ (NE I.4 1095b6) and be experienced ‘in
the actions that occur in life’ (I.4 1095a3) in order to grasp ‘the facts’ that are
the ‘starting-points’ of ethical and legislative inquiry. A good upbringing and
experience of life provide a student with true moral beliefs (‘facts’), but these are
just the starting points. True virtue (arête; see Curren, 1996a) and the systematic
knowledge required to promote virtue and happiness require more, and Aristotle
aspires to provide what is required. His course in ethics is presented as an
opportunity to progress dialectically from the possession of ordinary, unsystematic,
true or mostly true ethical beliefs to a systematic, reasoned body of ethical
knowledge (epistêmê) resting in an account of human nature and well-being
(see Reeve, 2000, pp. 21–27, on dialectic and the first principles of sciences).
Aristotle’s educational politics 23
The student’s antecedent beliefs are to be worked into a coherent, intercon-
nected, and grounded whole – the ethical knowledge required for phronêsis. There
is, thus, in the very framing of Aristotle’s project and its audience, an announce-
ment of his practical philosophy as both a science intended to guide practice and
a curriculum for all who would aspire to happiness in their own lives or the lives
of others – the curricular prerequisites of phronêsis. He follows Plato in frequently
invoking the role of medical science (epistêmê) in medical practice as a guiding
analogy for the role of political science in human affairs (NE I.13 1102a7-25;
II.2 1104a5-9; III.3 1112b12-15; X.9 1180b13-29; Pol. I.9 1257b25-32; II.8
1268b33-39; see also Jaeger, 1957; Lloyd, 1968). The reference to medicine at
the end of the Nicomachean Ethics (X.9) is especially telling:
But individuals can be best cared for by a doctor or gymnastic instructor or

anyone else who has the universal knowledge of what is good for every one
or for people of a certain kind …
And surely he who wants to make men, whether many or few, better by
his care must try to be capable of legislating, if it is through laws that we can
become good. For to get anyone whatever – anyone who is put before us –
into the right condition is not for the first chance comer; if anyone can do
it, it is the man who knows, just as in medicine and all other matters which
give scope for care and practical wisdom. (1180b13-29)
Educating is described here as a form of care, an art (technê) comparable to

medicine or gymnastic instruction, grounded in a science (epistêmê), namely the
hê politikê epistêmê he offers his own students.5 A technê is indeed a form of
science or knowledge in Aristotle’s scheme of things (Met. I.1 981b7-10, XI.7
1063b35-64a18; Top. VI.6 145a15-18), politics itself being referred to as both
a technê – a master art or architektonikês – and an episteme, and as determining
‘which of the sciences should be studied,’ who should learn them, ‘and up to
what point they should learn them’ (NE I.1-2 1094a1-b2).
Aristotle does say, famously and having just identified his topic as political
science, that ethical matters are ‘only for the most part true’ (NE I.3 1094b21).
This has created some puzzlement about how he could claim to establish ethics
and politics as sciences, consistent with his declaration that strictly speaking a
science can only pertain to what ‘does not admit of being otherwise’ (NE VI.3
1139b18-24). Yet, Aristotle does speak less strictly of scientific knowledge of
‘what holds always or for the most part (hôs epi to polu)’ (Met. VI.2 1027a19-21),
or what holds true by a necessity qualified by the indeterminateness of the matter
in which objects of concern to some sciences are embodied (see Reeve, 2000,
pp. 27–42). Aristotle identifies sciences as systematic bodies of truths pertaining
to the nature of unchanging objects of knowledge (NE VI.3 1139b20-25);
ethics pertains to the nature, function and varieties of the human psyche (i.e., the
varieties of character, which do or do not fulfill that function), and politics
pertains to the nature, function and varieties of the polis (i.e., the varieties of
political constitution, which do or do not fulfill that function). Structurally, these
24 Randall Curren
are sciences not unlike logic, as Aristotle invented it, logic being the science
pertaining to the nature, function and varieties – varieties that do or do not fulfill
the function of preserving truth – of syllogisms. Ethics and politics take unchang-
ing natures as their enduring objects of knowledge and they elaborate system-
atically the domains of truths that come to rest in the comprehension of those
natures. What is true invariably of the natures may be true ‘only for the most
part’ of the embodied creatures and cities (polises) that are the focus of practical
concern; the latter may fail to be true to their natures for reasons more or less
systematically diagnosable through insight into the qualities of their ‘matter’, a
theme sounded repeatedly through the middle books of the Politics in observa-
tions about the difference the characteristics of a population make to a city’s
fulfillment of its function (Pol. IV-VI).
Having noted these general features of Aristotle’s vision of political science,
we can now best approach the substance of his educational views through an
ordered survey of the large moving pieces of his ethical-political theory. To this
end, we must now consider the moral and intellectual virtues, how they are
acquired and how they are related to one another; the happiest kind of life and
the role of virtue in achieving it; the nature of a political community; Aristotle’s
theory of constitutions and the ‘best possible’ society described in Book VII of
the Politics; the context these provide for the account of education in Book VIII
of the Politics.
The virtues
In the final book of the Nicomachean Ethics (X.9), Aristotle observes that
reasoned arguments alone are not enough to make people good. Many people
are not moved by arguments based on what is admirable or appropriate (kalon),
because they lack even a conception of what is kalon, having never been exposed
to it (1179b4-15). He goes on to say that ‘nature’ (i.e., traits one is born with),
habituation (training in doing the right things) and teaching must all be favour-
able in order for a person to become good, so there is little chance of becoming
good if one does not grow up under good laws. We learn in Books VII and VIII
of the Politics that those laws should, among other things, provide schooling that
is public and ‘the same for all’ (VIII.1 1337a23-24). Book VIII opens with the
remarkable suggestion that ‘No one will doubt that the legislator should direct
his attention above all to the education of youth’ (1337a10-11) – remarkable
because public or state-sponsored education was unknown in his world apart
from some military training. It reflects a conviction that societies have a funda-
mental, collective duty – a duty falling on governments – to enable the young to
develop into good and flourishing adults. The laws should regulate birth and
early training in order to ensure the healthy development of the body and the
desiring part of the psyche, all with an eye to the development of ‘reason and
mind’ (VII.15 1334b15-17). Aristotle says this sequence of development is
‘natural’, but he regards the fulfillment of a person’s intellectual potential as
something rare and difficult to achieve.
Aristotle defines moral virtues as dispositions to feel and be moved by our
desires or emotions neither too weakly nor too strongly, but in a way that moves
us to act as reason would dictate, and to take pleasure in doing so (NE II.2-6).
Intellectual virtues are defined as capacities or powers of understanding,
judgment and reasoning that enable us to attain truth (NE VI.2 1139b11-13).
Treating the moral virtues as states of the irrational part of the psyche, he regards
them as laying a necessary foundation for the development of intellectual virtues.
Having distinguished the moral and intellectual virtues in this way, Aristotle
says the former mainly arise as a result of habit and the latter mainly arise as a
result of teaching (NE II.1). The understanding of his conception of moral
development often goes no farther than the associated idea that we become brave
by repeatedly doing the right thing in the face of danger and become cowardly
by repeatedly fleeing or cowering in the face of danger. Yet, there are two very
important further aspects to Aristotle’s conception of moral virtue and its devel-
opment. The first is that ‘habit’ cannot mean thoughtless, unguided repetition
(Sherman, 1989). The conduct in question must be shaped in all its details
towards what is desirable. This requires supervision to ensure that the learner
does the right thing, and coaching that leads her through progressive mastery of
various nuances of what she is doing, calling her attention to aspects of it she will
not have perceived nor had any language to describe. Supervision and coaching
enable learners to progress and become self-directed in their practice and habits.
The second overlooked aspect of Aristotle’s conception of moral development
is that the moral virtues are both a necessary step towards, and only completed
by, the acquisition of the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom or good
judgment (VI.12 1144a29-37; VI.13 1144b7-20 and 30-32; Curren, 2000,
pp. 202–204). Aristotle asserts a unity of virtue thesis, which holds there are
interdependencies between the possession of good judgment and the possession
of moral virtues. No moral virtue is a true virtue unless it is guided by good
judgment, and no one can develop good judgment without first possessing
natural or habituated forms of the moral virtues. Moral virtues are dispositions
of desire, emotion and perception that lead us to choose and do what it is reason-
able for us to choose and do, all the while perceiving our choices and actions to
be reasonable. Moral virtues thereby establish the ends we aim at, while good
judgment enables us to achieve those ends. Virtue that is merely habitual might
suffice in familiar circumstances, but it will not reliably guide us to the right or
best act. A true virtue is supposed to be good without qualification, so it must
be guided by good judgment which prevents its possessor from going astray in
challenging circumstances.
The unity of virtue thesis also holds that in order to have good judgment one
must possess all the moral virtues. The possession of good judgment is only
possible if one perceives the world accurately in all its moral particularity, and
according to Aristotle our perceptions are largely shaped by what we have
experienced as normal. The ways we have habitually acted and the ends we have
habitually pursued will seem to us acceptable and good. An aspect of the
formation of (habitual) moral virtues or vices is thus the habituation of
26 Randall Curren
corresponding perceptions, accurate or inaccurate. Since good judgment
requires accurate perceptions, it also requires the possession of the moral virtues
pertaining to different spheres and aspects of conduct.
By Aristotle’s lights, good practical judgment (phronêsis) subsumes particular
cases, well perceived, under universal principles acquired through teaching.
Perceiving the particulars well requires virtue, as we have seen, but also
experience and discussion that enables one to benefit from the perceptions of
others. Learning the universal principles begins, as we have seen, with the
acquisition of true ethical beliefs in the course of a sound moral upbringing, and
it proceeds through a study of political science that refines and shapes those
beliefs into a systematic, interconnected whole – a ‘scientific’ understanding of
human affairs.
Human flourishing
Aristotle employs a whole battery of arguments in Books I and X of the
Nicomachean Ethics and Book VII of the Politics to show that the highest good
and happiest life for human beings is a life devoted to intellectual inquiry or
‘contemplation’ as its highest aim.6 The most intuitive of his reasons is that what
is most satisfying is putting our greatest gifts, our intellectual capacities, to good
use. As he says in NE I.7, the highest good for human beings is activity that
exhibits virtue of the ‘best and most complete’ kind, or in other words sophia, the
wisdom that pertains to intellectual inquiry or ‘contemplation’ (1098a16-18).
Another argument compares the two strongest candidates for being the highest
good: the life that takes contemplation as its highest end and the life that takes
statesmanship or political leadership as its highest end. The contemplative life
qualifies as the highest good for human beings, because it is not only desirable for
itself (being intrinsically satisfying), but aims at nothing beyond itself (NE X.7.
1177a16-18; Pol. VII.3 1325b14-32). The political life cannot qualify as a high-
est good, because the activity of statesmanship aims at something beyond itself –
ideally, the well-being of the statesman’s society. In aiming at something beyond
itself it is not ‘complete’ in itself, and the virtue it exhibits is not ‘complete’. The
political life may be a happy life for some, if it genuinely exhibits the virtue of
practical wisdom – the second best and most complete human virtue – but it
cannot constitute the best kind of life or highest good for a human being.
Once one recognises that Aristotle identifies only two kinds of lives as genu-
inely happy, the contemplative life being the happiest and the political life being
happy ‘in a secondary degree’ (NE X.8 1178a9), it is easy to understand his
deepest argument for believing that only someone who possesses moral virtue
can be happy. It is intrinsic to both of these kinds of lives that they involve the
exercise of intellectual virtues which, according to the unity of virtue thesis,
cannot be possessed by someone who lacks the moral virtues (Kraut, 1989). The
accurate perceptions associated with the moral virtues are required for both
phronêsis and sophia, since both are concerned with truth, including truths about
human affairs.7 Understanding this sheds light on Aristotle’s idea in Politics
VII that the training of the irrational psyche should aim at ‘reason and mind’. It
should prepare the way for the acquisition of the intellectual virtues, whose
exercise is central to a happy life, by ensuring that a person’s perceptions of what
is good and appropriate are not corrupted by growing accustomed to doing bad
or inappropriate things.
Political communities
Aristotle’s Politics begins with an account of the origin and growth of polises
(politically autonomous cities), and his famous claim that human beings are
‘political animals’ (politikon zôon). What this means is not that human beings
naturally engage in political activities, but that they are gregarious, need to live
together in cities in order to live the best kind of life, and are equipped by
language to live as a community consciously organised in pursuit of the best kind
of life (I.2 1252a8-53a30; Miller, 1995, pp. 30–45). As Aristotle conceives it, a
political society should be a mutually beneficial partnership to which everyone
freely consents (Pol. I.13 1259b37-60a2; III.3 1276a8-16, III.4 1277b8-30,
III.6 1297b17-22, VII.2 1324a24-25, etc.). As a partnership in pursuit of the
best kind of life, a political community must be socially unified, collectively
governed, of one mind in its conception of the best kind of life, and egalitarian.
A true political community is unified by friendship, and friendship requires at
least a semblance of equality (VII.8 1328a35-36; II.4 1262b7-10, etc.).
Yet, existing societies are not unified, Aristotle says. His concern, like Plato’s,
was how societies might become more peaceful, stable and secure against the
factional conflict that ensured most governments in their world were short-lived.
In the Republic, Plato imagined a scheme for common rearing of children in
which parents would not even know whose child was whose. He imagined that,
in this way, rivalries between families might be restrained and a stronger sense of
civic community might emerge. In Book II of the Politics, Aristotle rejects this
scheme. He agrees that a society must be unified by friendship to be secure
against factional conflict, but he thinks a more promising way to accomplish this
is through civic institutions that nurture friendships bridging all social groups.
The most important of these civic institutions is common schools – public day
schools – in which a city’s diverse children ‘grow up together’ at least a few hours
a day (V.9 1310a12-25). It is through education that societies can be unified and
made into a community, Aristotle advises (Pol. II.5 1263b37-38; see Curren,
2000, p. 131 ff, 2002c).
Aristotle goes on (in Pol. III) to elaborate an account of constitutions and the
proper forms of political rule, distinguishing the true, just or legitimate forms of
constitution from those that are corrupt, unjust or illegitimate. As one would
expect, the former aim at the common good and operate on the basis of consent,
while the latter aim only at the good of the rulers and rely on force (III.6
1279a17-22). The former promote partnership in living well, hence mutual trust
and goodwill, while the latter may seek to divide and enfeeble the populace in
order to prevent unified and effective resistance to its rule. Just regimes are based
28 Randall Curren
upon a rule of law, which no one is above, and their laws are worthy of respect.
Unjust regimes are by contrast ‘lawless’ or ‘unconstitutional’, and the unjust
requirements they announce as laws have no claim to being obeyed.
Of the just forms of constitution, polity is the best that can be attained by most
societies, and it is for that reason the goal towards which the reform of actual
societies should aim. It is both a ‘mixed’ constitution, which provides forms of
direct participation for citizens of all social classes, and a ‘middle’ constitution,
dominated by a large middle class. This is just because it respects the right of all
citizens to participate (Pol. III.9 1280a9-b7; NE V.3 1131a24-28), and it is
beneficial because moderation of wealth is conducive to living well and a large
middle class serves as a bulwark against destructive political polarisation.
Kingship is Aristotle’s theoretically ideal system, but he dismisses it as ‘unat-
tainable’, leaving an ideal form of aristocracy as the best constitution that might
be possible in highly favourable circumstances. Aristotle regards an ordinary
aristocracy, or rule in the common interest over willing citizens by a few who are
genuinely the best (aristoi), as a legitimate form of constitution.8 In Book VII of
the Politics, he imagines a constitution in which all of the citizens rule and possess
the true virtue required to live the best kind of life. This would be an ideal aristoc-
racy in which all of the citizens are voluntary partners in living the best kind of
life. Since the citizens would be partners in this, they must have leisure from
productive activities so they can acquire the highest virtue and make activity in
accordance with it the dominating concern of their lives. Those who engage in
productive activity, namely artisans, traders and farmers, would be necessary to
the political society but not members of it. They might be resident aliens at best,
maybe slaves but not citizens, though dealings with them should still be based on
mutual benefit. (It goes without saying that Aristotle has no plausible account of
how slavery could benefit the slave.) Citizens would share in ruling and being
ruled, and land holdings would be divided among the citizens, assuring the
moderation of wealth conducive to equal citizenship and a life of virtue. Three
institutions are mentioned as conducive to virtue and the social unity necessary
to a true community: common meals or dining clubs, common religious obser-
vances and common schools. In the closing chapters of Book VII, we come to
matters of childbirth, childcare and the training of habits and schooling, where
(as we have seen) everything should aim at the proper development of the rational
element of the psyche – the ‘best part’ in human nature, the flourishing of which
is intrinsic to living the best kind of life. Since this ‘ideal aristocracy’ is to be a
society of virtuous equals living in partnership in pursuit of the best kind of life,
every citizen must receive an education in virtue, and should receive it in the
context of common schools in which all citizen children are educated together.
Education
Two ideas dominate the opening of Book VIII of the Politics. One is that educa-
tion is a prerequisite for the practice of virtue, and is thus a matter of public
concern (1337a20-21). The foregoing makes this easy enough to understand: the
proper aim of politics is to enable citizens to live the best kind of life. In order to
live such a life, a person must be virtuous. The development of virtue depends on
a variety of things beyond a person’s control. To educate someone is to train and
teach him so he acquires the moral and intellectual virtues, develops the good
judgment needed for prudent self-governance and participation in political rule,
and learns to take pleasure in the excellent activities with which a good life is occu-
pied. It makes perfect sense that Aristotle says in VIII.5 that the main concern of
education is to ‘cultivate … the power of forming right judgments, and of taking
delight in good dispositions and admirable actions’ (1340a15-19). He says else-
where that to be educated is to be able to form a sound judgment of an investiga-
tion or exposition, a person of ‘universal education’ being one who is able to do
this in all or nearly all domains of knowledge (Departibus animalium 639a1-5).
Note well that education is a preparation for leisure ‘spent in intellectual
activity’, according to Aristotle (VIII.3 1338a10-11). It is not a preparation for
work, as is so often now assumed. Greek education in gymnastikê (athletics) and
musikê (music, poetry and narratives – the ‘Arts of the Muses’) was from the
beginning a preparation for leisure (see Curren, 1996b). The knightly warriors
of Athens who originally received it spent their daytime leisure in athletic
contests and their night-time leisure at drinking parties where they entertained
each other with music and recitations. The subsequent democratisation of
Athens and invention of group lessons altered this ‘old education’, in part by
introducing the commercially useful arts of reading, writing and arithmetic.
Leisure was, in any case, not equated with mere amusement. It was contrasted
with productive labour in such a way that public service – even military service –
was generally considered a use of leisure, or time not spent in satisfying material
needs. For Aristotle, leisure provided the opportunity to flourish as a human
being or to pursue what is intrinsically, not just instrumentally, good.
Education should include ‘necessary’ practical arts, according to Aristotle
(VIII.1 1337b3-9), but it should focus on what is ‘liberal’ or conducive to
spending one’s leisure in activities that express the best in human nature or best
and most complete virtue. Aristotle’s lengthy discussion of music emphasises its
capacity to shape character and judgment (VIII.5-7). Yet, he notes that even
music becomes illiberal or ‘mechanical’, if it is pursued in order to entertain
others (making it an activity that is not complete in itself) and is pursued in such
a way that it interferes with the development and exercise of virtue (VIII.6
1341a4-b19). He is not specific about what counts as ‘necessary’ practical arts,
but he probably has in mind what is necessary to meeting one’s material needs
and exercising virtues that involve the use of external goods. His model is
probably a landowner of moderate means who needs to read, write, draw and use
arithmetic to prudently manage his farm.
The second dominating idea at the opening of Politics VIII is that citizens
should be moulded ‘to suit the form of government’ or constitution
(1337a11-19). The character of citizens matters to preserving constitutions and
also to their quality. The better the character of the citizens, the better the
constitution, Aristotle says. This is somewhat puzzling, since everything I have
30 Randall Curren
attributed to Aristotle suggests that constitutions should be made to suit the
needs of the citizen, not the other way around. Moreover, Aristotle says that it
is only in the best constitution that the virtues expected of a citizen fully coincide
with the virtues of a human being as such (Pol. III.4 1277a1-4). Only the best
kind of society fully enables the development of independent good judgment
and encourages the universal expression of that judgment in public and private
life. Since the proper aim of any political society is to enable citizens to develop
and exercise the best and most complete human virtue, it is not clear how it
could be legitimate for any government to educate citizens to have any virtues
that deviate from these. What are we to make of this?
First it is important to realise that Aristotle says a great deal in the middle
books of the Politics about the measures that actual regimes should take to
preserve themselves. He identifies injustice as the most important general cause
of political instability, and his advice to governments has the effect of encourag-
ing reforms that will make them both more just and longer lasting (V.1 1301a36-
b4; Curren, 2000, p. 100 ff.). To the extent that defective regimes adopt his
proposed reforms, they will come to approximate polities and have the best form
of constitution most societies could hope to have. Public education is introduced
in this context as the most valuable of the reforms that can be adopted. Like
other reforms, it will not leave a deficient system as it is, but will instead both
stabilise and improve it. Indeed, Aristotle says quite explicitly in Politics V.9 that
the education that ‘suits’ a constitution is not the kind of education preferred by
the rulers of an unjust system (1310a12-25). It is education compatible with a
more balanced and moderate system that better serves the interests of all citizens.
A critic might object at this point that education should not support anything
less than an ideal system. Aristotle’s implicit answer is that the best course in
human affairs is to proceed through incremental reform transacted through
public consultation and shared governance. Education that prepares everyone to
employ independent good judgment in shared governance is progress.
Second, it must be recognised that in order for constitutions to ‘suit the needs
of the citizen’, citizens must have certain desirable qualities. A constitution
(politeia) is not, as Aristotle understood it, simply a blueprint for a form of
government, but a functioning political system whose actual patterns are heavily
determined by the characteristics of the people involved. Moulding the constitu-
tion in such a way as to enable citizens to live the best kind of life requires
measures to ensure that citizens are prepared to treat each other with mutual
respect and friendly regard for each other’s well-being. It requires that citizens
have fellow citizens who will in a variety of ways allow them the satisfaction of
fulfilling their human potential.
The contemporary import of Aristotle’s

philosophy of education
Understood within the larger context of his philosophy of human affairs,
Aristotle’s philosophy of education offers valuable starting points for addressing
several topics of enduring interest. One must surely count among these his
account of the virtues and their development, his conception of what is good for
human beings, his ideas about the relationships between virtue, law, and educa-
tion, and his defence of public education.
I noted at the outset that Aristotle’s account of the virtues has been funda-
mental to a major movement in moral theory and the related broad swath of
scholarship on moral development and education. Neo-Aristotelian approaches
restored a measure of plausibility to the philosophy of moral education by
defending roles for both habituation and critical reason, in an era when
neo-Kantian notions of stimulating children to clarify and self-impose their own
values had dominated the landscape. They have arguably enriched and advanced
debate by arguing that habituation, perception, emotion, and judgment are
developmentally interrelated, and by confronting puzzles concerning the rela-
tionship between habituation and autonomous good judgment (Peters, 1981,
pp. 45–60; Curren, 2000, pp. 205–212; 2006; Kristjánsson, 2007, pp. 31–48).
They have also arguably provided the basis for more plausible accounts of the
role of motivation in moral learning, by addressing desire and perception.
The Aristotelian notion that governments and schools should make human
well-being or flourishing their central aim has also had some arguably salutary
influence, through arguments that contest to some degree the value neutrality of
liberalism (see White & White, 1986; Kupperman, 1987), views that hold the
chief purpose of education is to develop human capabilities or promote flourish-
ing (Brighouse, 2006; Nussbaum, 2003, 2006), and conceptions of education
that make initiation into ‘practices’ definitive of, or essential to, its nature (Hirst,
1998; MacIntyre & Dunne, 2002; Strike, 2003; Curren, 2009a). Some such
‘practice’ oriented views treat the ‘goods’ made accessible to learners through
initiation as purely internal to the practices, and others are ambiguous as to
whether these goods are purely internal. My own view, which is arguably the
most authentically Aristotelian, is that the framework of justification we need to
guide education is one that identifies what is good for human beings and on that
basis identifies practices worthy of perpetuation through schools (Curren,
2009a, pp. 52–54). We must, of course, set aside Aristotle’s idea that there is one
best life for human beings, but there is nevertheless much to be said for his idea
that what is most satisfying in life is experiencing the development and self-
directed employment of our abilities. It is an idea which must, however, be
placed within a wider and empirically grounded understanding of human needs
and happiness.
Other aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy of education have been all but ignored,
presumably because his Politics is a more daunting work than the Nicomachean
Ethics, and one more burdened with unattractive features. These are not trivial
obstacles, but there are nevertheless some themes in – and just below the surface
of – the Politics that are important for contemporary educational debate. The
most important of these is Aristotle’s ‘developmental’ view of reason, and its
bearing on the relationships between law and education.9 If reasonableness is a
human quality that develops by degrees and needs assistance to develop, and an
32 Randall Curren
ethic of respect for people as rational beings requires dealing with people as
much as possible through truthful and reasoned instruction and persuasion and
as little as possible through force and violence (see Curren, 2000, p. 21 ff.,
2002a), then the foundations of law and government rest more crucially on
adequate education for everyone than we generally realise. The legitimacy of a
government and a rule of law will rest on conscientious education that prepares
everyone voluntarily to accept the reasonable expectations of law on the basis of
their independent good judgment. This is a much more extensive educational
task than it may at first seem, largely because ongoing consent to new legislation
is transacted through participation in the public life of a democracy, for which
citizens must be prepared. This is arguably the strongest argument for public
education and equitable provision of education to be found in the Politics, and
one that remains compelling.10
In the foreground of the Politics are concerns about equity in enabling all the
members of a society to live well, the need for civic education to promote
intelligent cooperation in the enterprise of shared governance, and the value of
schooling different kinds of children together so they may learn to know and
respect each other as equals. These are still important concerns, and wealth and
poverty matter to all of them today, just as they did in Aristotle’s world. His was
not a multicultural world in the way ours is, but the patterns of conflict that
concerned him are perennial. Aristotle is often invoked in the communitarian
literature, a literature very sympathetic to calls for separate and culturally homo-
geneous schooling, but the Aristotelian course in these matters would be to hold
onto the common school ideal to the extent we can productively approximate it.
The educational literature of teaching and phronêsis that I referred to at the
start of this paper seems to have been directly inspired by the work of Alasdair
MacIntyre, a central figure in the communitarian movement, though he has
himself repudiated its central claims (MacIntyre & Dunne, 2002). Of all the
Aristotelian strands in philosophy of education, this is perhaps the most active
and influential at present. I shall close with a critique of its central claims, and
note how a more authentically Aristotelian argument might be brought in
defence of the professional autonomy of educators.
Kristján Kristjánsson has offered a detailed critique of the body of work in
question, referring to its shared commitments as the phronêsis praxis perspective
(PPP) (Kristjánsson, 2007, pp. 157–173). I will not rehearse his arguments,
which are essentially on target, but will instead offer a much briefer critique
based on the sketch of Aristotle’s views I have provided.11 According to PPP,
teaching is not an art (technê) comparable to medicine and gymnastic instruc-
tion, as Aristotle implies in Nicomachean Ethics X.9. It is said to be not a produc-
tive art (like medicine) or practical science (like political science) that aims at
something beyond itself, but a ‘practice’ (praxis) engaged in for itself and
nothing beyond itself. In Aristotelian terms, this would make teaching an activity
that qualifies as a highest end. If teaching were nothing more than engaging in
contemplation with students for the sheer pleasure of it, this might make sense,
but Aristotle’s account of education presents a very different conception of
teaching. The activity of teaching is unequivocally understood to aim at
something beyond itself, namely the formation of students, just as the art of
politics, to which education is subsidiary, is understood to aim at the formation
and thereby happiness of citizens. Notice that if the activity of teaching did
qualify as a highest end for Aristotle, it would qualify by reason of expressing the
virtue of contemplative wisdom or sophia. According to Joseph Dunne and those
who have followed him in adopting PPP, the virtue expressed in teaching is
phronêsis, which is correct but not helpful to their view.
A crucial further element of PPP is the claim that phronêsis is not grounded in
any body of science or ‘theory’.12 Having already seen in some detail the error
in this, what remains to be said of this claim is that it is presented as: (1) a way
to dissolve puzzles concerning how theory can guide practice; (2) a way to
establish that:
education is a distinctive practice with an integrity of its own, and that this
entitles that practice to a decisive measure of autonomy in carrying out its
work. (Hogan & Smith, 2003, p. 166, italics added; cf. Blake et al., 2003,
p. 7; Dunne, 1997, p. 364 ff.)
I have not found in the paper this is quoted from, or in any related works, an actual
argument for the claim that the integrity of educational practice entitles educators
to professional autonomy. Supposing the activity of teaching were a practice
engaged in for itself and nothing beyond itself, what is quite unclear is why anyone
would be entitled to engage in that activity with other people’s children, at other
people’s expense, free of external constraint, guidance and expectations.
As much as I find PPP both un-Aristotelian and philosophically irreparable, I
do sympathise with the desire to shield teaching and learning from the unrelent-
ingly instrumentalist and controlling pressures of the age. I also sympathise with
the intuition that Aristotelian resources can be put to good use in this endeavour.
The argument I have made in my own work on academic leadership (writing
here not of schools, but of universities) is that:
an academic institution’s mission cannot be understood in a purely or even

dominantly instrumental sense, because the goods belonging to the enter-
prise of higher education are in large measure internal to the practices of
inquiry and learning; i.e., internal to the unimpeded activities of academic
communities themselves. If institutions of higher learning do not initiate
students into forms of inquiry and other practices (such as the arts) that
are more intrinsically rewarding than what they could devote themselves to
without a higher education, then they will have failed. …
A good institution of higher learning is like a good political system [that
enables people to flourish as human beings] … It is governed in a way that
enables it to be a community or partnership in unimpeded pursuit of
academic goods, which is to say an institution in which people drawn to the
value of such work are able to flourish in doing it. (Curren, 2008, p. 351)
34 Randall Curren
This is no argument against accountability or demands that teaching serve ends
beyond the initiation of students into practices that offer intrinsic rewards, and
it would be inconsistent with Aristotle’s philosophy of education if it were. What
it is, and can be, is a defence of the view that institutions that leave no room for
intrinsically rewarding teaching and learning are not educational institutions,
whatever we may call them.13
Acknowledgements
I owe thanks to the Spencer Foundation for facilitating my work on the larger
project of which this essay is a part, and to Deborah Modrak and an anonymous
referee for their comments on an earlier draft.
Notes
1 This was indeed my purpose in Aristotle on the necessity of public education (Curren,
2000). The present article relies fundamentally on interpretive arguments developed
in detail in that work. For some points of clarification and philosophical expansion, see
Curren 2002a, 2002b, 2002c, 2006 and 2009b. The translations quoted in this paper
are from the Revised Oxford Translations in Barnes, 1984.
2 For an account of Aristotle’s audience, see Bodéüs, 1993.
3 See Sherman, 1989, for a particularist reading, and compare Reeve, 1992 and 2000,
which take Aristotle at his word.
4 For what is known about Aristotle’s school, the Lyceum, see Lynch, 1972.
5 ‘Art’ is a more idiomatic translation of technê in some contexts, and ‘craft’ is more
idiomatic in others. Contemporary usage commends medical ‘arts’ but Socrates’ under-
stood virtue as a ‘craft’, a form of knowledge resting in definitions of the virtues; politics
as soul ‘craft,’ but the ‘art’ of governing.
6 For a comprehensive defence of this reading and consideration of the leading alterna-
tives, see Kraut, 1989. Kraut argues that it is the unity of the virtues that makes moral
virtue internally (psychically) essential to a happy life.
7 An alternative, ‘inclusive ends’ interpretation of eudaimonia and its dependence on
moral virtue attributes to Aristotle the view that a happy human life – unlike a god’s life –
essentially involves virtuous participation in a human community. The texts typically
cited include NE 1097b11, 1140b7-11, 1177b27-28, 1178b5-8 and 1179a22-32 (see
Depew, 1991; Miller, 1995, pp. 346–357; Roberts, 2009, pp. 9–10), but they are hardly
decisive. What seems true is that: (1) virtue is essential to enjoying intimate good friend-
ship, which Aristotle identifies as the greatest ‘external’ good; (2) widespread virtue with
respect to others is essential to a city capable of enabling one to live well.
8 ‘Ordinary’ aristocracy is, of course, itself an ideal. Most so-called aristocracies are actually
oligarchies ruled by persons of wealth posing as ‘the best’ or most virtuous.
9 It is important to recognise that one can dismiss the idea that development occurs in
stages, with the emergence of reasoning trailing behind the formation of desire, yet
still hold that the development of reasonableness is incremental, dependent on factors
and efforts beyond the learner’s control, and may remain incomplete (as it is in much
of our prison populations; see Curren, 2002a). Stables, 2008 is not the first work to
argue in one way or another that Aristotle is wrong because children are already ra-
tional and do not require the formative care we imagine. These arguments focus on
circumscribed forms of rationality and fail to acknowledge the incremental nature and
gradual, socially mediated development of good judgment and capacities of self-man-
agement. See Purdy, 1992, for a powerful, virtue-centred refutation of such arguments.
10 A great deal of Curren, 2000 is devoted to establishing this.
11 There is of course substantial overlap between my critique and Kristjánsson’s, as well as
points of divergence. In the interest of brevity I must leave it to interested readers to
consult his splendid book for themselves. It corrects other abuses of Aristotle’s ideas in
the moral education literature, which I won’t address.
12 Dunne writes, in a characteristic passage, that ‘the great significance of Aristotle lies in
the fact that he ... set limits to the sway of techne and, through his novel conception of
phronesis, provided a rich analysis of the kind of knowledge that guides … characteristi-
cally human – and therefore inescapably ethical – activity (praxis)’ (Dunne & Pendle-
bury, 2003, p. 200). He asserts a few lines later that phronêsis is irreducible ‘to general
propositions’ (p. 201). It being a virtue, this can scarcely be denied, but it does not at
all follow that the universal principles that inform good practical judgment will never,
in the circumstances discerned, point clearly to a course of action. Dunne’s rejection
of ‘technique’ rests on a form of contextualism about judgment that Aristotle did
not hold.
13 On intrinsic rewards in learning, the damaging consequences for students of admin-
istrative pressures on teachers, and the value of theory in guiding good practice, see
Pelletier & Sharp, 2009; Ryan & Niemiec, 2009a, b. The empirically grounded theory
in question incorporates a form of eudaimonism broadly inspired by Aristotle’s account
of well-being. Aristotle’s philosophy being a naturalistic one with aspirations to sci-
ence, it is entirely within the spirit of his project to wed contemporary applications of
it with empirical research (see Curren, 2006, pp. 465–468).
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3 Philosophy and education
in Stoicism of the Roman
imperial era
G. Reydams-Schils
Introduction
In the first two centuries of the Roman imperial era, the study of philosophy
constituted the crowning educational experience, in the sense of being both a
privilege and a capstone. Only an elite among the elite studied philosophy, and
only then after mastering a curriculum consisting of grammar (reading, writing
and literature) and rhetoric. The ongoing cultural rivalry between rhetoricians
and philosophers could be intense, even though a Stoic such as Seneca
(c. 4 BCE–65 CE) clearly turned his rhetorical training to his advantage in order
to convey his views more forcefully, especially in his letters and consolations. This
tension was acknowledged in Seneca’s comments about his father’s misgivings
about philosophy (Ep. 108.22), in the exchanges between Marcus Aurelius
(121–180 CE, Med. 1.7) and his rhetoric teacher Fronto (c. 100–170 CE,
De eloquentia (Haines/van den Hout), Ad M. Caes. 3.15 (1.100 Haines, p. 48
van den Hout)), and in the concerns of Epictetus (c. 55–135 CE, Diss. 3.23.33-
38), who, like Seneca (Ep. 40), warned that rhetorical flourishes should not
cloud a philosopher’s expression.1
For Romans, Latin was the linguistic medium for rhetoric (even though
rhetoric could also draw from Greek models). Philosophy, on the other hand,
was most often expressed in Greek, even in the reflections that the emperor
Marcus Aurelius addressed to himself. Seneca consciously departed from this
model by not merely rendering Greek idiom, as had Cicero (106–43 BCE) and
Lucretius (early to mid-first century BCE) before him, but also developing his
philosophical views in Latin terms (Inwood, 2005, pp. 7–22).
As the following discussion of the views of Seneca, Cornutus (fl c. 60 CE),
Musonius Rufus (fl c. 30–100 CE), Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius will demon-
strate, these later Stoics could look back on a considerable legacy established by
the founders of the school in the Hellenistic period: Zeno (334–262 BCE),
Cleanthes (331–232 BCE), and especially the prolific Chrysippus (c. 280–206
BCE). The earlier Stoics had often framed their views in a conscious rivalry with
Plato and his successors, and also claimed Socrates for their own purposes.
During the Roman Republic, Stoics such as Panaetius (c. 185–110 BCE), who
spent part of his life in Rome and belonged to the entourage of Scipio Africanus
Philosophy and education in Stoicism of the Roman imperial era 39
the Younger, and Posidonius (135–51 BCE), who went on an ambassadorship to
Rome, directly infused Roman culture with their ideas; and Cicero, though not
a Stoic himself, demonstrated a familiarity with many Stoic views.
Not all the Stoics of the Roman imperial era taught philosophy or directed a
philosophical school. (For a good overview of Stoicism in the imperial era, see
Gill, 2000, 2003.) There is evidence of teaching activity on the part of Cornutus
and Musonius Rufus, but not much information about its structure. Cornutus
appears to have also taught topics pertaining to grammar as well as philosophy.
Epictetus directed a school in Epirus. Other Stoics were engaged in a wide range
of practices. Seneca progressively devoted more time to philosophy as he grew
older, addressed others who had interests and concerns similar to his, and also
wrote tragedies; Marcus Aurelius’ writings were addressed to himself, and it is
not clear whether he intended his reflections for a wider audience; and Manilius’
work (first century CE) belongs within the tradition of didactic poetry.
Cleomedes’ astronomical treatise on the heavens is a rare example of a Stoic
technical treatise from this period (c. 200 CE),2 as is the Elements of ethics by a
certain Hierocles (fl. 100 CE), to which we will return below.
Although the works of Seneca, Cornutus, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, and
Marcus Aurelius engage the topic of education at the relatively advanced level of
philosophy, they also provide some insights into pre-philosophical education.
The writings of Seneca and especially Marcus Aurelius give us clues about how
they themselves were educated. The entire first book of Marcus Aurelius’
Meditations, for instance, consists of an overview of the people who shaped him,
including his teachers. Stoic philosophy itself, in turn, had its own curriculum,
often conveniently divided into the three areas of logic, the study of nature
(or physics, as the ancients called it), and ethics, though in the work of the
authors examined here, ethics is the dominant strand of inquiry. Yet in the final
analysis, in the view of these later Stoics, philosophy cannot be reduced to a
curriculum or even a purely intellectual activity, but rather is meant to inform all
human actions and to transform so-called ‘ordinary’ life from within existing
social structures and responsibilities. The following discussion will examine these
thinkers’ views regarding pre-philosophical education, the three branches of
philosophy, and the ultimate goal of philosophical education.
Pre-philosophical education: Cornutus and Seneca

From the writings attributed to Cornutus it appears that he worked in grammar
and rhetoric (areas to which the Stoics also devoted attention) as well as philoso-
phy. He taught, among others, the poets Persius (34–62 CE) and Lucan (39–65
CE). The topic of his sole preserved text, Introduction to Greek theology, sits right
at the intersection of literary studies and philosophy. The work stands in a
tradition of allegorical interpretations of poetry (primarily but not exclusively
Homer and Hesiod) through etymologies of divine names, which, when
interpreted correctly, were believed to reveal the proper ‘philosophical’ view of
the gods.
40 G. Reydams-Schils
As the opening line and final paragraphs of this work indicate, it is intended
to provide a young pupil (paidion) with the correct understanding of the nature
of the universe, or physics, necessary to reinterpret mythological accounts. The
Stoics considered theology the highest branch of physics, and Panaetius and
Posidonius are said to have started their course of instruction with physics
(Diogenes Laertius 7.41). Cornutus’ work is a physics textbook – but it is also
plausible that it was meant to ease the transition from literary studies and
rhetoric to philosophy, and thus either to prepare the ground for a potential
interest in ‘higher’ philosophical studies or to prevent the worst misconceptions.
The correct view of the gods would, it was assumed, yield the right attitude
towards them: reverence with respect for traditional practices, yet also genuine
piety without superstition.3
According to Cornutus, there were ‘philosophers’ even among the men ‘of
old’, who had begun the tradition of clothing their insights in symbolic language.
Both of these points, however, were a matter of debate within the Stoic tradition,
as reflected in one of Seneca’s letters (Ep. 90). Though the Stoics agreed that
the first generations of human beings had more direct access to the truth,
they differed in their views about the extent of this knowledge and whether it
was pre-philosophical. They also disagreed over when the practice of ‘hiding’,
or, if viewed as a negative outcome (e.g., Cicero De natura deorum 2.63;
70–71; Plutarch Stoic. rep. 1039F), losing true meanings in poetry, mythology,
and other media, such as paintings and cult practices, had started. In this
context, Cornutus seems to present a strong endorsement of the allegorical
method.
To what extent the earlier Stoics engaged in full-fledged ‘allegorising’ is
unclear. (For the best current overview of the debate, see Ramelli, 2003, esp.
pp. 31–41.) We do know that the early Stoics Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus
shared Cornutus’ interest in etymologies of divine names that presumably
revealed true insights about nature and the divine. Cicero’s On the nature of the
gods provides invaluable information about this practice, notably about
Chrysippus’ work of the same name, but in a context, it has to be noted, that is
very critical of Stoicism (1.40-41). Seneca goes even further than Cicero in
disapproving of this mode of interpretation, thereby also asserting his independ-
ence vis-à-vis his Stoic predecessors (Ben. 1.3.2-4).
In his criticism of the allegorising method, Seneca uses the three Graces as an
example. (We have an instance of just such allegorising of the Graces in Cornutus
18.4-20.5 Lang. Thus Seneca may also have been indirectly criticising his
contemporary.) Looking for hidden meanings in specific names, genealogies, and
attributes of the gods in myths, poetic renderings, and art is not unique to the
Stoics, he claims, but constitutes a broader cultural practice. His main complaint
against allegorising is three-fold. First, such interpretations vary according to the
views of any given interpreter. Second, poets are not reliable witnesses: often they
simply make up names to suit their taste or to accommodate metrical constraints.
Most importantly, this kind of analysis of poetry and of cultural artifacts is of no
real use in instilling the right attitude and behaviour, he holds, making explicit
the ethical implications of one’s views of the divine. Capitalising on a well-attested
cultural tension between the Greek and Roman traditions, Seneca claims that
one could expect such an overly subtle approach from a Greek like Chrysippus.
But this subtlety belies Chrysippus’ usual acumen and is out of keeping with his
ability elsewhere to state his points lucidly and succinctly. Perhaps Chrysippus’
acumen is so finely pointed, Seneca scoffs, that it gets blunted and turns against
itself, pricking rather than piercing (Ben. 1.4.1).
Seneca’s famous Letter 88 on ‘liberal studies’ (liberalia studia), which also
mentions the key Greek notion of ‘encyclical education’ (egkuklios paideia, 23),
builds on this criticism within a larger assessment of the curriculum that normally
preceded the study of philosophy. Homer can be turned into a Stoic, Epicurean,
Peripatetic or Academic, he complains, depending on who is interpreting him; if
all of these doctrines can be read into Homer, none is really present. Even if
Homer was a philosopher, he became so independently of his poetry.
In this letter, Seneca plays on the connection between artes liberales and
liberae. Traditionally ‘free studies/arts’ meant those forms of knowledge that are
appropriate for politically free men and do not aim at moneymaking or
usefulness. (Seneca lumps painting and sculpture, which promote luxury,
together with wrestling and athletics and ranks these activities lower than the
‘liberal arts’, 18–19.) But the only study that makes human beings truly free, he
claims, is that which pursues wisdom and virtue, two notions inextricably
connected in Seneca’s mind.
Among the traditional liberal arts, he discusses grammar, literary studies,
music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. (One can see traces here of the
curriculum of the so-called trivium and quadrivium, which goes back to Plato’s
educational programme in his Republic (Hadot, I., 2005).) According to Seneca,
these forms of knowledge are helpful only to the extent that they are pro-
paideutic, in the sense of preparing the soul for the reception of virtue (20), and
that one limits one’s efforts to the strictly essential rather than being carried away
by a flood of useless tidbits of information (36–41). He denounces such exces-
sive interests as motivated by pleasure and thus intemperate.
Mathematics often concerns itself with practical purposes, as when arithmetic
serves the purpose of managing one’s wealth, or geometry is needed for fixing
the dimensions of an estate. But even forms of mathematics that are devoid of
such practical concerns are at best auxiliary sciences, and thus do not belong
within philosophy, or physics in the philosophical sense. Mathematics, he argues,
must always borrow its first principles from other forms of knowledge, whereas
philosophy investigates causes and laws of natural phenomena and hence probes
much more deeply (24–28).
If the goal of philosophy is to instill virtue and to make us better human
beings, as Seneca holds here, then not even all of philosophy as included in the
tradition will qualify as ‘free’. There are plenty of thinkers, Seneca complains,
who have either vied with scholars of grammar and geometry in the pursuit of
useless knowledge or who have undermined the possibility of knowledge
altogether (42–46). Ultimately, he maintains, all forms of knowledge that do not
teach us how to live well (42–43) in the context of a universe that is rationally
ordered, or prepare the ground for this outcome, are superfluous.
Philosophy: logic, physics, ethics

In his letter on ‘liberal studies’, Seneca also alludes to the division of philosophy
into logic, physics, and ethics (24), which was central for the Stoics (though not
unique to them). But most writings by the later Stoics tend to focus on ethics in
action – on how to lead the good life and face challenges. As a result, many
commentators have tended to consider their accounts mere popular moralising;
scholars such as Paul Veyne have even gone so far as to claim that in the Roman
imperial era, Stoicism lost its initial critical edge and innovative perspective by
conforming itself to prevailing social customs and practices (Veyne, 1987, p. 45).
Rather than endorsing an unreflective conformism, however, these accounts
have a much more complex hermeneutical status and represent a conscious
choice and a very specific mode of doing philosophy as well as engaging critically
with prevailing norms, a point to which I will return below. This mode of
philosophy by no means implies that knowledge of the more technical and
theoretical aspects of Stoicism was no longer available in this era or that the later
Stoics no longer cared about it. The technical aspects of Stoicism were still
present in doxographies, compilations of the views of different schools of
thought and philosophers, such as the work by Diogenes Laertius (probably
early third century CE). Such compilations offer insights into the circulation of
Stoic works and ideas in all three areas of physics, logic, and ethics. In addition,
critics of the Stoics such as Plutarch (c. 46–120 CE), Galen (129–199/217 CE)
and Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. late second to early third century CE) reveal
that the debate about core Stoic tenets, and Chrysippus’ teachings in particular,
was very much alive in this period. It may be that later Stoics tended not to focus
on theory in part because they wanted to move beyond these controversies
rather than get bogged down in them, as seems to have happened with earlier
Stoics in their debate with the sceptical Academy. If so, the ‘grid’ of the structure
and connections between different technical terms and notions that we find in
doxographical sources, as developed primarily by Chrysippus, may not be the
best lens through which to interpret these later accounts, even though they
reveal many connections with earlier Stoic doctrine.
Rather, the apparent differences may be mostly a matter of focus. Cleomedes’
exposition on astronomy, Manilius’ didactic poem, and Seneca’s own Naturales
quaestiones attest to a continued interest in advanced Stoic physics. In his other
writings, Seneca also likes to demonstrate occasionally that he ‘has the goods’,
so to speak, including a decent knowledge of the Stoic tradition and key techni-
cal distinctions in it and other currents of thought (as in Letters 94 and 95, on
the use of general doctrine and precepts, or Letter 58, on being, and Letter 65,
on causality). But these expositions may have been little more than finger-
exercises, just as a skilled orator may occasionally reveal the tools of his trade,
both to refresh his skills and establish his credibility. As readers, we should avoid
the anachronism of considering such passages more ‘philosophical’ than others
(Reydams-Schils, 2007).4
The writings of the Stoic Hierocles demonstrate how misleading the scholarly
view of these Stoics’ work as simply popular moralising can be. Praechter, evalu-
ating Hierocles’ thought only on the basis of passages preserved in Stobaeus
containing ‘how to’ guidelines for dealing with the gods and one’s socio-political
relationships (1901: v), considered him simply an ‘ordinary soldier in the army
of Stoicism’. But shortly afterwards von Arnim edited a papyrus with fragments
from a more theoretical work by Hierocles on ethics (Elements of ethics) that now
constitute our best evidence on the highly sophisticated Stoic notion of ‘appro-
priation’ (oikeiôsis), which stipulates that by nature and from birth, animals and
human beings come equipped with a self-awareness and self-love that guides
them towards self-preservation (von Arnim, 1906). This notion brings together
insights from both physics (how nature works) and ethics (how human beings
should lead their lives) and clearly demonstrates that later Stoics such as
Hierocles still had a good grasp of the technical aspects of Stoicism. (The core
texts for present purposes are Cicero De finibus 3.16-25, 62-68, Seneca Ep. 121.)
These Stoics had more than a mere awareness of doctrine. They also appar-
ently still had access to extensive writings by their predecessors, notably by
Chrysippus. According to the Vita Persii (32.35-33.40 Clausen), Cornutus
inherited from Persius’ library about 700 scrolls of Chrysippus’ works. And
although such sessions are not recorded in the extant evidence of Epictetus’
teachings, the expositions do mention that Epictetus’ approach partly relied on
the writings of his Stoic predecessors, especially those of the prolific and system-
atic Chrysippus. Epictetus thus practised ‘commentary’ as a pedagogical method
by reading philosophical works together with his pupils (sunanagnôsis, as this was
called (Hadot I., 2005, second edition, revised and expanded: p. 423)). Either
the teacher would comment on the passages read or students would be asked to
do so (as mentioned in Diss. 1.10.7-13; 1.26; 4.9.6; this would become the
dominant mode of teaching in later Platonism).
Yet it is very striking that whenever Epictetus mentions this pedagogical
method, he more often than not sounds a cautionary note, claiming that it does
one no good whatsoever to be able to interpret and understand Chrysippus’
works, or those of other thinkers for that matter, unless one can also put these
insights into practice and show how one has changed for the better as a result of
one’s reading (as in Diss. 1.4.5-17, 17.13-18, 2.16.34, 17.34-40, 19.5-15,
23.44, 3.2.13-18, 9.20-22, 21.6-7, 24.81). According to Epictetus, merely
interpreting philosophical expositions and showing off one’s erudition is no
different from the immersion of a scholar of literature in trivial details that are
meant to dazzle (Diss. 2.19.5-15; Ench. 49), and we have already seen how little
Seneca also valued this kind of erudition. Presumably Epictetus would measure
his own success as a teacher by the actual moral progress of his pupils, not by
their ability to parrot his teachings, a point to which I will return below.
What holds for reading philosophical treatises in these later Stoic accounts also
holds for the study of logic and physics. Although logic and physics do belong
within philosophy, these branches of knowledge can create similar pitfalls as the
other forms of knowledge to which students would have been exposed earlier in
their lives. There is a right and a wrong way of engaging in these inquiries, these
authors make clear; the wrong way entails studying them for their own sake and
indulging in technical details.
As the art of reasoning, and more specifically of demonstrations and syllogisms
(for which both Zeno and Chrysippus were famous, or notorious, depending on
one’s perspective), logic is indispensable to virtue: someone who is fundamen-
tally confused in his thinking about what the good is cannot be expected to live
the virtuous life. (On the study and importance of logic in this era, see Barnes,
1997; Crivelli, 2007; Giavatto, 2008.) For this reason both Musonius Rufus and
Epictetus are very severe with students who wish to bypass logic altogether or
downplay its importance. When Epictetus once replied to his teacher Musonius
Rufus that making a mistake in a logical problem was not as bad as burning
the Capitol and one of Epictetus’ students in turn said that it was not like
killing one’s father, both received the same reply: in logic, such sloppiness would
in fact be the equivalent of those odious deeds (Epictetus Diss. 1.7.32-33; cf. also
Ench. 52).
Another important pedagogical technique related to logic is the use of theses
and demonstrations. Musonius Rufus provides a glimpse of how this worked in
his teaching of ethics (1 Hense/Lutz), as in his example of the counter-intuitive
thesis that pleasure is not a good. If we start, Musonius says, with the generally
accepted premise that every good is desirable, and then add a second equally
accepted one that some pleasures are not desirable, the conclusion that pleasure
cannot be considered a good clearly follows. By this method, one moves from
that which is more obvious to that which is harder to grasp. Yet, Musonius points
out, a teacher should use only as many arguments and proofs as necessary to
make the point, taking into account the pedagogical needs of his pupils: the
gifted ones will need fewer arguments, while those who are dull, either because
of a weaker disposition or a wrong upbringing, will need more evidence for the
point to register. Yet the most convincing example, he claims, is a teacher who
acts consistently with his words (see also 5 Hense/Lutz, discussed below). Here
Musonius agrees with Epictetus that theorising, or drawing the right conclusions,
is easier than practice, that is, living according to these insights (Diss. 1.26.3-4).
Physics appears to play a minimal role in Musonius Rufus’ approach. Whereas
Chrysippus famously defined the goal of human life as living according to nature,
which included the nature both of individual human beings and of the universe
(Diogenes Laertius 7.88), Musonius Rufus does not draw much attention to the
universal dimension (17 p. 89 Hense) but tends to focus on human nature as
different from that of the animals and the gods. Musonius does leave room for
the notion of Zeus as the ‘ensouled law’ (nomos empsuchos 16 p. 87 Hense) and
depicts humans as citizens in Zeus’ city (i.e., the universe) (9 p. 42 Hense), but
does not spell out the philosophical implications of this position.
Marcus Aurelius, in contrast, states emphatically that physics, like logic, is
indispensable for the pursuit of philosophy, because views that are not based on
the correct science of nature cannot hold their own. He argues that in order to
make progress one needs a strong theoretical foundation and the self-confidence
that results from the correct knowledge applied to each particular case (10.9).
Yet a prominent, and often debated, feature of Marcus Aurelius’ writings is that
he appears to leave open how exactly the universe is governed, tending instead
to list alternatives, most often pitting the Stoic view of Providence against the
Epicurean randomness of colliding atoms with a disjunctive ‘either ... or’
structure. (Annas, 2004 and Cooper, 2004 are representative of the debate on
this issue; see also Giavatto, 2008.) His strategy appears to be a double one. First
he holds that regardless of one’s view of the universe, there are certain tenets
about attitude and behaviour to which one should always cling. And in some
cases, he uses an a fortiori approach: if an Epicurean can manage to be content
with his lot, how much more should a Stoic be so, given his or her belief that a
god has made everything good? By this approach, one could argue, Marcus
Aurelius puts physics in what he sees as its proper place, as subservient to ethics.
Marcus Aurelius is not the only later Stoic to use these strategies, though they
do loom largest in his reflections. Seneca, in one of his letters (16.4-6), leaves
open whether an inexorable fate, a god, or chance rules the universe (though
Stoicism assumes a connection between the first two possibilities – i.e., fate
supposedly reflects the divinely imposed order of the universe). But the actual
course he recommends to his addressee, namely, firmness of resolve, does not
depend on any specific theory of the universe. Epictetus adopts a similar strategy,
saying, ‘Why should I care whether existing things are compounded from atomic
or incomposite elements, or from fire and earth? Isn’t it enough to learn the
essence of good and bad ... to run our lives using these as rules; and not to
bother about those things that are beyond us?’ (fr. 1 Oldfather, trans. Long).
In On benefits (7.1), Seneca does not leave any doubt that it is much preferable
to have a few maxims of practical philosophy at hand that will make us better and
happier than a vast storehouse of recondite knowledge about nature and its
hidden causes. But it is in the preface to the third book of his Naturales
quaestiones that he solves the riddle of this quasi-sceptical approach to the study
of nature. Physics and moral self-improvement are meant to reinforce each other,
and only the physics that serves this mutual relation is worth pursuing.
Understanding ourselves correctly implies understanding our place and role in
the universe, how we relate to the divine principle, and to other human beings
in the universal community.
In the final analysis, according to the later Stoics, it is not just logic or physics
in the philosophical curriculum that are subservient to the correct way of life. So,
too, is talking about rather than practicing ethics. As Musonius Rufus (5 Hense/
Lutz) and Epictetus claim, one can hold discussions and write as much as one
wants about the good life, but anyone with philosophical interests is ultimately
judged by the same standard as a physician, a sailor or a musician: it is what one
accomplishes that matters. Musonius Rufus and Epictetus hereby also quietly
subvert certain upper-class assumptions about the value of philosophy, as exem-
plified in Seneca’s letter on the liberal arts discussed above (88). (Musonius
Rufus, after all, taught the slave Epictetus.) Paradoxically, Musonius Rufus and
Epictetus turn Seneca’s notion of freedom on its head: even though they agree
with Seneca that only virtue makes one truly free, they use the parallel of the arts
and vocational training to underscore that philosophy, too, has to prove itself in
its results. Or, as Epictetus puts it:
The builder does not come and say: Listen to me lecturing on building. He
gets his contract for a house, builds it, and shows that he has the craft. You
should act in the same sort of way: Eat like a human being, drink like a
human being, and so too, dress, and marry, and father children, and play
your roles as citizen; put up with abuse, and an inconsiderate brother, father,
son, neighbor, fellow-traveler. Show all this to us, so that we can see what
you have really learnt from the philosophers. (Diss. 3.21.1-6; trans. Long)
The role of philosophy, the goal of life

When Musonius Rufus locates the ideal relationship between teacher and pupil
in an agrarian setting and recommends farming or being a shepherd as the best
way of life for a philosopher, who should work with his own hands just like
anybody else (11 Hense/Lutz), it is obvious that we are dealing with a very
specific concept of philosophical education, and one that sets itself in conscious
opposition to the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. Musonius Rufus argues
that if work is balanced with leisure for study and discussion, this mode of
interaction is the best because the teacher simultaneously sets an example by
putting his principles into action and displaying virtue in his way of life (cf. also
Seneca Ep. 6.6).
To understand what is behind Musonius Rufus’ recommendations, we need to
see how theory and practice relate to each other in Stoicism, and especially in the
later accounts. ‘Philosophy’, Musonius Rufus claims, ‘is nothing else than to
search out by reason what is right and proper, and by deeds to put it into practice’
(14-end Hense/Lutz, cf. also 4, on philosophy as the art of becoming a good
human being). A Platonist or a follower of Aristotle would agree that philosophy
should serve the good life. But for all the points of contact with these other tradi-
tions, the Stoic understanding of the good life is fundamentally different from
that of a Platonist or Aristotelian. The crucial point here is not even that the
Stoics in general would consider all forms of philosophical knowledge, including
logic and physics, to be virtues (SVF 2.35). After all, Plato and Aristotle’s notions
of virtue (which, one has to remember, in its original context is closer to our term
‘excellence’) are also capacious, including the virtues pertaining to reason.
Rather, the difference is that Stoics do not have a hierarchical notion of virtue,
seeing logic, physics, and ethics as mutually entailing each other in one continu-
ous and dynamic whole. (Cf. Hadot, P., 1979, 1991; Gourinat 2008. Other core
texts here would include Diogenes Laertius 7.130 and SVF 3.280.)
What sets especially later Stoicism apart is the view that all theory, including
what we would call theory or philosophising about ethics, must serve an ethics
in action. Theory and practice are inextricably intertwined, but with an emphasis
on practice. Generally speaking, for Platonists contemporary to the Roman
Stoics and later, the good life consists primarily, if not always exclusively, of the
contemplation of and the mind’s reunion with a higher, intelligible realm, or
theory in that sense. Interpreters of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics disagree
about which of two conceptions of the good life he endorses. According to one
conception, the good life consists of the exercise of practical reason in a life of
political and social activity. According to the other, it consists of the exercise of
theoretical reason through contemplation. To the Stoics, positing pure thought
(or even a higher state) as the goal of life and as ‘practice’ (cf. Aristotle Politics
1325b) would make little sense, not in the least because they do not recognise a
transcendent intelligible and noetic dimension to reality. For them, with their
unified view of virtue, in which all virtues entail each other, wisdom as the excel-
lence of reason always constitutes moral virtue and being engaged in the world.5
Small wonder, then, that the later Stoics put so much emphasis on training
(meletê, askêsis, as in Musonius Rufus 6 Hense/Lutz) as the indispensable bridge
between theoretical insights and practice.6 This notion, which has connections
with the Socratic and Cynic traditions, encompasses much more than Aristotle’s
habituation, which is meant to shape the lower, irrational aspects of the soul
(as in Nicomachean Ethics 2). The Stoics, with the potential and debated excep-
tion of Posidonius, do not accept irrational aspects of the soul as existing inde-
pendently from reason. Hence training and habituation involve a human being’s
entire disposition, including the process of learning to use one’s reason correctly.
The Stoic notion of the good has this feature in common with its Platonic and
Aristotelian counterparts that it is a radical departure from ordinary conceptions
of happiness, and thus it is not easy to implement against prevailing practices,
weaknesses in one’s own disposition, and bad habits. Therefore, according to
this view, pupils need all the help they can get to make these insights sufficiently
their own or to acquire the right ‘disposition’ (ethos, as in Musonius Rufus 5
Hense/Lutz) for putting them into practice under all circumstances.
To this end, Musonius Rufus (6 Hense/Lutz) stipulates exercises for both
body and soul, but holds that of the two, the care of the soul is the most impor-
tant. He establishes an explicit connection between the exercises of the soul and
demonstrations (1 Hense/Lutz): the training of the soul, he claims, involves
having ready at hand (procheirous) the demonstrations concerning true
(as opposed to apparent) good and evil, becoming accustomed (ethizesthai) to
making the correct distinctions, and practising (meletan) the avoidance of true
evil and the pursuit of true good. (Diogenes Laertius (6.70) attributes the same
distinction between two types of exercises to Diogenes the Cynic (fl. mid-fourth
century BCE, on this topic cf. Goulet-Cazé, 1986); cf. also Clement of Alexandria
Strom. 7.16.)
Here askêsis, it has to be noted, has not yet acquired its later connotations of
‘asceticism’, though frugality and the endurance of hardships are recommended
for the sake of self-control and temperance, which are essential if one does not
want to be swept off one’s feet by the pull of the wrong values (as in Musonius
Rufus 18-20 Hense/Lutz). For instance, Epictetus urges his students ‘on occa-
sion, when you are very thirsty, [to] take cold water into your mouth, and then
spit it out, without telling anybody’ (Ench. 47). But a good Stoic, as Seneca
reminds us, is also capable of putting affluence and easier conditions to good use
(De vita beata 20.3-end).
For the later Stoics, ethics in action means showing one’s mettle in ordinary,
everyday life circumstances and in society, among one’s given socio-political
obligations. For this reason, students are not meant to form settled attachments
to a school, as increasingly happened, for instance, with the inner circles of the
schools of Platonism. The knowledge and training acquired through education
has to be portable and to become fully interiorised, ‘digested’, as it were
(Epictetus Diss. 3.21.1-3; Ench. 46; Seneca Ep. 2.2-4, 84, De beneficiis 7.2.1).
Thus Seneca and Epictetus show their own independence towards their Stoic
predecessors and do not extol a Zeno, Cleanthes or Chrysippus above all others.
‘We Stoics’, Seneca claims, ‘are not subjects of a despot: each of us lays claim to
his own freedom’ (Ep. 33.4). If Chrysippus took the liberty to disagree with his
teacher Cleanthes, ‘Why, then, following the example of Chrysippus himself,
should not every man claim his own freedom?’ (Ep. 113.23).
Epictetus and Musonius Rufus also play down their own importance as philos-
ophers (as in Diss. 1.16.20, 1.2.35, 3.1.36, 3.7.1, 3.8.7)7 – even though they do,
on occasion, mention the benefits of studying under their guidance.8 Students
are told sternly not to show off their philosophical knowledge (e.g., Epictetus
Diss. 1.26.9) and that external trappings, such as a certain dress code, do not
make the philosopher (as in Epictetus Diss. 3.12.16, 3.14.4, 3.23, 4.8.15-16);
Musonius Rufus (16 Hense/Lutz). Many of the accounts preserved in Epictetus’
Discourses explicitly address the challenge of the transition from the school to
everyday life (as in 4.1.132-143, 4.5.37, 4.12.12; cf. also 1.29.34-35, 2.9.15-16,
2.10.29-30, 2.16.2, 3.3.17, 3.20.18). As they point out, it is quite a bit easier
to display the correct attitude and behaviour among like-minded people and
peers than to hold on to what one has learned outside the school environment
(Diss. 2.16.20-21). And if Epictetus devotes so much attention to this topic, it
is precisely because his pupils are meant to return to their regular lives.
In the long run, and over the course of an entire lifetime, according to this
view, teachers are there only to point the way (as Seneca and Epictetus indicate
Chrysippus had done for them). It is self-education and monitoring one’s own
progress as one goes through different situations in life that are to do the bulk
of the work. Modes of such ongoing training include reading and excerpting
philosophical works, refreshing one’s memory of key tenets so as to have these
ready at hand (as the etymology of ‘manual’ or Epictetus’ Encheiridion implies),
engaging in conversations with others, witnessing one’s conversations with
oneself, contemplating the order of the universe or writing.
Although Seneca is not a teacher in the same sense as Musonius Rufus and
Epictetus, he increasingly focused on philosophical writings towards the end
of his life and mapped out his own moral progress and challenges, along
with summaries and advice for his addressees and audience. Marcus Aurelius’
reflections, many of which were jotted down during military campaigns, are the
clearest example of writing as ongoing training, especially if originally intended
primarily for himself and not for a broader audience. (Epictetus attributed
this kind of writing even to Socrates allegedly training himself in the art of
refutation, raising objections and coming up with counter-arguments, Diss.
2.1.32-33, 2.6.26-27, as rightly noted in Döring, 1974, p. 218 n. 2.) In those
reflections, we find the most powerful man in the then known world, as meas-
ured by conventional standards, warning himself against completely identifying
himself with his public role. ‘Make sure’, he tells himself, ‘that you are not
turned into a Caesar’, without leaving space for the self to continue groping for
that which truly matters.
In the course of interpreting Homer and Virgil, being trained in delivering
speeches, and acquiring other forms of learning, all the way up to one’s
philosophical education, one should aim towards ‘a holy disposition and acts that
serve the common good’ (6.30), as Marcus Aurelius succinctly rendered the
purpose of human life.
Notes
1 During the later period known as the Second Sophistic, the rivalry becomes all the more
pronounced, with Dion of Prusa (also known as Chrysostom), Apuleius and Maximus
of Tyre clearly straddling the divide.
2 Even though the dates suggested for Cleomedes range from the first century BCE to the
fourth century CE, a dating of ‘some time around 200 CE’ has been proposed as likely by
Alan C. Bowen and Robert B. Todd, 2004, pp. xi–xii, 2–4.
3 Cf. Boys-Stones, 2007, who emphasises a strong strand of ethical pedagogy in his work,
which also reflects on the political and civic aspects of human communities.
4 On the point that texts such as Epictetus’ Encheiridion and Marcus Aurelius’ Medita-
tions are as ‘philosophical’ as Chrysippus’ treatises, see Sellars, 2009, esp. pp. 126–128,
165–166, 167–175. Pace Brennan, 2005, who uses a stereotypical distinction between
Chrysippus as ‘one of the greatest thinkers of all time’ and Epictetus as ‘one of the great-
est talkers’ (p. 10).
5 Here my approach differs from P. Hadot, 1998, p. 216, repeated by Sellars, 2007 and
2009, esp. p. 145 (summary statement), who stipulate that there is a practical side to
physics and logic as well. While I do not take issue with this claim as such and the impli-
cation that there are appropriate exercises in logic and physics, I would also emphasise
that physics and logic are practical precisely to the extent that they serve a human being’s
correct understanding of the good and its implementation in life, that is, ethics in action.
6 P. Hadot, 1995, is still the seminal work on this topic, but my focus here is on what
is distinctive in the later Stoic tradition; cf. also Hijmans, 1959; Sellars, 2009, esp.
pp. 107–166. Xenophon does not hesitate to attribute this notion to Socrates (Mem.
1.2.19).
7 On this aspect of Epictetus, who prefers to see himself as a ‘trainer of the young’, see
Diss. 2.19.29-34, cf. Long, 2002, pp. 121–125. Thus when Musonius Rufus speaks as
one man in exile to another, he presents his arguments as addressed to himself as well as
to his addressee (9 Hense/Lutz), and when he counsels a youth who has a conflict with
his father over the study of philosophy, he does not insert himself between the son and
the father to bring about a transfer of authority (16 Hense/Lutz). On this topic, cf. also
Bénatouïl, 2009, especially pp. 134–155, and G. Reydams-Schils, ‘Authority and agency
in Roman Stoicism’, forthcoming.
8 Even though Epictetus explicitly distances himself from the practice of doctors adver-
tising for patients, Diss. 3.23.27. See Musonius Rufus 17 Hense/Lutz; Epictetus Diss.
1.11, addressed to a Roman official merely passing through, and 2.19.29-34.
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4 Medieval theories of education
Hugh of St Victor and
John of Salisbury
Brian D. FitzGerald
Introduction
The medieval roots of our contemporary universities are well known. Rather less
familiar is what thinkers of the time actually considered education to be. The two
theorists examined here – Hugh of St Victor (c.1096–1141) and John of
Salisbury (c.1120–1180) – represent only the twelfth century, but there are good
reasons for turning to this period in particular for an assessment of medieval
education. Intellectually, the twelfth century saw heightened activity, especially
in Paris, where Hugh taught and John studied. The old cathedral schools were
proving incapable of absorbing the influx of new texts and ideas (including, for
instance, techniques of textual analysis and the translations of Aristotelian logical
writings) or of satisfying the growing desire for instruction in these by students
who were driven both by enthusiasm and by a recognition of the career advance-
ments that education could bring within the Church.
In this period, before groups of masters and teachers became formalised
entities recognisable today as universities, before the methods and aims of
scholasticism spread, both Hugh and John understood the need for systematic
statements about what learning should be and how it should be done. Hugh’s
Didascalicon (written in the late 1120s) and John’s Metalogicon (in 1159),
besides reflecting the twelfth-century fashion of Greek-sounding titles, are their
major pedagogical statements. Medieval scholars had, of course, long been aware
of earlier visions of education: the writings, for instance, of Cicero and Quintilian,
though incompletely known in the Middle Ages, encouraged reflection on the
liberal arts – what was the relationship between wisdom and eloquence? Did
studying these arts improve people’s lives? For Christian thinkers, whose search
for wisdom revolved around the figure of Christ, whom they believed was
Wisdom incarnate, there was often uncertainty about their relationship to the
old pagan arts and forms of schooling. What place did a liberal arts education
have for a Christian when all that was necessary for salvation could be found in
the Bible? Twelfth-century scholars could find authority either for an ascetic
rejection of worldly wisdom, as in Athanasius’ Life of St Anthony, or for a more
positive monastic appraisal of secular letters, as in the writings of Cassiodorus
(c. 490–585) or Alcuin (c. 735–804). One of the reflections on these questions
Medieval theories of education 53
most influential for medieval education was Augustine of Hippo’s De doctrina
christiana, written at the beginning of the fifth century. In this paper, I hope to
show how Hugh and John, drawing on, and responding to, both classical and
Augustinian ideas, offered re-statements of pedagogical purpose and method
which were significant in their own day and important for any consideration of
the history of educational theory.
Hugh of St Victor: Didascalicon

Hugh’s origins are obscure, but in the second decade of the twelfth century he
arrived at the Abbey of St Victor in Paris, home to a community of Augustinian
canons. By 1127, Hugh was a master at the school there, and, within six years,
its head. Rooted in the traditional monastic form of reading and education that
emphasised sacra pagina, the study of and meditation on Scripture, the abbey
masters were nonetheless engaged with the intellectual energy of Paris. Hugh’s
Didascalicon reveals the influences of both of these currents.
The Didascalicon is, first and foremost, a text about how to read. There are
two things, Hugh tells us in his preface, by which a person ‘advances in
knowledge … – reading and meditation’ (1961, p. 44). The Didascalicon treats
only of reading, but he wants to emphasise that education is not comprised of
study alone; reading begins, but by no means completes, a process of under-
standing and learning. The Didascalicon’s goal, though, is to ensure that the first
step is taken properly. To teach his readers how to study, Hugh believes they
ought to know what to read, the order in which to read it, and how to read it
(p. 44). Out of this project emerges Hugh’s effort to order all knowledge, both
sacred and secular. Underlying such an ordered system is a belief in the unity of
all knowledge, the interrelationship of the liberal arts, and their importance for
an understanding of the divine.
Thus, while understanding how to read is the stated goal of the text, Hugh
presumes a still higher purpose for this activity, which he reveals in the opening
line of Book One: ‘Of all things to be sought, the first is that Wisdom in which
the Form of the Perfect Good stands fixed’ (1961, I.1, p. 46). For Hugh, this
Wisdom is ultimately Christ, though he speaks about it here as an inner illumina-
tion, one which reveals to people what they truly are. What one must do above
all is follow the classic doctrine: ‘Know thyself’ (I.1, p. 46). Knowledge, ulti-
mately, leads to self-knowledge, and this learning process is necessary because
man has ‘forgotten his origin’ (I.1, p. 46). Hugh refers here to original sin, and
all of his pedagogical concerns must be seen in the light of his belief in human
involvement in a narrative of creation, sin and redemption. This pursuit of
wisdom reminds the self of its true origins in God, as a creature made in God’s
image and likeness. The Didascalicon therefore proposes a programme of spir-
itual restoration for fallen man: ‘we are restored through instruction, so that we
may recognise our nature and learn not to seek outside ourselves what we can
find within’ (I.1, p. 47). By opening the paths to wisdom, education is ultimately
not only an epistemological endeavour, but a moral and spiritual one as well.
54 Brian D. FitzGerald
In this, Hugh draws on Augustine’s belief in the ethical component of
reading, highlighted in De doctrina christiana. The first three books of De
doctrina discuss Christian education with the aim of interpreting Scripture and
its revelation of God’s wisdom. While Hugh rarely cites them explicitly, it is their
concerns which he is reworking, less for exegetical than for pedagogical purposes
(Sweeney, 1995, p. 63).1 Augustine believes that ‘all teaching is teaching of
either things or signs’ (1995, p. 125).2 All words for Augustine are signs that
point to things they represent, as the word ‘sheep’ represents the animal.
Instruction in the arts helps a student understand unfamiliar signs and therefore
the literal meaning of the words of Scripture. Classical liberal arts education,
then, must be put at the service of the interpretation of Scripture, the definitive
Christian text containing all necessary teaching. This is to appropriate classical
learning for a Christian purpose, as in Augustine’s famous analogy (1995, p. 67)
of the Israelites despoiling the Egyptian treasures for their own ends on the way
to the Holy Land (an image not quite as negative as Jerome’s well-known
comparison of secular learning to the captive woman of Deuteronomy (21:10-3),
who might be wed only after she had been shorn of all her hair) (1996, 70.2).
In the Scriptural text, though, there are meanings beyond the literal at work,
which, for Augustine, cannot be accessed by classical education and to which
those pagan arts are in strict subservience. These spiritual meanings are revealed
by God through sacred history and Christian truth. So, for instance, the word
‘sheep’ in the Book of Genesis signifies the animal, but the sheep which Abraham
sacrificed was a thing that also pointed ahead to Christ’s sacrifice (Augustine
1995, p. 14). Understanding the relationship between literal and allegorical
meanings will prevent one from going astray in the interpretation of Scripture.
For Augustine, the ability to interpret Scripture is connected to one’s moral
capacities. In the first place, reading something literally (e.g., the Song of Songs)
that in reality points to a different spiritual meaning (and vice versa) could be
disastrous for one’s abilities to understand and to live out God’s word.
Furthermore, Augustine extends the ethical implications of reading to every
choice a person makes in life: every created thing – not just those in the Scriptural
narrative – points as a sign to its Creator (1995, p. 141). We have continually to
interpret the world, recognising its ultimately contingent nature, refusing to let
our desires settle on worldly things while lifting them continually towards God.
All of our choices are therefore acts of interpretation, fraught with moral and
spiritual dimensions, about the true meaning of things.
This is Hugh’s belief as well, but Hugh is far more systematic than Augustine,
and his plan for Christian education not only goes beyond De doctrina’s scope
but, in the process, alters some of its emphases.3 Hugh’s first concern is what to
read. Mindful, like Augustine, that wisdom is the goal of education, Hugh
classifies all learning under the heading of Philosophy, using, as Jerome Taylor
notes (1961, p. 8), an Aristotelian four-fold division containing all the arts (by
which Hugh means a form of knowledge comprised of rules and precepts). His
scheme is as follows: 1) theoretical – theology (contemplation of God and spir-
itual substances), physics (natural philosophy) and mathematics (the quadrivium
of arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy); 2) practical – solitary (ethics),
private (household economics) and public (civil); 3) logical – the trivium
(grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric) and 4) mechanical (containing seven arts,
including agriculture, medicine, and hunting).4
Hugh justifies his four-fold scheme by pointing out that the contemplation of
truth (the theoretical) and the practice of virtue (the practical) are the two means
of restoring the divine image within (1961, I.8, pp. 54–55); humans need, in
addition, the verbal arts of logic to comprehend and assess those higher arts
(II.17, pp. 71–73). Furthermore, since the intention of all human pursuits
‘ought to regard either the restoring of our nature’s integrity, or the relieving of
those weaknesses to which our present life lies subject’ (I.4-5, pp. 51–52), Hugh
includes the fourth type of art, the mechanical. He not only recognises clearly
the significance of the traditional seven liberal arts, but he also attempts an order-
ing of all conceivable human arts. Even the lowliest, at the most physical level,
has a part to play in spiritual restoration. Although Hugh distinguishes knowl-
edge of the mechanical arts (scientia) from the understanding which ultimately
comes through the higher arts (intelligentia), his treatment of the mechanical is,
as Paul Rorem points out, ‘a comprehensive affirmation of daily life in the world
at large’ (2009, p. 26).5
As Hugh unfolds his pedagogical system, his discussion of the order in which
to read and how to read them reveals another difference from Augustine. To aid
in his readers’ philosophical quest, Hugh spends the first three books of the
Didascalicon explaining how the arts are to be learned through secular writings;
the second three books go on to discuss the continuation of learning via sacred
texts. Hugh certainly distinguishes between secular and sacred writings – he
emphasises the truthfulness of the sacred – but the Didascalicon does not focus
on this difference.6 Because all of the arts are ‘philosophical’, secular arts have
standing on their own terms as part of the search for wisdom and the ethical and
spiritual regeneration of those who study them (Hugh, 1961, II.3, II.18, pp. 63,
73). Augustine’s suspicion of secular texts and his subjugation of secular arts to
the status of Scriptural aids are absent here. Hugh specifically encourages the
study of certain arts of which Augustine is suspicious (notably, drama and
astronomy), but more important is the basis on which he includes them. For
Augustine, the secular is an instrument of Biblical exegesis; for Hugh, it is more
integrally and naturally an instrument of the very process of human renewal.
Hugh follows Augustine’s lead in appropriating pagan treasures, but he incorpo-
rates them into the Christian life to a far greater extent.7
Hugh’s discussion of textual analysis seems rather straightforward – begin
with the basic sense of the words and then look for the deeper meaning. But,
unusually for the twelfth century, he uses this method for both sacred and secu-
lar texts: first the letter (the literal meaning), then the sense (sensus) or particular
figures of speech and finally the deeper meaning (sententia) (III.8, VI.8-12,
pp. 91–92, 147–150). This parallel further highlights the underlying unity of
sacred and secular learning. It also points to Hugh’s consistent awareness of the
need for firm foundations. This is particularly evident in his insistence that, when
reading the Bible, one must begin with its historical books – ultimately, it is an
account of deeds done in time, and any hidden spiritual significations in the text
must be grounded in reality (V.3, p. 121). As with ‘the construction of
buildings’, the loftier meanings are built upon basic foundations: the humble
meaning and syntax of sentences shape and support any deeper understanding,
and the basic events of sacred history provide both support for, and constraint
on, interpretation (VI.2-3, pp. 135–138).
It is in this spirit that Hugh utters his most famous remark: ‘Learn everything;
you will see afterwards that nothing is superfluous’ (omnia disce, videbis postea
nihil esse superfluum) (VI.3, p. 137). Hugh does not intend by this to promote
an insatiable appetite for reading anything that comes along;8 instead, it is a
reminder of the ethical implications of how one reads. For both Hugh and
Augustine, reading is a moral act: as Eileen Sweeney notes, ‘the soul’s path
towards salvation itself [is] made symmetrical to the path of reading’ (1995,
p. 62). Augustine laid out his programme of Christian education for the purposes
of Scriptural exegesis, and he saw interpretative skills primarily as a way of grow-
ing out of disordered selfishness and learning to recognise that everything points
beyond itself to something greater. Hugh agrees on this goal: the movement
within a text from literal to figurative and spiritual, like the movement from the
study of words in the trivium to the study of things in the higher arts, and from
secular to sacred writings, mirrors the soul’s growth from an understanding of
worldly things to a recognition of their relationship to the divine (Sweeney, 1995,
p. 75). For Hugh, though, unlike Augustine, this spiritual process begins long
before one is interpreting Scripture’s deeper meanings. All education contributes
to the rebuilding of sinful humanity, for Hugh is more optimistic about people’s
natural potential for drawing upon the things of creation to remake that lost
image in their present life. The process of renewal begins even with the lowliest
of arts. Hugh’s well-ordered programme thus requires a student who is able to
order himself along the way, for at the beginning of the whole endeavour lies
humility, a willingness to proceed step-by-step, from the lowest to the highest,
all the while recognising that the ‘instability of our life’ means that ‘we are forced
often to review the things we have done’ and often repeat them (1961, V.9,
p. 133). One must also recognise that, as Hugh noted at the beginning of his
book, even this process of reading is only a stage, for lectio must always point
beyond to meditatio and then to operatio, the living out of the growth of love
and virtue within.9
John of Salisbury: Metalogicon

John left his native Salisbury for Paris in the 1130s, where he studied for twelve
years under such luminaries as Peter Abelard, William of Conches, and Gilbert
of Poitiers. Unlike Hugh, however, John chose to enter into political service after
his ordination, and he then trained at the papal court before returning to
England in 1154 to serve as secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury, a post
which entailed numerous political and diplomatic duties. It was while serving in
this office that John finished both the Metalogicon and his political treatise, the
Policraticus. The Policraticus was by far the more popular of the treatises in
John’s day, but the Metalogicon, which appeared in 1159, had a circulation
among contemporary intellectuals and has proven of lasting significance as a
reflection on education.
Compared to Hugh’s Didascalicon, the Metalogicon is decidedly more focused
in scope – it treats only the components of logic, or the trivium: grammar,
rhetoric and dialectic. John does not disagree with Hugh’s basic principle about
the pedagogical goal of wisdom, but he discusses only the first stages of that
search. He sets out to promote the study of the trivium’s verbal arts (all three of
which he calls logic), and to ensure that they are studied correctly (1962,
I.10, p. 32). In its stated purpose, the Metalogicon is clearly Victorine in spirit –
much as Hugh insists on the significance of even the lowest arts for the philo-
sophical quest, so does John defend the very foundations of education. As
will be clear, however, John’s interest in the uses of that education differs
from Hugh’s.
John’s first point is one of basic pedagogy. The Metalogicon’s source of inspira-
tion is someone he calls Cornificius, who has been a critic of the teaching of logic
(current scholarly consensus is that John’s description of this detractor is a
composite portrait of several different opponents). Against the ‘Cornifician’
claim that the verbal arts should not be taught because reason and eloquence are
gifts of nature which education cannot alter, John states his case firmly for the
mutual interaction of talent and instruction: nature needs to be cultivated or it
will deteriorate (1962, I. 8, pp. 28–31). For John, this means not merely know-
ing the principles of the trivium or the rules of eloquence but practising them.
He cites numerous instances of schoolmasters who neglect to have students act
on what they have been taught (II.10, 17, pp. 95ff, 111ff). Here, his approach
differs from Hugh, for whom treating ‘by means of the art’ rather than ‘of the
art’ is far too complex and leads to reading things out of proper order. It is suffi-
cient for Hugh if students understand the rules (1961, III.5, 89–90). John is
decidedly more pragmatic.
In this regard, a key feature of John’s pedagogical theory is the role of the
Aristotelian habitus: knowledge is not truly possessed until it becomes fixed
through regular practice. As Cary Nederman has pointed out (1989, pp. 270,
275–277), this principle (which John could have derived indirectly, from authors
such as Cicero and Boethius) underlies John’s claims that nature grants only the
capacity for knowledge. Instruction that is active as well as informative must then
do its work. This is why John rejects not only the Cornifician disdain for the
trivium but also the opposite error of over-intellectualisation. He is critical of the
fad for dialectics he has seen among some of his former instructors (a trend
which would certainly continue among the schoolmen of the next century).
Those who elevate dialectics above all else will fail to reach wisdom, not so much
because they do not study the other arts but because they have forgotten the
relationship of their studies to life (1962, II.7-9, pp. 88–95). Debates about the
tension between subtilitas (subtlety or precision) and utilitas (usefulness) were
ongoing in the twelfth century, and John here prefers the latter, seeing wisdom
in pragmatic terms:
It is easy for an artisan to talk about his art, but it is much more difficult to
put the art into practice. What physician does not often discourse at length
on elements, humours, complexions, maladies, and other things pertaining
to medicine? But the patient who recovers as a result of hearing this jargon
might just as well have been sickened by it. (II.9, p. 94)
The same is true of moral philosophers who cannot embody ethics in their own
lives.10
One of John’s overriding concerns regards eloquence’s relationship to wisdom
and, like Hugh, he has an Augustinian precedent in De doctrina christiana.
While Hugh drew primarily upon the themes of the first three books of that
work, John’s interest in the concrete uses of the verbal arts is the focus of Book
IV. Augustine recognises rhetoric has a purpose in promoting the truth when
used well, but he worries about its misuses (1995, p. 119). Book IV, where he
discusses how to present Scripture’s meanings to others, reveals that underlying
ambiguity. Augustine, like John, focuses on specific uses of eloquence rather than
mastery of its rules (p. 201), but he is wary of the study or use of any rhetoric
detached from a Scriptural context. This, for him, is eloquence without wisdom,
and he refers to Cicero’s own warning ‘that wisdom without eloquence was of
little value to society but that eloquence without wisdom was generally speaking
a great nuisance, and never beneficial’ (p. 203). For Augustine, wisdom comes
from reading Scripture, and his concern is the eloquence required for preaching
to unfold Scripture’s message to others and to move them to follow it
(pp. 227–233).
John’s own discussion of this relationship is not focused on preaching but, as
befits a diplomat, on the interactions that occur in civil life. Eloquence without
wisdom – the mistake made by addicts of dialectic – is a mere ‘hodgepodge of
verbiage’ (sartago loquendi), words that are useless or harmful in their emptiness
(1962, I.3, p. 16). But wisdom without eloquence – the mistake of the
Cornificians – is equally problematic: any knowledge we have is futile unless it
can be assessed with dialectic, expressed with grammar, and used via rhetoric to
influence others (I.7, pp. 26–27). Only with eloquence can one pursue the goal
of building up human happiness.
This goal reveals a reworking of Book IV of De doctrina christiana in the
same manner that Hugh reworked the first three books. Like Hugh, John rejects
a pessimistic notion that man’s post-lapsarian nature limits his capacities and
knowledge (Nederman, 1988, pp. 11–12). John intends a more immediate
remedying of human weakness than Augustine, though he urges the develop-
ment of happiness within a context more secular than both Hugh and Augustine.
In positing the trivium’s powers, John retains an Augustinian awareness of
human weakness and disorder, and yet he believes that it is natural and beneficial
for humans to live within social bonds. John follows what Nederman calls the
Ciceronian tradition (placing it between Augustinian pessimism and Aristotelian
optimism about natural sociability) – society may be natural, but people need to
be awakened to this nature through reason and persuasion (1988, pp. 4–6).11
Unlike Hugh, for whom the maxim ‘Know thyself ’ is the basis for spiritual
regeneration ultimately aimed at the contemplative’s encounter with the cosmic
source of Wisdom, John’s emphasis is on renewal of the human community. For
John, too, then, the way one studies is a mirror of moral development. Human
nature neither limits one’s abilities to learn nor one’s abilities to build up the
bonds of human society – people need to be drawn out through practice in both
learning well and living virtuously. Studies do not make people good, John
notes, but they do help them both ‘to receive and to impart knowledge’, which
precedes virtue (1962, I.21, p. 61). There is room for grace, but it must build
upon a developed nature.
John’s pedagogical ethics contain one further element. He combines his
optimism about the powers of education with a moderate scepticism (rare in his
time) regarding man’s ultimate capacities for certain knowledge.12 People are, he
says, ‘imprisoned within the petty dimensions of our human capacity’ and there-
fore must be moderate in their claims of truth (II.20, p. 127). In the end, with
sensation as its foundation, knowledge consists mainly of ‘probabilities’ (III.10,
p. 201) such that human perfection means ‘having a good concept of many
things’ (III.3, p. 157). John’s sense of the probabilistic is a major reason why he
spends so much of the Metalogicon discussing the proper uses of dialectic and
promoting in particular its Aristotelian forms: rational powers are useless without
the verbal arts to bring them to life, and Aristotelian logic seems to him a
particularly suitable technique for assessing probable truths in a world which is
otherwise reliant on sense data (Keats-Rohan, 1987, pp. 4–5). This technique’s
moderate methods are a good way of using both reason and persuasion in the
attempt to improve human society.
Education and politics

As is clear from the Didascalicon, Hugh’s interest in education is ultimately a
spiritual one. He does, in fact, speak of politics, classifying it as a practical science
along with ethics and economics. Not simply a theoretical knowledge, what
these sciences teach requires virtuous actions to achieve – political science, for
instance, trains rulers how to act with regard to their subjects’ welfare (1961,
II.19, p. 74). Hugh is one of the first twelfth-century thinkers to articulate a
specifically public sphere of practical knowledge and to point to ‘the interrelated
educative nature of ethics and political science’ (Nederman, 1996, p. 577).
Nonetheless, he wrote no treatises on the subject; only when we turn to John of
Salisbury and his Policraticus – often considered the first complete work of
political theory in the Latin Middle Ages – can we see explicit connections
between the pedagogical, the ethical, and the political.
John clearly conceived of an intimate link between the Policraticus and the
Metalogicon: finished in the same year (1159), the pedagogical precepts he lays
out in the one are the guiding principles of his political thought in the other.13
One of the most significant of these is John’s distinction between sacred and
secular: just as he emphasised a clearly secular purpose for the liberal arts, so does
he articulate separate spheres for Church and State. Spiritual concerns are
ultimately the most important: John uses the familiar image of the political
community as an organism, a body, and declares the clergy its soul (1990, V.2,
pp. 66–67). The Church, therefore, must orient the community towards
promoting the salvation of its members. The secular ruler, though, has an
independent purpose, to cultivate human society through the renewal of a just
community on earth. Such a renewal is a contribution to the Church’s goal, but
it is not merely that: temporal goodness and happiness have significance in their
own right. Both secular and sacred, therefore, have roles to play, and good
governance in either realm requires awareness of the limits of each.14
Not only does John argue for a balanced relationship between body and soul,
but he also insists on harmony among the different corporal members. He takes
the traditional analogy of the state as body and greatly expands it, describing in
detail the role of head (prince), heart (senate), senses (judges), etc. One impor-
tant feature to note is John’s treatment of the peasantry as a distinct group who
are by no means insignificant: they are ‘the feet … for whom it is all the more
necessary that the head [the prince] take precautions, in that they more often
meet with accidents … and those who erect, sustain and move forward the mass
of the whole body are justly owed shelter and support’ (V.2, p. 67). Nederman
(2002, p. 82) argues that John (perhaps influenced by the Didascalicon) is
drawing out the political implications of Hugh’s valorisation of mechanical
labour. Just as Hugh’s classification of knowledge gives the mechanical arts a
crucial role to play in support of a person’s pursuit of virtue and wisdom, so do
John’s mechanical citizens improve the material well-being of a state and thus are
by no means unimportant to the larger goals of either individual or communal
flourishing. Indeed, another major feature of John’s body politic is that all its
parts, including the lowest, exist in a reciprocal, rather than subordinate,
relationship with the other members: ‘The health of the whole society will only
be secure and splendid if the superior members devote themselves to the inferiors
and if the inferiors respond likewise to the legal rights of their superiors’ (1990,
VI.2, p. 126).
Each group has responsibilities, but it is ultimately the task of the ruler, the
head, to maintain within the body this reciprocal balance, a prerequisite for the
common good. The prince’s power comes from God, and thus the prince
becomes a divine image, so long as he does not act unjustly. But the purpose of
his power is to ‘bring about the utility of each and all, and … arrange the optimal
condition of the human republic, so that everyone is a member of the others
(alter alterius membra)’ (IV.1, pp. 28–29). The tyrant abuses this power and
threatens the balance by ignoring the principles of equity (aequitas), which seeks
to give to each person what is owed.
John’s description of the causes of tyrannical behaviour reveals the intimate
connection he sees between ethics and politics. Much of the Policraticus is a
critique of the numerous distractions at the secular courts: hunting, gambling,
and music, among others. Lamenting the rulers’ dissolute lifestyle, John
expresses the hope that,
having attained years of discretion, they would allow serious affairs of state
to take precedence of their own diversions. The state would then feel a surge
of strength course through its entire frame and the appearance of perfect
harmony would impart charm and it would attain the perfection of an
exquisite beauty … if there be no confusion in its various functions. (1938,
I.4, p. 26)
John’s conception of political power is ‘an entirely personalised one’ (Nederman,

2005, p. 60), so individual vices take on far greater significance. The first chapter
of the Policraticus provides an Augustinian framework for such corruption: ‘the
soul is tricked by a multiplicity of allurements into a captivity in which, alienated
from itself, inner goodness decays as the desires are extended to the deceptions
of various external things’ (1990, I.1, p. 9). Those distractions weaken the
individual by distorting their judgment and preventing the habitus of virtuous
action to develop. But, they also weaken the state, for a leader who lacks inner
and outer harmony transmits this imbalance to the community he governs. The
soul that extends itself without restraint in its desire for external pleasures will be
just as unrestrained in its desire for power.15
It is not surprising, therefore, to see John call flattery the worst possible vice.
Embodying all that the Metalogicon fought against, flattery abuses eloquence by
directing it towards pleasing deception rather than wisdom. Its profusion of
nonsense distorts the prince’s knowledge of himself and his relationship to the
other members of society, loosening the moderation necessary for harmony. The
ruler who is unable to assess the proper relationship of words to life throws off
the restraints of humility and turns to tyrannical excess (IV.7, pp. 46–49). The
imbalance created in the flattered ruler is so grave, in fact, that John proclaims,
‘him whom it is permitted to flatter, it is permitted to slay’ (III.15, p. 25). The
extent to which he actually considered tyrannicide justifiable has been debated;
nonetheless, such a statement leaves no doubt about his belief in the link
between pedagogy and politics.16
Underlying this link is John’s epistemology, which highlights one further
element in his political thought. His philosophical scepticism promoted an
education that recognises most truths as probabilistic; to achieve a harmonious
body politic, its members, and especially its rulers, must recognise the same
thing. Liberty, says John, is a prerequisite for virtue; the latter cannot be pursued
without the ability to make free choices: ‘to the extent that one is free the virtues
are effective’ (VII.25, p. 176). Like a classroom where students do practice exer-
cises, these choices are part of the rooting of knowledge in habitual action, but
they also include the possibility of mistakes, to which others must be tolerant. A
ruler’s wise restraint and moderation in his own life is a good sign that he will
recognise the importance of granting freedom and support to other members of
society as they pursue virtue (Forhan, 1992, p. 109). A flattered tyrant is far less
willing to listen to critics. Therefore, John insists, ‘it is always permitted to a free
man to speak to persons about restraining their vices’ (1990, VII.25, p. 180).
The wise use – and the wise reception – of eloquence are crucial elements in a
political system that cultivates virtue not only through mutual support, but also
through mutual toleration of each others’ liberties. Those are the necessary
foundations for building up the bonds of human society.
Conclusion
Both Hugh and John, therefore, propose systems where the humble search for
wisdom and truth underlies all learning, and where the process of education is a
model for how one lives. Augustine, too, understood this to be education’s func-
tion, and Hugh and John are clearly indebted to him. Nonetheless, they are not
as willing as Augustine (or indeed as predecessors like Cassiodorus or Alcuin) to
subordinate everything so firmly to Scripture. For Hugh, a comprehensive vision
of the divine presence within the natural world leads him to seek a legitimate and
proper place for all forms of knowledge, balancing the new and the old, the
sacred and the secular. All these forms contribute to his systematised search for
wisdom, marked by the concerns of contemplation: to gain greater awareness of
the divine image within. John, on the other hand, places the arts at the service
neither of Scripture nor of contemplation but of society, for it is in the realm of
utility and action that he primarily envisions the operation of wisdom. Knowledge
in pursuit of virtue must be grounded in the practical and the probable. In peda-
gogy, this means defending the traditional trivium to keep each art in its proper
place, while encouraging the latest developments in logic because of their epis-
temological benefits. In politics, it means articulating the distinct responsibilities
of each member for the other to prevent the distortions that weaken communal
harmony, while promoting a liberty that requires humble toleration. Jerome
Taylor notes that a particular concern of twelfth-century thinkers was ‘the rela-
tionship of the entire order of nature to the divine’ (1961, p. 12). For Hugh and
for John, education develops man’s natural capacities, making him more aware
of who he is and what he is called to be, as image of God or as social creature.
Both the contemplative and the politician see education at the heart of human-
ity’s spiritual renewal.
In the following century, as the Paris schools were incorporated as a university,
the concerns of Hugh and John did not lose their significance. Indeed they
became more acute: the translation of Greek and Arabic texts continued apace,
requiring absorption by intellectuals; university curricula became both more
organised and more narrowly specialised; and dialectic assumed a greater role in
theological and philosophical discourse. Thirteenth-century scholastic philoso-
phers and theologians were certainly concerned with the role of education in
spiritual and social renewal, but, by the fourteenth century, the condemnation of
scholastic pedagogy and specialised training by Italian humanists such as Petrarch
indicated the perception of a lost balance and purpose. Schooling, with its
distinctions and disputations, seemed dominated by arid subtilitas, its ethical and
civic relevance more and more distant. In the Didascalicon and Metalogicon,
though, it is clear that one does not need to wait for the Renaissance to see the
answers that would address humanist interests: the need to integrate the classical
and Christian traditions, the significance of the verbal arts, and the role of
education in transforming not only the intellect but the soul. Augustine had
already shown how important solutions to these issues were for medieval
Christians, and Hugh and John continued his work while transforming it. Their
twelfth-century statements offer insight into the earlier pedagogical traditions
while pointing forward to the questions and debates of the centuries to come.
Notes
1 See also Zinn (1995) for the presence and absence of De doctrina christiana in the
Didascalicon.
2 See Markus (1996) for an excellent discussion of this aspect of Augustine’s thought.
3 See Sweeney (1995) for a more detailed comparison of the two works.
4 For a discussion of 12th-century divisions of the arts, see Taylor (1961), pp. 7–17.
5 Cf. Hugh (1961) I.8, p. 55.
6 Zinn (1995) describes Hugh’s later development of a more refined distinction between
sacred and secular.
7 Sweeney (1995, pp. 63–65) offers more detailed comparisons.
8 Cf. Hugh’s critique of this attitude (1961, V.7, p. 130), as well as Augustine’s rejection
of curiositas, e.g. in Confessions X.35.
9 Harkins (2009, pp. 275–276) discusses the significance of this idea for Hugh’s works
after Didascalicon.
10 Two influential precedents for a discussion of this relationship – between a per-
son’s moral statements and moral actions – with regard to preachers are De doctrina
christiana Book IV and Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis.
11 For a discussion of the classical and early medieval sources for this concept, see
Kempshall (2008).
12 Augustine treats this sort of scepticism in De magistro and Contra Academicos.
13 There is no complete English translation of this work. In this paper, I quote the partial
versions by Pike (the 1938 edition) and Nederman (the 1990 edition).
14 Nederman (2005, p. 60) notes that, in his discussion of tyranny, John spends nearly as
much time on ecclesiastical tyrants as secular ones, for members of the clergy could just
as easily attempt to upset the balance of power between body and soul.
15 Wilks (1984) gives a more detailed explanation of this relationship.
16 For more on the debates about John’s attitude towards tyranny, see Nederman (2005),
pp. 60–62.
Further reading
For the Didascalicon, the best current translation is (1961) The Didascalicon of
Hugh of St Victor: a medieval guide to the arts (trans. J. Taylor) (London,
Columbia University). Taylor’s introduction is an excellent discussion of the text
in its historical context. The critical edition is (1939) Hugonis de Sancto Victore
Didascalicon de studio legendi (ed. C. H. Buttimer) (Washington, DC, Catholic
University). The latest comprehensive discussion of Hugh’s thought is by Paul
Rorem (2009) Hugh of St Victor (Oxford, Oxford University Press), and a good
overview can also be found in Patrice Sicard (1991) Hugues de Saint-Victor et son
école (Turnhout, Brepols). For a contemporary thinker’s meditation on the
significance of the Didascalicon, see Ivan Illich (1993) In the vineyard of the text:
a commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (Chicago, University of Chicago).
The English translation of the Metalogicon is (1962) The Metalogicon of John
of Salisbury: a twelfth-century defense of the verbal and logical arts of the trivium
(trans. D. McGarry) (Berkeley, University of California). The critical Latin
edition is (1991) Ioannis Saresberiensis Metalogicon (eds J. B. Hall & K. S. B.
Keats-Rohan) (Turnhout, Brepols). Keats-Rohan has also done a critical edition
(1993) of Books I–IV of the Policraticus (Turnhout, Brepols). The remainder
can be found in C. Webb’s 1909 edition. A recent overview of John’s life and
works, with a helpful bibliography of scholarship since 1984, can be found in
Cary Nederman (2005) John of Salisbury (Tempe, Arizona Center for Medieval
& Renaissance Studies). David Luscombe provides a summary of scholarship
before 1984 in (1984) The world of John of Salisbury (ed. M. Wilks) (Oxford,
Blackwell).
Among the numerous considerations of 12th-century thought and education,
several important ones, with references to Hugh and John, are R. W. Southern
(1982) The Schools of Paris and the School of Chartres, in: R. Benson &
G. Constable (eds) Renaissance and renewal in the twelfth century, 113–137, and
(1970) Medieval humanism (Oxford, Blackwell); C. S. Jaeger (1994) The envy of
angels: cathedral schools and social ideals in medieval Europe, 950–1200
(Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania); S. Ferruolo (1985) The origins of the
university: the schools of Paris and their critics, 1100–1215 (Stanford, Stanford
University); and M.-D. Chenu (1997) Nature, man and society in the twelfth
century (trans. J. Taylor & L. Little) (Toronto, University of Toronto).
For Augustine’s De doctrina christiana, the critical edition is R.P.H. Green
(1995) Augustine: De doctrina christiana (Oxford, Oxford Early Christian
Texts). A collection of scholarly essays about the text can be found in D. W. H.
Arnold & P. Bright (eds) (1995) De doctrina christiana: a classic of western
culture (Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame). The influence of the work
is assessed in E. D. English (ed.) (1995) Reading and wisdom: the De doctrina
christiana of Augustine in the Middle Ages (London, University of Notre Dame).
References
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Press).
Augustine (1995 [c. 426–7]) On christian teaching (ed. & trans. R. P. H. Green) (Oxford,
Clarendon).
Forhan, K. L. (1992) The not-so-divided self: reading Augustine in the twelfth century,
Augustiniana, 42, 95–110.
Harkins, F. (2009) Reading and the work of restoration: history and scripture in the theology
of Hugh of St Victor (Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies).
Hugh of St Victor (1939 [c.1127]) Hugonis de Sancto Victore Didascalicon de studio
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Minnesota).
John of Salisbury (1962 [1159]) The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: a twelfth-century
defense of the verbal and logical arts of the trivium (trans. D. McGarry) (Berkeley,
University of California).
John of Salisbury (1990 [1159]) Policraticus (trans. C. Nederman) (Cambridge,
John of Salisbury (1991 [1159]) Ioannis Saresberiensis Metalogicon (eds J. B. Hall &
K. S. B. Keats-Rohan) (Turnhout, Brepols).
Keats-Rohan, K. S. B. (1987) John of Salisbury and education in twelfth century Paris
from the account of his Metalogicon, History of Universities, 6, 1–46.
Kempshall, M. S. (2008) The virtues of rhetoric: Alcuin’s Disputatio de rhetorica et de
virtutibus, Anglo-Saxon England, 37, 7–30.
Markus, R. A. (1996) Signs and meanings: world and text in ancient Christianity
(Liverpool, Liverpool University).
Nederman, C. (1988) Nature, sin and the origins of society: the Ciceronian tradition in
medieval political thought, Journal of the History of Ideas, 49, 3–26.
Nederman, C. (1989) Knowledge, virtue and the path to wisdom: the unexamined
Aristotelianism of John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, Mediaeval Studies, 51, 268–286.
Nederman, C. (1996) The meaning of ‘Aristotelianism’ in medieval moral and political
thought, Journal of the History of Ideas, 57, 563–586.
Nederman, C. (2002) Mechanics and citizens: the reception of the Aristotelian idea of
citizenship in late medieval Europe, Vivarium, 40, 75–102.
Nederman, C. (2005) John of Salisbury (Tempe, Arizona Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies).
Rorem, P. (2009) Hugh of St Victor (Oxford, Oxford University Press).
Sweeney, E. (1995) Hugh of St Victor: the Augustinian tradition of sacred and secular
reading revised, in: E. D. English (ed.) Reading and wisdom: the De doctrina christiana
of Augustine in the middle ages (London, University of Notre Dame), 61–83.
Taylor, J. (1961) Introduction, in: (trans. J. Taylor) The Didascalicon of Hugh of St Victor:
a medieval guide to the arts (New York, Columbia University), 3–39.
Wilks, M. (1984) John of Salisbury and the tyranny of nonsense, in: M. Wilks (ed.) The
world of John of Salisbury (Oxford, Blackwell), 263–286.
Zinn, G. (1995) The influence of Augustine’s De doctrina christiana upon the writings of
Hugh of St Victor, in: E. D. English (ed.) Reading and wisdom: the De doctrina chris-
tiana of Augustine in the middle ages (London, University of Notre Dame), pp. 48–60.
5 Education, Erasmian
humanism, and More’s Utopia
John M. Parrish
Introduction
Of the various classical theories of education surveyed in this volume, the contribu-
tion of the humanists of the Northern Renaissance – of what came to be known
as ‘Erasmian humanism’ – may well be the least familiar to modern students of
education. There is some irony in this. The name of Desiderius Erasmus (1466–
1536), though scarcely remembered today beyond the university, was in his own
day synonymous with learning and the pursuit of knowledge. The most famous
of his associates, Thomas More (1478–1535), is better remembered, but mainly
for his martyrdom, and perhaps secondarily for coining the term ‘Utopia’ – but
not as a leading exemplar and promoter of the Erasmian humanist approach to
learning and knowledge. Other leading Erasmian humanist figures, such as
Guillaume Budé or Juan Luis Vives, are now remembered almost exclusively by
historians. Yet the contribution made by Erasmus and his circle to the theory and
practice of education was as influential as perhaps any of the approaches surveyed
in this collection.
In the first section of this paper, I will outline the main features of the
Erasmian strain of Renaissance humanism, pointing out the main components of
that tradition which carried implications for the philosophy of education. In the
second section, I will explore in greater detail two specific works of Erasmus – his
treatises on The education of a Christian prince (1515) and his later work On the
education of children (1529). In the last section I will show how Thomas More’s
Utopia (1516), perhaps the most enduring literary achievement of Erasmian
humanism, displays the educational philosophy of the movement in such a way
as to bring out its larger implications for moral and political theory and practice.
Finally, in the paper’s conclusion, I will briefly consider the contemporary legacy
of this tradition for educational theory and reform.
Erasmian humanism as an educative movement

The idea of education, in its broadest sense, resided at the heart of the intellec-
tual movement we now know as Northern or Erasmian humanism. Erasmus
himself, the figure whose name the movement would come to bear, was the
Education, Erasmian humanism, and More’s Utopia 67
paramount scholar of his age, and the circle he led was deeply committed to the
idea of the liberating power of learning. Its leading lights were men such as
Guillaume Budé (1467–1540), Jerome Busleyden (c. 1470–1517), Ulrich von
Hutten (1488–1523), Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547), Juan Luis Vives
(1493–1540) and of course Thomas More, among the most significant literary
talents and intellectual innovators of their age. (See further Bietenholz &
Deutscher, 1985–87.) In some ways the Erasmian movement was a continuation
of the particular orientation towards learning sparked in the Italian Renaissance;
yet in other respects Erasmian humanism struck out in its own distinctive direc-
tion, in ways that were to have consequences particularly for the Protestant
Reformation (Phillips, 1949; Kristeller, 1961; Spitz, 1988).
From the Renaissance in Italy, the Northern Humanist movement inherited
an orientation towards both historicism and the rhetorical arts, emphasising the
importance of context in the pursuit of learning (Kristeller, 1961). Among the
most important reasons for this change was the re-emergence in late medieval
Italy of the ancient city-state forms of government (Skinner, 1978, vol. 1).
Confronted simultaneously with the differences between their forms of govern-
ment and those of their feudal contemporaries on the one hand, and with the
similarities between their practices and those of the ancient city-states on the
other, leading intellectuals of the Italian Renaissance came to stress the signifi-
cance of time and historical context in a fashion uncharacteristic of prior medi-
eval thought (Kristeller, 1961; Skinner, 1978, vol. 1). This awareness led
Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457), for example, to employ self-consciously historicist
methods in order to debunk the fraudulent ‘Donation of Constantine’ docu-
ment which had helped to validate the papacy’s claim to temporal supremacy
(Valla, 1922).
The humanists’ emphasis on context derived also from the revival in the late
medieval world of awareness about the ancient past. One antecedent of this
change was the rediscovery of Aristotle during the thirteenth century, an event
which led Thomas Aquinas and his followers to apprehend some of the differ-
ences between their age and that of the pre-Christian past (Skinner, 1978,
vol. 1, ch. 3). While Aquinas and other scholastics focused on trying to reconcile
these differences in order to show the innate compatibility of Christian doctrine
with Aristotelian philosophy, later Renaissance figures (including Erasmus and
his colleagues) drew a different lesson from the encounter with the ancient
past. In this way most of the leading figures of Renaissance humanism came to
define their project in explicit opposition to scholasticism. In particular, they
criticised the scholastics’ emphasis on speculative philosophy and dialectical
logic, which they saw as impractical and pedantic (Augustijn, 1991). These
Renaissance thinkers, influenced by the ancient texts they had recently rediscov-
ered (and most particularly by Cicero), came to emphasise the importance of
rhetoric as opposed to philosophical logic, and to see the study of literature and
oratory, rather than philosophical disputation, as the most worthy scholarly
pursuits (Cameron, 1990, p. 148). This also led them to diminish their focus on
the recent medieval past and reach back to those ancient sources where rhetoric
68 John M. Parrish
and practical ethics had held the place of honour now reserved for dialectic and
speculative philosophy.
To a significant degree, the Erasmian movement followed these trends of the
Italian Renaissance. Yet within the Erasmian movement these Renaissance
orientations combined in rather different ways than they had in Italy. To begin
with, the Erasmian movement was consistently a more self-consciously pious
undertaking than was true (broadly speaking) of the Italian Renaissance. Most
Italian humanists were practising Catholics and some were devout – but their
faith did not move to the centre of their work and in particular of their pursuit
of learning with quite the consistency that we find in the Erasmian circle (Hexter,
1973, pp. 62–82; McConica, 1991, ch. 4). As with the Renaissance’s revival of
the ancient past in general, so too specifically in the area of religion the Erasmian
humanists urged a return ad fontes (that is, ‘back to the sources’), replacing
contemporary scholastic disputations as the principal texts of scholarship with an
attention to the ancient classical, Biblical, and Patristic sources. The emphasis on
rhetoric and historical context led these humanists to stress the knowledge of
Greek as well as Latin grammar and literature as indispensable to true scholarly
learning, and this commitment to the study of language filtered down to each
level of educational attainment.
In Erasmus, in particular, we find a deliberate revival of the idea of ‘baptising
the classics’, derived in part from Erasmus’s beloved St Jerome and in part also
from the more developed account offered by St Augustine (Boyle, 1981). This
drew in turn on two features of the earlier Italian Renaissance which we have
already noted: first, its fascination with and admiration for the intellectual
achievements of antiquity; but second, and to some degree opposed, its sense of
the historical distance between those practices and the fundamentals of the
Christian faith. Following the advice of Augustine and Jerome, the practice of
these humanists was to be like the Israelites leaving with spoils of their Egyptian
(that is, pagan) captors: they were to take what was useful from pagan society,
and abandon what was not (Augustine, 1997, pp. 64–67). Thus the Erasmians,
more self-consciously than the Italian humanists, came to see scholarship as an
undertaking possessed of its own distinctive form of piety. They upheld the
ideal of ‘Christian scholarship’, in which one’s scholarly labours were governed
by standards of accuracy that were often critical of conventional religious
practice, yet pursued a fundamentally religious purpose: the illumination of
God’s truth and the performance of Christ’s ideals in the contemporary world
(Harbison, 1956).
As a consequence of these factors, Erasmian humanism – in a pronounced and
deliberate contrast to the scholastic tradition – focused its attention persistently
on the practical, ethical conclusions to be drawn from its religious foundations.
Eschewing the speculative concerns of scholastic theology, Erasmian humanism
emphasised instead the ‘philosophy of Christ’, exemplified in the challenging but
practical moral teachings of (for example) Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount
(McConica, 1991, ch. 4). This emphasis found reinforcement in the larger
Renaissance orientation toward the elevation of the rhetorical arts over deductive
logic. Rhetoric was the superior skill because of its practical benefits – it was able
not only to identify morally correct conclusions but to move its audience to
undertake appropriate practical action in response (Spitz, 1990, p. 207).
These commitments of the Northern humanist movement – to antiquity and
historical context, to a more Biblically-centred and practically-oriented form of
piety – sharply influenced the movement’s approach to the issue of education. In
tune with the broader spirit of the Renaissance, Erasmian humanism conceived
of education as a method for cultivating human potential and dignity to the
fullest possible extent. In keeping with their emphasis on practical piety, these
humanists viewed the educative process as not merely the pursuit of knowledge
but rather the engendering of virtue through knowledge.
The preceding has offered a sketch, necessarily brief and broad, of the general
attitudes toward education which arose in the Renaissance in general and among
the Northern humanists in particular. In the next two sections, I want to illus-
trate how those attitudes emerged in the writings of two of the key figures of the
movement: Erasmus himself, whose specific writings on education are the focus
of the next section, and Thomas More, whose employment of these educational
ideas in his literary masterpiece Utopia are the subject of the following section.
Erasmus on education
Turning now to Erasmus’s own main texts on education, I want to focus my
attention on three issues, each of which is both central to Erasmus’s own
educational theory and has been deeply influential on subsequent educational
practice. These are: first, his persistent emphasis on the importance of early
childhood education; second, his argument that methods of education which
amuse and delight students are more effective than those which emphasise
coercion and fear; and third, his insistence that the moral dimension of
education – an explicit concern with directly cultivating the pupil’s development
of virtue and good character through the educative process itself – is not only a
legitimate but indeed an indispensable element of the teacher’s task.
If there is a single theme most frequently emphasised in Erasmus’s educational
writings, it is the importance of early childhood education. It is never too early
to begin the process, Erasmus argues, for ‘we can never begin too soon with
something that can never be finished’ (De pueris instituendis (hereafter DPI);
Collected works (hereafter CWE) v. 26, p. 343). Early education is necessary
because of the centrality of learning for human life, for what it means to be
human. Repeatedly Erasmus emphasises that someone who lacks education or
the desire for wisdom ‘is less than human’ or ‘has no humanity at all’ (Colloquies,
‘The abbot and the learned lady’, CWE v. 39, p. 502; DPI, p. 298; see also DPI
p. 301; De recta pronuntiatione (hereafter DRP), CWE v. 26, p. 369). This belief
commits Erasmus to promote public responsibility for providing universal educa-
tion to citizens, for ‘children of commoners are human beings just as much as
those of royal family’ (DPI, p. 334). Just as the public takes responsibility to train
its soldiers or its church choir members, so too should appropriate training ‘be
70 John M. Parrish
provided by the authorities for those who are to give the young people of the
nation a sound education based on humane ideals’ (DPI, p. 333).
Parents should therefore begin thinking about providing their children’s
education from the moment of conception, for the child’s earliest experiences
will have immense consequences for later life (DPI, pp. 309, 319, 323). Several
factors make children especially well suited to early learning, in contradistinction
to (sixteenth-century) conventional wisdom. First, very young children are
exceptionally impressionable, giving them a good memory and a natural aptitude
for learning (DPI, p. 297, p. 320). Erasmus stresses this from the first sentence
of the De pueris:
If you follow my advice … you will see to it that your infant son makes his
first acquaintance with a liberal education immediately, while his mind is still
uncorrupted and free from distractions, while he is in his most formative and
impressionable years, and while his spirit is still open to each and every
influence and at the same time highly retentive of what it has grasped; for
we remember nothing in old age as well as what we absorbed during our
unformed years. (DPI, p. 297)
Repeatedly, Erasmus invokes the metaphors of wax, clay and dye wool to
illustrate the impressionability of young children (Parallels, CWE v. 26, p. 163;
DPI, pp. 305–306, 318–319).
In particular, Erasmus points out, very young children are well suited to the
acquisition of language, in part because of their natural urge (shared with
monkeys) to imitate (DRP, p. 369; DPI, pp. 319–321, 336). So remarkable is
this capacity in young children, Erasmus claims, that ‘a German boy could learn
French in a few months quite unconsciously while absorbed in other activities’
(DPI, p. 320). Adults avoid learning Latin and especially Greek because of its
difficulty; early education is the remedy. And given the centrality of the rhetorical
arts to the humanist programme, it is not surprising to find Erasmus claiming
that language acquisition is the gateway to ‘intellectual judgment and a mastery
of all the branches of knowledge’ (DPI, pp. 320–321).
Not every method is suitable to early childhood education, so the instructor
must be discriminating. Human flourishing in general depends on three factors,
according to Erasmus: nature (i.e., natural character); method (i.e., education);
and practice. These form ‘three strands [which] must be intertwined to make a
complete cord: nature must be developed by method and method must find its
completion in practice’. Thus our natural character is not all-determining; and
likewise practical experiences by themselves are not sufficient to supplement it;
education or ‘method’ plays the crucial intermediary role. Diverse methods work
best with diverse students, just as various methods work best at varying stages of
children’s development (DPI, pp. 316, 335–338; Erasmus, Education of a
Christian prince (hereafter ECP), p. 12).
What links these methods together, distinguishing which method is appropri-
ate at each stage, is the importance of alluring the student to the enjoyment of
study. This partly involves an accommodation to the frailties of human nature.
‘As physicians do not always prescribe the most efficacious remedies for patients
but make some allowance for their cravings’, Erasmus explains, ‘so likewise I
thought it well to allure the young – who respond more readily to pleasing than
to strict or harsh treatment – with this kind of bait’ (Colloquies, ‘The usefulness
of the Colloquies’, CWE vol. 40, p. 1097). It cannot all be fun and games, of
course – at some stage, all students must discipline and master themselves so as
‘to find delight in things productive of utility rather than pleasure’ (Colloquies,
‘The art of learning’, CWE v. 40, p. 394). Yet at the same time Erasmus insists
that ‘there is nothing which prevents usefulness from going hand in hand with
pleasure, and integrity with enjoyment’ (DPI, p. 338). Indeed, this is how we
should expect to achieve the most effective results in education. It is easier to go
downhill than uphill, easier to sail a ship with the wind and tide than against
them – and likewise ‘it is also easier to be taught in a discipline that agrees with
our personal inclinations’ (DPI, pp. 316–317, 336). Each individual has their
own unique nature, including natural aptitudes for certain subjects – mathematics,
theology, language – and ‘we take in most easily the work for which nature
designed us’ (DPI, p. 316). In such situations, the educator must accommodate
what he is in any event powerless to overcome, and help each individual talent
‘to follow its own spontaneous inclinations’ (DPI, p. 336).
The process of alluring begins with the teacher himself. According to Erasmus,
it is an absolute ‘prerequisite’ for the learning process to work effectively ‘that
the teacher must be liked’, and this is because ‘we learn best when we have the
desire to learn; and it is from those whom we like and respect that we learn most
eagerly’ (DPI, p. 324). Consequently, the teacher selected should be someone
‘who is able to encourage [the student] by a kind and charming manner, and not
someone who will alienate him by a hard demeanor’ (DPI, p. 298; see also
pp. 325, 334, 338).1 The same principle further applies to the instructor’s meth-
ods of encouragement and correction. The instructor should seek to encourage
students where he can, though always ‘with sincerity and on valid grounds’
(ECP, p. 13). To encourage students, he should also design his lessons specifi-
cally so as to avoid any unnecessary difficulties for students to encounter, and
when a difficulty is unavoidable he should ‘smooth and soften it with an agree-
able style of speech’ (ECP, p. 13; DPI, p. 341). When correction is necessary, as
it will sometimes be, he should correct the student privately and with ‘a touch of
pleasantness in manner’ (ECP, p. 13; DPI, p. 332). Above all, Erasmus returns
repeatedly to condemn the harsh and widespread use of corporal punishment in
education. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Erasmus insists, coercive practices
such as the use of fear and especially beatings in education are unhelpful, unprof-
itable and unnecessary (Colloquies, ‘Off to school’, CWE, v. 39, p. 114; DPI,
pp. 325, 327–328, 331, 333–334). Such tactics are opposed to the free spirit of
education, and will drive students either to rebellion or to despair; ‘and once this
hatred has been implanted in young minds, the disgust with education will
remain through the years of adulthood’ (DPI, p. 325; cf. pp. 326, 331; CWE,
v. 26, pp. 327, 331).
72 John M. Parrish
Instead, Erasmus warmly recommends the employment of games and amuse-
ments in the educative process. Practically nothing ‘is learned better than what
is learned as a game’, Erasmus asserts, and consequently the teacher’s task is ‘to
give the course of study the appearance of a game’ (Colloquies, ‘Usefulness’,
p. 1098; DPI, p. 341). Children will always be open to anything that can be
presented as a game, because ‘play and childhood go naturally together;’ and so
if children can be persuaded to ‘think of their activity as play rather than
exertion’, the battle is largely won (DPI, p. 341). In addition, educators can
employ students’ competitive instincts to motivate them to excel: the desire for
praise and fear of shame will drive them to greater achievements, and the teacher,
Erasmus somewhat coldly states, ‘should exploit these motives to advance their
education’ (DPI, pp. 332, 339–340).
Early childhood education matters to Erasmus not only because of the unique
capacity of young students for certain kinds of learning, but equally if not more
importantly because of its moral dimension.2 Children must be ‘fashioned and
instructed from earliest infancy … for true virtue’, Erasmus argues (‘Panegyric
for Archduke Philip of Austria’, ECP, p. 143; cf. ECP, p. 54). Failing to take
advantage of the blank slate provided by the raw impressionability of youth will
invariably result in the child’s eventual moral degeneration (DPI, p. 306).
Without this moral dimension of education, other aspects of learning are of
limited value (DPI, p. 319). Here, Erasmus again employs his redefinition of
‘philosophy’ to include the ‘philosophy of Christ’: for since a philosopher is
‘someone who rejects illusory appearance and undauntedly seeks out and follows
what is true and good’, it follows that ‘being a philosopher is in practice the same
as being a Christian; only the terminology is different’ (ECP, p. 15).
This also helps to situate in proper context the famous openness of Erasmus’s
circle to at least a limited degree of education for women. Though no member
of the Erasmian movement went so far as to encourage universal education for
women equal to that received by men, it was nevertheless the case that a few
women judged exceptionally able were encouraged to attain learning in the
humanist style and were praised when they succeeded. Perhaps the most conspic-
uous instance was the case of Thomas More’s daughter Margaret, who attained
literacy not only in English but also in Latin and even Greek and who served as
the model for the female character in Erasmus’s colloquy, ‘The abbot and the
learned lady’. This openness to education for women is somewhat surprising in
Erasmus’s case, since in other respects he was hardly inclined to view women as
equal to men in their capacity for learning: for example, he consistently uses the
male pronoun only in referring to teachers, and he has some quite unkind things
to say about females assigned to serve as teachers (as at DPI, p. 325).
Nevertheless, the belief that some women are suitable pupils for a humanist
education is clearly sincere and important to Erasmus.
This commitment to women’s education is best understood, however, in the
context of the movement’s larger commitment to the idea that knowledge is the
path to moral virtue. We can see this illustrated in Erasmus’s discussion of
Thomas More’s home ‘school’ for his three daughters and son. Describing
More’s school, Erasmus observes approvingly that More’s experiment has
changed his mind to favour providing women with a full humanist education
(Erasmus, Letter 1233 to Guillaume Budé, CWE, v. 8, p. 296). Yet the rationale
for this experiment is not based on a gender-free view of human equality; it is
grounded rather in a deeply gendered perception of women’s appropriate roles
in society – and the utility of humanist learning specifically for their good perfor-
mance of these roles (Erasmus, Letter 1233, p. 296). ‘For two things in particu-
lar are perilous to a girl’s virtue, idleness and improper amusements’, Erasmus
states, ‘and against both of these the love of literature is a protection’ (Erasmus,
Letter 1233, p. 297).3 Thus the education of women is desirable because it is
education in moral principles, according to Erasmus’s understanding of the
morality of gender roles.
Central to Erasmus’s idea of moral education is the need to inoculate the
student against the contagion of popular opinion. In ‘The abbot and the learned
lady’ Erasmus’s spokesperson (the lady) states that the public is ‘the worst
possible authority’ on moral conduct, and that popular custom is ‘the mistress of
every vice’ (Colloquies, ‘Abbot’, p. 503). This is perhaps the principal reason why
early education is so important: those who delay a child’s education are postpon-
ing his learning ‘to an age when his mind will already be less receptive and more
subject to grave temptations (which by that time, in fact, may have entangled
him completely in their brambles)’ (DPI, p. 299; cf. ECP, pp. 10–11);4 for to
inculcate good habits we must first unteach bad ones – and this is far more
difficult than teaching virtue in the first place (DPI, pp. 312–313).
Instead, the learned lady advises, we should ‘accustom’ ourselves to what is
truly virtuous: ‘then the unusual will become habitual, the unpleasant enjoyable,
the apparently unseemly, seemly’ (Colloquies, ‘Abbot’, p. 503). The most impor-
tant element in moral education is therefore habituation, for ‘small acts of good-
ness, habitually repeated, amount to great virtue’ (DPI, p. 318). Once again,
early childhood education is the key to bringing this to fruition. ‘It is the young
who most easily acquire the good’, Erasmus argues, ‘since they possess that
natural flexibility which enables them to bend in any direction, are not as yet
enslaved by bad habits, and are readily inclined to imitate whatever is suggested
to them’ (DPI, p. 318). Throughout, Erasmus assumes the correctness of the
Socratic notion that virtue is in principle teachable. Since human beings are
animals designed for a specific purpose, the virtuous life, it follows that ‘every
human being can be taught virtue without any great hardship;’ all that is
required to tap into this natural inclination, ‘bursting with life’, is ‘the effort of
a dedicated teacher’ (DPI, p. 310).
This view leads Erasmus very close to the brink of denying the existence of
original sin and postulating that wrongdoing has its roots in society rather than
human nature. He does ultimately pull up short of this denial, acknowledging
that human beings, even children, are ‘indisputably’ subject to original sin (DPI,
p. 321). Indeed, he even uses this acknowledgement to provide another
argument for early childhood education; a child’s early years, he tells us, require
special care in moral education, since ‘at this stage their behaviour is guided by
74 John M. Parrish
instinct more than by reason, so that they are inclined equally to good and evil –
more to the latter, perhaps – and it is always easier to forget good habits than to
unlearn bad ones’ (DPI, p. 321; see also ECP, pp. 8–9). But the force of
Erasmus’s argument points strongly in the other direction, toward identifying
corrupt and irrational social institutions and practices as the key exacerbating
conditions of whatever sinfulness may naturally be within the human heart. ‘It is
a serious mistake’, Erasmus warns, ‘to think that the character we are born with
is all-determining’ (DPI, p. 311). Instead, he argues, ‘the greater portion of this
evil stems from corrupting relationships and a misguided education, especially as
they affect our early and most impressionable years’ (DPI, p. 321). And since this
is so, what is caused by a failure of moral education can be corrected by a proper
application of the teacher’s art. The conventional wisdom ‘that children are
inclined by nature to evil’ is unfair, Erasmus states; instead, ‘the evil is largely due
to ourselves; for it is we who corrupt young minds with evil before we expose
them to the good’ (DPI, pp. 312–313). So we should not be surprised that
children ‘who have already been schooled in the ways of evil should exhibit so
little promise for being trained in the ways of the good’, since ‘the unteaching
of bad habits’ is far more difficult than teaching good ones (DPI, pp. 312–313).
Thus, in the end Erasmus holds that much if not most of human sin is
resistible by means of moral education, for while some part of the development
of character and virtue does lie outside our influence, it is also ‘to some extent
within our power to prevent degeneration in one who was born good and to
improve by training someone born none too good’ (ECP, p. 6). As we will see
in the next section, this identification of social evil with a failure of education is
central not only to Erasmus’s own educational theory, but also to the most
systematic (if also the most elusive) articulation of Erasmian humanism’s poten-
tial political applications: Thomas More’s Utopia.
Education in More’s Utopia

Having outlined the views on education encountered generally in the Erasmian
humanist movement and specifically in Erasmus’s own texts, I now want to turn
to the literary product of the movement perhaps most widely known to contem-
porary readers, Thomas More’s Utopia.5 In doing so, I hope to show both how
the institutions of Utopian life illustrate the ideals of the Erasmian approach to
education, and also how Utopia reveals what larger social and political implica-
tions those ideals in fact carried (though always perceived through the complex
ambiguity which characterises Utopia as a whole).6 In the first part of this
section, I will briefly show how Utopia appears to accept and endorse the first
two aspects of the Erasmian educational programme: early childhood education
and the use of delightful and amusing as opposed to coercive methods of instruc-
tion. Having established these points, I will then turn to my major purpose in
this section of the essay: to show that for More, as for the Erasmian movement
more generally, the main importance of these first two points is precisely their
contribution toward the third, the explicitly moralistic aims of education. For in
Utopia, the employment of alluring modes of learning from cradle to grave
serves a single purpose: to fashion the virtuous persons and virtuous citizens
without which it is impossible to have a flourishing society. (On this theme, see
further Skinner, 1987.)
The importance of education is a persistent theme throughout Utopia.7 In
introducing Utopia, Hythloday stresses that the Utopians’ eagerness to learn is
the principal feature that distinguishes them from their European counterparts
(p. 39). Hythloday’s principal criticism of European councillors and kings (and
by implication, of European readers as well) is their unwillingness to learn what
is uncomfortable or unfamiliar (p. 14, and throughout). He illustrates the
Utopians’ contrary tendency by noting that 1,200 years ago a shipwreck brought
ancient Egyptians and Romans to their island; and due to the Utopians’ eager-
ness to learn, they soon acquired practically every useful aspect of ancient tech-
nology and culture (p. 39). ‘This readiness to learn’, Hythloday argues, is ‘the
really important reason for their being better governed and living more happily
than we do, though we are not inferior to them in brains or resources’ (p. 40).
Education is a lifelong affair in Utopia. Before dawn, at mealtimes, in the
evening’s leisure, the Utopians are constantly surrounded by public lectures,
thoughtful homilies, table talk with wise elders, and the persistent invitation to
learn more (p. 58). All citizens receive vocational training in both agriculture and
at least one (and often two) necessary trades – including both men and women
(pp. 48–49). More importantly, all citizens also receive a liberal education in the
Erasmian model, notwithstanding the fact that only a very few are destined for
full-time scholarly careers (pp. 63–64). In addition, much of the society’s plenti-
ful leisure time is devoted to intellectual pursuits, including pre-dawn scholarly
lectures that (somewhat implausibly) draw large crowds of eager listeners (p. 50).
Love of learning and openness to new ideas runs through every dimension of
Utopian life. Their moral philosophy revolves around pleasure, but this does not
lead them to hedonism because they explicitly and systematically privilege the
pleasures of the mind above any others (pp. 71, 73).8 Their religious practices,
likewise, include the belief that God has created the intricacies of nature in order
to be admired and studied and that God is pleased by humanity’s careful and
curious exploration of nature (p. 76). Their religion also specifies that a Utopian
worshipper must display a learner’s open-mindedness toward religious matters:
he thanks God for such religious truths as he hopes he has attained, but also
remains expressly open to the possibility of social and religious improvements he
has not yet encountered (p. 103).9 Even in their military practices, the Utopians
celebrate military victories achieved by the cunning of the mind over any other
triumph: ‘they boast that they have really acted with manly and virile bravery
when they have won a victory such as no animal except man could have
achieved – a victory gained by strength of understanding’ (p. 86).10
Moreover, Hythloday tells us that in their educational practices the Utopians
specifically employ the Erasmian approach of seeking to make the methods
of learning as pleasing as possible. We can see this in the game-like qualities
ascribed to their children’s agricultural field trips (p. 49) as well as in their private
76 John M. Parrish
amusements, in which they play two chess-like games in which ‘one number
captures another’ or ‘in which the vices fight a battle against the virtues’ (p. 50).
Indeed, the Utopians believe that Nature herself, like a good Erasmian humanist
educator, teaches her truths to human beings by means of pleasure: she ‘coaxes
her children with enticing delight to do what in any case they must do from
necessity’ (pp. 73–74).
The pervasiveness and allurement of learning in the commonwealth makes
education in many respects a democratic activity in Utopia. Indeed, education is
so central to their political purposes that according to Hythloday ‘the chief aim
of their constitution is that, as far as public needs permit, all citizens should be
free to withdraw as much time as possible from the service of the body and
devote themselves to the freedom and culture of the mind’, in which they believe
‘lies the happiness of life’ (p. 53; see also p. 59). Yet education also remains an
elite activity in the sense that some individuals are chosen for their intellectual
promise to pursue full-time scholarship; these are the only Utopians who are
exempted from a full day’s work at a trade. Membership in this scholarly class,
moreover, is a prerequisite to all public and religious offices in Utopia, making
Utopia truly a society in which philosophers rule (p. 52).11
Central to the Utopian vision of education, moreover, is the idea of education
for virtue. This is true in part because they hold that the products of learning –
or, put another way, the conclusions reached by natural reason – are themselves
ultimately synonymous with the requirements of virtue.12 This does not mean of
course that learning is thought to replace the conclusions of religion regarding
virtue, but rather that learning properly pursued will fulfill them. Though they
practise a kind of limited toleration of a wide range of theisms throughout their
society, the Utopians do specifically hold that the fundamentals of religious belief
are crucial to educating for virtue (p. 102), and it is in part for this reason that
the priests supervise the Utopian education system (p. 99).13 Nevertheless, while
they recognise the religious basis of virtue, they note that this too is ultimately
grounded in natural reason. For since reason (as they believe) indicates the exist-
ence of a benevolent God, it follows that omitting this information from our
moral reasoning must produce defective conclusions (p. 66).14
The Utopians’ central organising social principle is therefore to ensure that
‘virtue has its reward’ (p. 37). And this leads them to establish a society in which
institutions themselves are in the first instance the citizens’ teachers in the ongo-
ing project of moral education. By means of their system of communal owner-
ship and their debasement of gold and jewels (which are used to make chamber
pots and children’s toys, respectively), the Utopians systematically teach their
citizens contempt for all the vicious preoccupations of European life, including
sloth, luxury, and particularly greed (pp. 60–63). Utopian institutions constitute
an immersive, even invasive educational environment. From birth onwards, the
behaviour of Utopian young people is supervised at every stage by some form of
familial or public authority, with the society’s total absence of privacy making for
a disciplinary environment rather like Foucault’s panopticism (pp. 58, 101;
Foucault, 1977).
The Utopians’ virtuous attitudes come partly from exposure to good institu-
tions, but also explicitly from ‘instruction and good books’, Hythloday tells us
(p. 63). The deliberate combination of learning with moral education is at the
heart of the Utopian experiment. In Utopia, Hythloday explains,
Instruction in morality and virtue is considered no less important than

learning proper. They make every effort to instil in the pupils’ minds, while
they are still tender and pliable, principles useful to the commonwealth.
What is planted in the minds of children lives on in the minds of grown men
and serves greatly to strengthen the commonwealth; its decline can always
be traced to vices that arise from wrong attitudes. (p. 99)
This is the defect of European educational practice. By not teaching these lessons
early, as the Utopians do, Europeans systematically reinforce the sinful and
irrational tendencies inherent in the culture. It is on these grounds that
Hythloday in Book I criticises European practices of capital punishment for theft
as educational failures, reminiscent of ‘bad schoolmasters, who would rather
whip their pupils than teach them’ (pp. 15–16).
Instead, Hythloday asserts, the source of Europe’s theft problem is its system-
atic education of people to be thieves. For, Hythloday asks, ‘if you allow young
folk to be abominably brought up and their characters corrupted, little by little,
from childhood; and if then you punish them as grown-ups for committing the
crimes to which their training has consistently inclined them, what else is this, I
ask, but first making them thieves and then punishing them for it?’ (p. 20). This
is why the Utopians punish lawbreakers raised in Utopia more severely than
foreigners, ‘feeling that they are worse and deserve stricter punishment because
they had an excellent education and the best of moral training, yet still couldn’t
be restrained from wrongdoing’ (p. 78). This is also why the Utopians have no
lawyers and very few laws, ‘for their training is such that very few suffice’ (p. 82).
Thus ‘More’ the narrator tells us that many of the Utopian practices should
instead be seen as sources from which European nations ‘might take lessons in
order to correct their errors’ (p. 12).
That this combination of humanist learning with moral education expresses
More’s own intention can be further seen in his contemporaneous letter
to his children’s tutor, William Gonnell, in which he specifically describes his
aims for the moral dimension of their educational programme. Throughout
his letter, More stresses the close relationship between learning and virtue. Of
the two goods, virtue is certainly the most important, More acknowledges;
learning indeed is worthless in the absence of true virtue (Letter 20, pp. 103,
106). Fortunately, however, there is no conflict between them. On the contrary,
More asserts that the virtues will always prove to be ‘the real and genuine
fruits of learning’, and that those who pursue learning with the intent of
improving their virtue will find success (Letter 20, p. 105). Furthermore, as
More details his account of the moral dimension of the education he desires
for his children, we find that it corresponds closely to the design of the
78 John M. Parrish
key institutions of Utopia. The tutor, More says, should continually warn
his pupils:
to avoid as it were the precipices of pride and haughtiness, and to walk in

the pleasant meadows of modesty: not to be dazzled at the sight of gold; not
to lament the lack of what they erroneously admire in others; not to think
more of themselves for gaudy trappings, nor less for the want of them; not
to deform the beauty that nature has given them by neglect, nor to try to
heighten it by artifice; to put virtue in the first place among goods, learning
in the second; and in their studies to esteem most whatever may teach them
piety towards God, charity to all, and modesty and Christian humility in
themselves (Letter 20, p. 105).
Near the close of the letter, More repeats this theme in words that mirror almost
exactly those of Hythloday’s peroration at the end of the discourse of Book II,
in which Hythloday asserted that Pride was the only obstacle preventing both
rational interest and Christian duty from leading to the creation of Utopian insti-
tutions elsewhere (p. 106). This Augustinian sentiment captures not only the
central evil in More’s moral system – pride – but also the central intuition behind
the Utopian plan to fight that evil – namely, the employment of moral education
as the single indispensable point toward which all the other elements aim.15 This
same policy is precisely what we find More counselling his own children’s tutor
to pursue in carrying out the Erasmian humanist educational programme in the
very house Erasmus himself had found to be exemplary of its ideals.
But, dear Gonnell, the more do I see the difficulty of getting rid of this pest
of pride, the more do I see the necessity of getting to work at it from
childhood. For I find no other reason why this inescapable evil so clings to
our hearts, than that almost as soon as we are born, it is sown in the tender
minds of children by their nurses, it is cultivated by their teachers, it is
nourished and brought to maturity by their parents; while no one teaches
anything, even the good, without bidding them always to expect praise as
the recompense and prize of virtue. Thus long accustomed to magnify
praise, they strive to please the greater number (that is, the worse) and end
by being ashamed to be good (p. 106).
For More in reality, no less than for Hythloday in Utopia, the key to proper
education lay in employing an early and comprehensively moral education to
liberate the learner from vicious custom and open her horizons to the delights
of true virtue.
The Erasmian legacy

In some ways the most significant influence of Erasmian humanism on educa-
tional practice emerged within a few decades, as the Protestant Reformation
which drew so heavily on the ideas of Erasmian humanism came to transform the
social world of early modern Europe, including, conspicuously, its educational
practices. Though Erasmus and most of his humanist colleagues remained
devout Catholics (some more devout than others), the leading lights of the
Reformation, including specifically Martin Luther, Philipp Melancthon, Ulrich
Zwingli, and John Calvin, drew heavily on key features of the Erasmian human-
ist movement, including several aspects of its attitude toward education. Like the
Erasmian humanists, Reformation leaders emphasised a return to ancient
sources, though these were mainly Biblical and Patristic rather than classical; and
the elevation of the ministry of preaching in Protestant practice to a greater
centrality than ever helped to cement much of the Erasmian humanists’ empha-
sis on rhetoric and composition as key educational skills (Spitz, 1990, p. 215).
The Reformers’ simultaneous challenge to the twin pillars of medieval learning,
monasticism and scholasticism, helped undermine their centrality to European
thinking about the life of the mind. In their place, the Protestant Reformers
helped to complete the Erasmian project of moving formal education to a central
place in cultural life, leading to the institution of universal, compulsory educa-
tion, frequently for both genders, as an increasingly probable option within
Protestant society (Spitz, 1990, p. 215). Similarly, many aspects of the Catholic
Counter-Reformation responded to these trends by increasing its own emphasis
on (orthodox) education, perhaps most notably in the institution of the Jesuit
order, with its educational philosophy so deeply grounded in the methods of
Erasmian humanism (Olin, 1994, ch. 6).
In a broader sense, however, the most lasting impact of Erasmus and his circle
upon education may lie not with its immediate influence on the Reformation but
rather with its exemplification and institutionalisation of the intellectual ideals of
Renaissance humanism within Western culture generally and educational practice
specifically. Within a century, Erasmus’s Colloquies had become a staple of
European schoolrooms (McConica, 1991, p. 85), and thus their moral lessons
and the humanist sensibility implicit within them filtered through to the larger
culture. Erasmus’s own persistent concern with the importance of early child-
hood education and his encouragement of playful and pleasing modes of
pedagogy – both driven, as we have seen, by key tenets of the Renaissance
humanists’ intellectual agenda – have of course become two of the central
premises of contemporary educational practice throughout the world. What has
perhaps been lost to some degree is the Erasmian humanists’ insistence on the
importance of explicit cultivation of virtue in the educational process. Yet this
emphasis was derived from premises equally central to Renaissance humanism
and, as we have seen, inseparably linked in Erasmus’s mind to his arguments for
early education and alluring pedagogy. While modern thought has largely
abandoned the robust conception of original sin which Erasmus criticised, it has
not replaced it with what Erasmus thought was necessarily implied: an ethically-
saturated education designed to eliminate society’s pathologies from the ground
up. In part this is because of factors such as a rapidly expanding pluralism of
religious and moral beliefs, which Erasmus at the outset of the Reformation
80 John M. Parrish
could hardly have imagined, and which continues to pose serious and significant
problems for any sort of programme of ‘education for virtue’. But since modern
society also continues to cherish the Erasmian dream (pictured in More’s
Utopia) of a society whose problems can be reformed through addressing their
root causes, it might be well for us to consider again whether this is possible
without an educational policy which seeks more aggressively to cultivate from
earliest childhood the virtues necessary for citizenship and for individual flourish-
ing within a good society.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Christopher Brooke and Thomas I. White for helpful comments
on an earlier draft of this paper; and to Kenneth Chatlos, not only for his
thoughts regarding this paper, but also for first introducing me to Erasmus,
More’s Utopia, and the study of the history of ideas.
Notes
1 Erasmus favours the sixteenth-century equivalent of ‘merit pay’ rather than equal com-
pensation for teachers (see DRP, p. 376).
2 The centrality of moral education to Erasmus’s educational programme is presumably
why he counted such morally-charged fictions as The praise of folly and The complaint
of peace among his ‘educational works’. See Rummel, 2004, p. 14.
3 More also argues a similar point in Selected Letters, Letter 20 (to William Gonnell),
p. 104.
4 On the importance of having a ‘blank slate’ to work with in moral education, see also
ECP, p. 5, pp. 11–12.
5 Throughout this section I rely on the premise that More’s views in Utopia are rep-
resentative of the general commitments of Erasmian humanism. For a careful argu-
ment of this point and a response to important counterarguments, see Hexter, 1973,
pp. 57–82.
6 It is impossible to present a brief discussion of Utopia that does full justice to the
complexity of its argumentative ambiguities and interpretive puzzles. Here I assume as
a point of departure that generally (though not without complication) More intends
Utopian institutions to be taken as at least a semi-serious model for the reform of
European institutions. I offer an argument for what I merely assume here in Parrish,
2007, ch. 3. On the political ideals of the Erasmian humanists, see Tracy, 1978.
7 Throughout this section I am indebted to the detailed discussion of these themes in
Surtz, 1957.
8 It is not accidental that the section on the Utopians’ moral philosophy is followed di-
rectly by Hythloday’s observation that ‘in intellectual pursuits they are tireless’, and by
his account of their eager acquisition and immediate application of the ancient Greek
literature Hythloday happens to carry with him (pp. 75–76).
9 On the significance of the Utopians’ religious practices for interpreting More’s inten-
tions, see Fox, 1982.
10 Their good education also strengthens their effectiveness in battle, since, having ‘been
trained from infancy in sound principles of conduct (which their education and the
good institutions of their society both reinforce)’, they are more likely to exhibit true
courage and sound judgment in battle (p. 90).
11 These ‘philosopher-kings’ are philosophers more in the ‘philosophy of Christ’ sense
than in the more familiar medieval or scholastic sense, according to Hythloday; the
Utopians apparently share the Erasmian humanists’ distaste for the logical quibbles of
scholasticism (p. 64).
12 On the Utopians’ moral philosophy, see further Logan, 1983.
13 It is also in part because the priests are consistently among the best educated people in
the society, as noted above.
14 They do also acknowledge that natural reason can be misled and thus can be overrid-
den by the truths of divine revelation, though conspicuously there is no such direct
revelation visible in Utopia (p. 74).
15 Erasmus reports that More gave public lectures on the political aspects of Augustine’s
City of God, in Letter 1233.
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6 Teaching the Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes on education
Teresa M. Bejan
I
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is not primarily regarded as a philosopher of
education; however, the only firm policy recommendation he made in his
Leviathan (1651) was for the immediate reform of university teaching by the
sovereign power.1 After initially coyly skirting the issue of who, in his view, might
be competent to teach the universities – ‘any man that sees what I am doing may
easily perceive what I think’ – he subsequently declared his hope that, at ‘one
time or other this writing of mine may fall into the hands of a sovereign’ who
will ensure ‘the public teaching of it’ (30:14, p. 226; 31:41, pp. 243–244). The
sovereign monarch or assembly should also see to it that other doctrine be
censored and their teaching suppressed, so that none but true – that is,
Hobbesian – doctrines might be put before the people (18:9, p. 113). Once
taken, Hobbes thought these steps might enable him to surpass even Plato by
successfully ‘convert[ing] this truth of speculation into the utility of practice’
(31:41, p. 244).
At least one of Hobbes’s contemporaries approved of his proposed curricular
reform. In Academiarum examen, John Webster cited Hobbes favourably in his
own case for reform and echoed the suggestion that the works of Aristotle (espe-
cially the Politics) might profitably be replaced, as ‘our own Countreyman master
Hobbs hath pieces of more exquisiteness, and profundity in that subject, than ever
the Graecian was able to reach unto’ (1654, p. 88). (Webster was a radical
supporter of Cromwell, and an advocate of ‘natural magic’, so Hobbes would
have agreed with him on little else (Jesseph, 1999, pp. 63–68).) Others,
however, alternated between horror and incredulity. John Wallis (Savilian
Professor of Geometry), Seth Ward (Savilian Professor of Astronomy) and John
Wilkins (Warden of Wadham College, Oxford) took obvious pleasure in mocking
Hobbes publicly for what they saw as his supreme arrogance. ‘He doth not spare
to professe, upon all occasions’, sneered Wallis, ‘how incomparably he thinks
Himself to have surpassed All, Ancient, Modern, Schools, Academies, Persons,
[and] Societies … and What Hopes he hath, That, by the soveraign command of
some Absolute Prince … his new Dictates should be peremptorily imposed, to be alone
taught’ (Wallis, 1662, p. 3). Of the so-called ‘Hobbe-goblin’, Ward and Wilkins
84 Teresa M. Bejan
declared it ‘manifest, that the only thing which paines him is the desire that
Aristotelity may be changed into Hobbeity, insteed of the Stagyrite, the world
may adore the great Malmesburian Phylosopher’ (Ward & Wilkins, 1654,
pp. 54, 58). (For background, Jesseph, 1999; Malcolm, 2002, pp. 317–335;
Skinner, 2002, pp. 328–331.)
Hobbes did not quail in the face of such criticisms. In his response to the
‘egregious professors’, he argued that his proposed reforms followed necessarily
from an analysis of England’s late civil wars. In particular, ‘the cause of my writ-
ing [Leviathan]’, he explained, ‘was the consideration of what the ministers …
by their preaching and writing did contribute thereunto’ – namely, the dissemi-
nation by them and other gentlemen of false and seditious doctrines, received
first from their studies in the universities and spread thereafter to the whole
English people. Convinced, as he was, that such teaching had caused the war
and, furthermore, that he had at last demonstrated true civil doctrine in
Leviathan, how could he fail to recommend it? Thus, ‘to me … that never did
write anything in philosophy to show my wit, but, as I thought at least, to
benefit some part or other of mankind, it was very necessary to commend my
doctrine to such men as should have the power and right to regulate the
Universities’ (Six lessons, 335).
Though the ensuing controversy focused on Leviathan, Hobbes had been
arguing along similar lines since the very earliest version of his political philoso-
phy, The elements of law, circulated privately in 1640. There, he confidently
declared that ‘if the true doctrine … were perspicuously set down, and taught in
the Universities’, young men ‘would more easily receive the same, and afterward
teach it to the people, both in books and otherwise, than now they do the
contrary’ (29:8, pp. 176–177). Two years later, in De cive, he again insisted that
‘it is a duty of sovereigns to have … the true Elements of civil doctrine written
and to order that it be taught in all the Universities in the commonwealth’ (13:9,
p. 147). Neither regicide nor Restoration changed his mind; in Behemoth,
finished in 1668, he described how ‘the people were corrupted generally’ by
erroneous opinions spread by the preachers and ‘democratical gentlemen’
educated in the universities – notwithstanding the fact that the ‘rules of just and
unjust sufficiently demonstrated, and from principles evident to the meanest
capacity, [had] not been wanting’ (pp. 2, 26, 39–40). Consequently, the
common people were ignorant of their true civic duty, which consisted simply in
obedience to their rightful sovereign, and were thereafter easily manipulated by
their teachers into rebellion against him (p. 39). The universities, in educating
the educators of the people, had thus been ‘to this nation, as the wooden horse
was to the Trojans’ (p. 40).
Throughout, Hobbes maintained that although the educational situation was
dire, the means to its amelioration remained straightforward. The disease itself
suggested the cure:
For seeing the Universities are the fountains of civil and moral doctrine,
from whence the preachers and the gentry, drawing such water as they find,
Teaching the Leviathan 85
use to sprinkle the same … upon the people, there ought certainly to be
great care taken to have it pure … and by that means, the most men,
knowing their duties, will be the less subject to serve the ambition of a few
discontented persons … . (Leviathan, ‘Review & conclusion’, p. 496)
The universities’ very success in sowing rebellion offered hope for a peaceful
future. Just as they had facilitated and exploited the people’s ignorance, he
argued, they could be made to serve the opposite end.
University reform for Hobbes did not concern higher education alone but
rather the civic education of the entire commonwealth, and hence it was a matter
of supreme political importance. As the recent civil wars had demonstrated,
‘where the people are not well instructed in their duty’, the peace of the
commonwealth will be perpetually disturbed (Leviathan, 19:9, p. 122). In order
to maintain peace, force was not enough; subjects must also be taught (Behemoth,
p. 59). Sovereigns who failed to exercise their rights in overseeing the people’s
education were not only shortsighted, they were guilty of neglecting the very
end for which sovereignty was instituted. ‘The actions of men proceed from their
opinions’, Hobbes explained, and ‘in the well-governing of opinions consisteth
the well-governing of men’s actions, in order to their peace and concord’
(Leviathan, 18:9, p. 113). Hence education of the people in true civic doctrine
was, he insisted, an essential duty of the sovereign power (30:6, p. 222).
The conclusion that popular education was of paramount political importance
derived for Hobbes from his conviction that the sovereign’s authority rested
ultimately on the public opinion of his power and hence was ‘grounded on the
consent of the people and their promise to obey him’ (Leviathan, 40:6, p. 319).
Far from being merely a curious digression or megalomaniacal outburst,
Hobbes’s proposed reform of the universities in Leviathan was instead a central
and urgent conclusion of his civil science, and despite the prominence of the
universities in his discussion, his educational aspirations extended well beyond
hopes for a trickle-down enlightenment. His writings reveal instead a programme
for truly universal civic education, effected through a variety of channels. This
comprehensive instruction of the commonwealth would require Hobbes’s
civil doctrine to be taught to people at all levels of society and at every stage of
life. Not only the universities, but also the pulpit and the family must be
made to serve the educational aims of the commonwealth, and these must
furthermore be supplemented with sovereign assiduity in suppressing
dissent. Hobbes hoped that the sovereign might thereby educate a true ‘public’,
characterised not only by consensus, but by ‘a real unity of them all’ (Leviathan,
17:13, p. 109).
II
Hobbes owed his own prominence to his education. Born into obscurity in
Westport (near Malmesbury in Wiltshire) in 1588, his proficiency with classical
languages saw him through to Oxford at the age of fourteen. He learned his
86 Teresa M. Bejan
languages under the tutelage of Robert Latimer, a graduate of Oxford who ran
a small school in Westport. After graduation, Hobbes went to work as a tutor to
the Cavendish family. Such service in noble households was a common path for
young men of talent and education but little means. Over the next thirty years,
Hobbes was a tutor three times over, while also serving as a companion and
personal secretary. In light of his aspirations in Leviathan to be a teacher of
sovereigns in true civil doctrine, it is notable that he served as a tutor (if only in
geometry) to the Prince of Wales and other members of the nobility in exile
while in France during the 1640s (Skinner, 1996, pp. 19–26, 217–221).
At the time of the first civil war, England had reached the zenith of a remark-
able educational expansion at all levels, from the ubiquitous petty schools
responsible for teaching basic literacy, through the grammar schools, to the
universities (Stone, 1964, pp. 42–44). It is likely that over half of the male popu-
lation of London was literate, and in the 1630s enrollment at Oxford and
Cambridge was at an historic high (Stone, 1964, pp. 68–69, 78). By 1642 the
leaders in Parliament were an especially well-educated group, a fact that was not
lost on Hobbes and undoubtedly contributed to his assessment of the universi-
ties as the very ‘core of rebellion’. After all, ‘it is a hard matter for men, who do
all think highly of their own wits, when they have acquired the learning of the
university, to be persuaded that they want any ability requisite for the government
of a commonwealth’ (Behemoth, p. 23).
Hobbes was not alone in blaming England’s system of education for the prob-
lems of the day, and cries for educational reform were to be heard from many
quarters. In 1644, John Milton called ‘the reforming of Education … one of the
greatest and noblest designs that can be thought on, and for the want whereof
this nation perishes’ (1953, p. 363). Yet reform entailed very different things for
different people. Milton favoured an elite education in (overtly republican) civic
virtue (1953, pp. 413–414). For others, such as James Howell, the high level of
education seemed itself to be the problem, leading to the conclusion that ‘so
many Free-Schools do rather hurt than good’. Bacon himself had written in
1611: ‘Concerning the advancement of learning … for grammar schools there
are already too many, and therefore no providence to add where there is
excess … there being more scholars bred than the state can prefer and employ …
which fills the realm full of indigent, idle and wanton people which are but
materia rerum novarum’ (both quoted in Cressy, 1975, pp. 24–25, 27). Still
others agreed with Hobbes that the problem was not an educated populace per
se, but rather that their miseducation had left the people lacking in virtue; what
was needed, then, was closer attention by the government to the further expan-
sion of education and its scrupulous regulation. Samuel Hartlib described the
magistrate’s ‘Duty towards the Young ones’ to ‘Order the Meanes of their
Education aright, to which effect he should see Schools opened, provided with
teachers, endued with Maintenance, regulated with Constitutions, and hee
should have Inspectors and Overseers to looke to the observance of good Orders
in this businesse’ (Considerations tending towards England’s Reformation, 1647).
Hartlib and his associates, including John Dury and Jan Comenius, argued for
public provision of education with the intention of improving the people in
(mostly Christian) virtue (Turnbull, 1947; Webster, 1970).
Nor was Hobbes alone in turning special attention to the universities. Figures
as different politically as he and the republican Milton could agree with a radical
Leveller like Gerrard Winstanley that the universities were, by and large, ‘stand-
ing ponds of stinking water’ (quoted in Solt, 1956, p. 310). In the Grand
Remonstrance of 1641, the Long Parliament itself (in language echoed by
Hobbes) declared the need ‘to reform and purge the fountains of learning, the
two Universities, that the streams flowing from thence may be clear and pure,
and an honour and comfort to the whole land’ (Gardiner, 1906, p. 230). Despite
these good intentions, the state of education suffered because of the war, with
many schools closing and university enrollment falling sharply. Yet even as the
situation worsened and Parliament was forced to turn its attention elsewhere,
educational reform movements in England flourished (Stone, 1964, p. 51;
Cressy, 1975, pp. 10–11).
Although he had graduated from Oxford more than forty years before the publi-
cation of Leviathan, Hobbes claimed to be well qualified to criticise the university
curriculum. Ward and Wilkins complained that his criticisms could hardly claim
to be current given his advanced age, and despite its mean-spiritedness there was
something to this assessment (pp. 58–59). It seems clear that at the time Aristotle
and scholasticism were hardly the monolithic presences Hobbes described in
Leviathan – Wilkins himself had openly attacked the authority of Aristotle from
within the university in the 1630s (Curtis, 1959, pp. 241; Malcolm, 2002,
pp. 4–5). Still, Hobbes was joined by many of his younger contemporaries in
deriding what they perceived as the lasting influence of scholasticism on university
teaching. The virulent dislike of anything hinting of Roman ‘Anti-Christianity’
amounted to a kind of ecumenical anti-Catholicism, leading to a remarkable
convergence between figures as different in politics and religion as Hobbes,
Milton, Webster, and the Comenians on this issue. Throughout Leviathan,
Hobbes criticised the ‘Schools’ and the ‘Schoolmen’ and accused them of traf-
ficking in ‘vain philosophy’ characterised by absurdities and ‘insignificant speech’
(‘Review & conclusion’, pp. 457–458; 1:5, p. 7). Instead of devoting themselves
to preaching sound morals and civil obedience, the university-trained divines
bewildered the people with concepts like ‘freedom of will, incorporeal substance,
everlasting nows, ubiquities, [and] hypostases’, all of which were unable to raise
clear, corresponding concepts in the mind and so were, strictly speaking, nonsen-
sical (Behemoth, p. 58). Hobbes suggested that this ‘philosophy’ was a kind of
learned madness and likened its purveyors to ‘beggars, when they say their pater-
noster, putting together such words and in such a manner, as in their education
they have learned from their nurses … [yet] having no images or conceptions in
their mind’ (Elements, 10:9-10, p. 63; 5:14, p. 39). Such rote learning could not
constitute knowledge for the same reason a parrot could not be considered to
know the truth, though it recite true sentences perfectly (6:3, p. 41).
Such an education, Hobbes insisted, served only to stupefy and dull the wits
of students. It was little wonder, then, that philosophy no longer resembled the
88 Teresa M. Bejan
scientific pursuit of truth but rather the parroting of certain authoritative
authors. Chief among these, of course, was Aristotle – so much so that philoso-
phy in the universities was, according to Hobbes, no more than ‘Aristotelity’
(Leviathan, 46:13, p. 458). Hobbes held the Stagyrite to be doubly guilty for
England’s educational woes: he blamed Aristotle not only for inspiring much
scholastic absurdity, but also for the current vogue for Greek and Roman
thought more generally, on account of which young men now subjugated their
understandings to ‘Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and others of like authority’,
accepting their definitions of ‘right and wrong, [and] good and bad’ unquestion-
ingly (Elements of law, 27:13, pp. 170–171). Ward and Wilkins took these
criticisms to mean that Hobbes thought the universities too hostile to free
inquiry and expression, and so responded that those familiar with the universities
‘do know that there is not to be wished a more generall liberty in point of
judgment and debate, then what is here allowed’ (1654, p. 2). Hobbes’s objec-
tion, however, was not that the universities allowed insufficient freedom of
expression. On the contrary, when it came to the expression of beliefs he thought
that students were simply subjecting their understandings to the wrong
authorities – i.e. not the sovereign.
For Hobbes, the uncritical embrace of anti-monarchical and ‘democratical’
notions by English republicans had plainly contributed to the recent revolution.
‘In these western parts of the world’, he complained, ‘we are made to receive our
opinions concerning the institution and rights of commonwealth from … Greeks
and Romans’, whose own judgments in favour of democracies or republics came
from the security and honours that they had happened to enjoy within them.
Those living under other regimes, however, mistook this preference for superior-
ity in principle, and ‘by [the] reading of these Greek and Latin authors … from
their childhood have gotten a habit (under a false show of liberty) of favoring
tumults and licentious controlling of the actions of their sovereigns’ (Leviathan,
21:9, pp. 140–141). Such political notions gratified the ambitions of certain
men, who ‘out of their readings of Tully, Seneca, or other anti-monarchics’ came
to ‘think themselves sufficient politics, and show their discontent when they are
not called to the management of the state’ (Behemoth, pp. 155–156). For
Hobbes, the self-interested embrace by ‘democratical gentlemen’ of republican
ideals in politics and religion (such, he thought, was the appeal of Presbyterian
church-government) directly caused ‘the effusion of so much blood as I think I
may truly say: there was never anything so dearly bought, as these western parts
have bought the learning of the Greek and Latin tongues’ (Leviathan, 21:9,
p. 141).
England’s late misfortunes thus stemmed from the dual influences of scholas-
ticism and the ancients on the universities – and unfortunately their negative
effects had not been limited to those there educated. Dazzled by the ‘subtile
doctrines’ preached by the university-educated clergy, the common people were
led to turn against their lawful sovereign (Behemoth, p. 43). Hobbes argued that
a number of specific seditious doctrines could be traced directly to scholastic or
classical sources, including: (1) that sovereignty could be divided or limited;
(2) that every private man could rightly judge good and evil for himself; (3) that
to act against one’s conscience is a sin; (4) that private men have an absolute
right in their property; and (5) that citizens in a democracy or republic enjoy
liberty, while subjects in a monarchy are slaves (Leviathan, 29:6-14,
pp. 212–215). The people called for reform on the basis of these and other
errors and so, ‘like the foolish daughters of Peleus (in the fable) which, desiring
to renew the youth of their decrepit father, did by the counsel of Medea cut him
in pieces’, they brought about the commonwealth’s destruction (30:7, p. 222).
Hobbes was not alone in believing the teaching of classical authors to have
vicious effects upon the populace. Comenius, for example, held that ‘such a
reformation of Schooles as is according to the rules of true Christianity’ required
such ‘profane and heathen Authors … [be] quite rejected’ (quoted in Milton,
1953, p. 192). Hobbes was more moderate and argued that the sovereign must
not allow ‘such books to be publicly read without present applying such correc-
tives of discreet masters as are fit to take away their venom’ (Leviathan, 29:14,
p. 215).2 Nor were his proposed reforms unusually extreme. Milton (one of the
‘democratical’ gentlemen in question) advocated that the universities be
abolished altogether, a measure proposed in earnest in the Barebones Parliament
of 1653 (Milton, 1953, p. 364; Malcolm, 2002, p. 326). Hobbes’s argument
was by contrast relatively mild. Despite their shortcomings the universities were
‘not to be cast away, but to be better disciplined: that is to say, that the politics
there taught be made to be (as true politics should be) such as are fit to make
men know, that it is their duty to obey’ (Behemoth, p. 58).3 These ‘true politics’
were, of course, to be found in his Leviathan, and so Hobbes seemed to
suggest that by tweaking the curriculum, the universities might easily be made
to undo the harm they had done and be turned instead to the maintenance of
peace and order.
III
In his response to the ‘egregious professors’, Hobbes explained that his recom-
mendation that Leviathan be taught in the universities did not mean necessarily
the book itself, but rather its ‘doctrine’ – ‘for wiser men may so digest the same
as to fit it better for public teaching’ (pp. 335–336). This doctrine was no more
than the existence of a ‘mutual relation between protection and obedience’,
which required an ‘inviolable observation’ (Leviathan, ‘Review & conclusion’,
p. 497). Hobbes claimed that his conclusions were truly universal. The require-
ments for peace in all commonwealths, regardless of regime, were first, the
absolute right of sovereigns to command, and second, the absolute duty of the
people to obey. The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to
last as long and no longer ‘than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect
them … the end of obedience is protection’ (Leviathan, 21:21, p. 144). Hobbes
is clear that a subject can never alienate his right to resistance should the sover-
eign directly threaten his life. A sovereign, of course, could treat his subjects so
terribly that they had no choice but to rebel. However, until the point where he
90 Teresa M. Bejan
was no longer ensuring their protection, such action by subjects could be neither
righteous nor just. Civic virtue, then, consisted simply of obedience to the
commands of the sovereign and the civil laws. This proposed unity of virtue was
a firm rejection of the idea that civic virtue was relative to regime – and that the
most virtuous citizens belonged to the best (republican) commonwealths. For
Hobbes, the best regime was always the present one, that is, the one currently
ensuring the security of citizens.4
Hobbes drew these conclusions from the (as he thought it) universally accept-
able premise ‘that peace is good’ (De cive, 3:31, p. 55). According to his civil
science – and confirmed, as he thought, by experience – mankind is naturally
inclined to disagreement and discord because individuals left to their private
judgment will judge according to their different personal perspectives and inter-
ests. Under such conditions it is no wonder that men can scarcely agree as to the
meanings of words, let alone in their evaluations of right or wrong or just and
unjust. In the absence of laws and of a sovereign power to enforce them, this
diversity of opinion would lead necessarily to a war of all against all, wherein
individuals would live in a state of ‘continual fear and danger of violent death’
and in which ‘the life of man, [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’
(Leviathan, 13:9, p. 76). Peace requires consensus and concord; thus, individu-
als must agree to foreswear their ‘private reason’ and submit to the unitary
‘public reason’ of the commonwealth – that is, the judgment of the sovereign
alone (37:13, p. 300). Hobbes did not think that a perfect consensus (in the
sense of genuine agreement) on controversial matters was possible, but rather
that by submitting to the sovereign’s judgment in matters of the expression of
disagreement, the outward appearance of consensus might be achieved. ‘There
is virtually no dogma either in religion or the human sciences, from which
disagreements may not arise and from them conflicts … one cannot prevent such
disagreements from occurring. However, by the use of sovereign power they can
be kept from interfering with the public peace’ (De cive, 6.11n, p. 81). This
outward consensus, maintained through energetic regulation of education and
public expression by the sovereign, would be sufficient for peace, though
thought itself would necessarily remain free.5
Once this natural diversity in judgment is reduced to the unity of the sover-
eign’s public reason, the civil laws will become the rule of all men’s actions and
the final authority in controversial matters, such as ‘whether they be right or
wrong, profitable or unprofitable, virtuous or vicious’ or (especially) just or
unjust. This sovereign right of authoritative determination, Hobbes insisted,
would extend even unto the definitions of words, insofar as they tended to
controversy. The definition of the term ‘human being’, for instance, cannot be
decided ultimately by private men or philosophers, but only by the laws
(Elements, 29:8, pp. 180–181).6 The subjection of individuals’ judgment to the
sovereign’s was especially necessary in matters of religion. Individual claims of
conscience were merely attempts by subjects to make themselves judges in
matters that were properly the province of the sovereign. ‘The law is the public
conscience’, he argued, ‘by which [the citizen] hath already undertaken to be
guided’ (Leviathan, 29:7, p. 212). Not only is the sovereign the supreme definer
of words and judge in temporal matters, he must also be acknowledged as the
sole interpreter of Scripture and of God’s will on earth. Although Hobbes
conceded that the sovereign could err and sin against the law of nature (which
dictates peace), individuals could never claim the right to judge the matter for
themselves.7
The doctrine of Leviathan emphasised above all the tenuousness of the peace
secured by the commonwealth and the great risks attendant on any act of
disobedience. Throughout his writings, Hobbes cast education in true civil
doctrine as a necessary supplement to the ‘coercive power to compel men to the
performance of their covenants’ exercised by the sovereign (Leviathan, 15:3,
p. 89). In order to govern men’s opinions, one must first recognise that ‘opin-
ions are sown in men’s minds not by commanding but by teaching, not by threat
of penalties but by perspicuity of reasons’ (De cive, 13:9, p. 146).8 This is in
keeping with Hobbes’s assertion in Leviathan that the sovereign has a duty to
teach the people ‘the grounds and reasons’ of the rights of sovereignty ‘diligently
and truly … because they cannot be maintained by any civil law or terror of legal
punishment’ (30: 4, p. 220). Some contemporary readers have cited these state-
ments alongside his appeals to ‘public reason’ as evidence against the traditional
view that Hobbes relied entirely on self-interest and the fear of violent death in
ordering social life, in favour of a more liberal (even Rawlsian) interpretation.
Such statements, they argue, reveal Hobbes’s concern with justifying rule to the
ruled and providing political stability for the ‘right reasons’, rather than on
the sole basis of ‘coercion and fear’ (Button, 2008, p. 38; also Waldron, 1998,
pp. 141–142; Lloyd, 1992, p. 2).
This view, however, mistakes the kind of ‘reasons’ Hobbes’s civil doctrine can
be understood to offer. The problem with punishments is not that they encour-
age obedience for the ‘wrong’ reasons, but rather that they cannot be relied
upon consistently to provide the kind of constant, overwhelming inducement to
obedience (namely fear) requisite to peace. Sovereigns are neither omniscient
nor omnipotent, and self-interested subjects will seek out opportunities to break
the law ‘whensoever the hope of impunity appears’ if they can hope to profit
thereby (Leviathan, 27:18, p. 195). Teaching acts as a supplement to the ‘terror’
of punishments for Hobbes by constantly keeping men in mind of the terrible
consequences (namely, the state of nature) that must result from the neglect of
their duty of obedience (6:57, p. 34).9 The recognition, therefore, that punish-
ments alone may not always suffice as incentives to obedience should not be
taken as a revision of his basic contention that a person’s ‘will to do or not to do
depends on the opinion [he] has formed of the good or evil, reward or penalty
to follow’ (De cive, 6:11, p. 80). Science for Hobbes is precisely ‘the knowledge
of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another’ which can help men,
who often struggle to reckon the consequences of their actions correctly, to
foresee them and plan accordingly (Leviathan, 5:17, p. 25; 6:57, p. 34). Indeed,
the civil wars alone would have ‘instructed’ men sufficiently as to the nature of
their civic rights and duties, except for the fact that human memories are short
92 Teresa M. Bejan
and ‘miseries’ quickly forgotten (18:16, p. 116). It is precisely because every
man’s actions are governed by his opinion of the likely consequences to follow
that his instruction in ‘true’ civic doctrine is so crucial.
The true civil science of just and unjust having been deduced, it was necessary
still to bring it to the universities to be taught. Once this was done, however,
‘there is no doubt … that young men, who come thither void of prejudice, and
whose minds are yet as white paper, capable of any instruction, would … receive
the same, and afterward teach it to the people’ (Elements, 29:8, pp. 176–177).
‘Teaching’ here meant ‘begetting in another the same conceptions that we have
in ourselves’, which might be done by leading the learner step-by-step through
the same demonstration by which the teacher had reached his own conclusions
(13:2, p. 73). If Hobbes had (as he thought) reasoned correctly, with conclu-
sions confirmed by experience, then his proof should be easily taught and readily
accepted by others, the sure sign of which would be consensus (13:2-2,
pp. 73–74).
Yet if – as the contemporary reception of Leviathan soon revealed – the
expected consensus was not forthcoming, how might Hobbes account for it?
Namely, by the fact that men’s minds were not ‘as white paper’, but rather hope-
lessly ‘scribbled over’ with prejudice, bad habits of reasoning, and false opinions.
Hobbes referred to this problem as indocibility, or ‘difficulty of being taught’.
Once ‘men have … acquiesced in untrue opinions, and registered them as
authentical records in their minds; it is no less impossible to speak intelligibly …
than to write legibly upon a paper already scribbled over’ (Elements, 10:8,
pp. 62–63). Such indocibility might be compounded further by a student’s
outright rejection of the definitions proffered by his master, which amounted to
a simple refusal to be taught. In such cases, any subsequent demonstration (no
matter how sound) would be entirely beside the point (De corpore, 6:15, p. 84).
Although Hobbes was under no delusions as to the seriousness of the problem
of indocibility, he seemed to have considered it no great impediment to the ready
teaching of his doctrine in the universities.10 In order to understand why this is
so, it is important to remember a particular feature of sovereignty on his
account – namely, the right of the sovereign to define all words subject to
controversy. For Hobbes, the ultimate master in the universities should be the
sovereign, who would exercise total discretion in what is to be taught, who may
teach it, and what doctrines must be suppressed. What distinguishes the sover-
eign from other schoolmasters is his right to punish those teachers and pupils
who refuse to accept his definitions as the basis of their lessons, as well as those
who insist on publicising unacceptable conclusions.11 Although he thought that
the sovereign’s commands and punishments would be inadequate to give rise
directly to genuine belief in any dissident intellect, by being able to mandate
conformity in all external speech and action Hobbes bypassed entirely the prob-
lem of internal dissent in public teaching.12 Regardless of what teachers and
students in the university might actually think, they could teach others only in
accordance with the doctrines and definitions approved by the sovereign-
teacher.13 If the sovereign were assiduous in the regulation of doctrine, the
punishment of (scandalous) heterodoxy, and the licensing of teachers so that
‘solid reason backed with authority’ reigned, Hobbes was certain that indocibil-
ity would present no insuperable obstacle to the teaching of true civil doctrine
in the universities (Behemoth, p. 56). Hobbes thought heterodoxy would be a
problem only for geniuses (like himself), who would be clever enough to think
and express themselves safely within the confines of whatever limits the sovereign
put in place. He was, however, a poor judge of such matters in practice, and was
forced to flee from England to France and back again to avoid the threat of
persecution for his views. He proved altogether too clever by half when he
became the target of proposed anti-heresy legislation in 1666. Leviathan was
burned publicly in the Bodleian quadrangle long before it was ‘publicly taught’
in the universities (Ryan, 1983, p. 205).
IV
Given the considerable attention Hobbes devoted to university teaching in
Leviathan and elsewhere, it is little wonder that scholars have taken that discus-
sion to be representative of his views on education more generally. Yet he was
careful throughout his writings to distinguish between the different forms of
teaching appropriate to different sections of the population. These differences
extended sometimes even to the content of the lessons to be learned (Hoekstra,
2006, p. 59). The vast majority of citizens would not attend university, but like
many of his contemporaries Hobbes thought the safety and well-being of the
commonwealth required universal civic education. Merely teaching elites aright
and expecting their knowledge to trickle down would not be sufficient.
Once he considered the instruction of the ‘vulgar’, Hobbes abandoned his
technical definition of teaching as evident demonstration productive of
knowledge – and, thus, distinguished from persuasion, which produced only
‘bare opinion’ (Elements, 13:2, p. 73). Rather, teaching appeared in Leviathan
most often in conjunction with ‘preaching’ and was directed explicitly towards
cultivating opinion as such (e.g. Leviathan, 18:9, p. 113; 27:36, p. 201; 30:6,
p. 221). After all, ‘the power of the mighty has no foundation but in the opinion
and belief of the people’ (Behemoth, 16). Although the Leviathan itself might be
suitable for teaching in the universities, it would hardly be suitable for popular
instruction.14 Hobbes acknowledged that the majority of men lacked the time,
interest, or even sometimes the capacity to comprehend the whole; pithy
summaries were therefore required. His favourite summary – that of all natural
and moral laws into a negative version of the Golden Rule – was hardly the only
one to be found in his writings (Leviathan, 15:35, p. 99). Indeed, the most
suggestive précis of his civil doctrine appeared in his discussion of what, precisely,
sovereigns were to have their subjects taught, wherein he presented the central
political conclusions of Leviathan as analogues to the Ten Commandments
(30:7-13, pp. 222–225).
Bishop Bramhall accused Hobbes of writing in Leviathan a ‘Rebells catechism’
(1658, p. 515), and although Hobbes strongly rejected that characterisation of
94 Teresa M. Bejan
its conclusions, a civil catechism is exactly what Leviathan demanded for the
instruction of the people. (Fittingly, Hobbes’s father, a disgraced clergyman, had
been censured among other things for failing to catechise the young (Malcolm,
2002, p. 3).) The venue in which the bulk of popular instruction was to take
place was the pulpit, and this civic education was modelled more or less explicitly
on religious instruction. In order that the people be taught their duty and
remember it, ‘it is necessary that some such times be determined wherein they
may assemble together … hear those their duties told them … and be put in
mind of the authority that maketh’ the civil laws (Leviathan, 30:10, p. 223). In
this way, Hobbes hoped that the regular observance of the Sabbath might be
turned to the end of peace and become a kind of civic Sunday school.
Thus, the form of popular instruction proposed by Hobbes depended not on
his method for achieving scientific knowledge, which ‘proceeds by cutting a
proposition into small pieces, then chews it over and digests it slowly’ by way of
definitions and evident demonstration, but rather on that which he describes as
the way to religious belief (De cive, 18:5, pp. 238–239). ‘For it is with the
mysteries of our religion as with wholesome pills for the sick, which, swallowed
whole, have the virtue to cure, but chewed, are for the most part cast up again
without effect’ (Leviathan, 32:3, p. 246). The discussion of popular education is
further illuminated by Hobbes’s comment in a letter in 1636 that he ‘long[ed]
infinitely to see those Bookes of the Sabbaoth; & am of your Mind, they will put
such thoughts into the Heads of vulgar People, as will conferre little to their
good Life. For, when they see one of the Ten Commandments to be jus
humanum merely (as it must be, if the Church can alter it) they will hope also
that the other nine may be so too. For every man hitherto did believe that the
ten Commandments were the Morall, that is, Eternal law’ (Hobbes to Glen of
6/16 April 1636 in Correspondence, p. 30). The Ten Commandments were to
serve as a mnemonic device to aid the vulgar in remembering their duty.
Likewise, the memorable metaphoric images of the ‘Mortal God’, Leviathan, and
the secular hell of the state of nature, sure to figure prominently in sermons
based on Leviathan’s civil doctrine, would capture the popular imagination.
Hobbes often analogised education to a process of ‘imprinting’. This metaphor
recurs throughout his work, often in the context of the impressions made by
religion and the arts upon the mind. He suggests that Numa, like other found-
ers, took care to ‘imprint in [the people’s] minds a belief that those precepts
which they gave concerning religion might not be thought to proceed from their
own device’ (e.g. Leviathan, 12:20, p. 69; also 8:25, p. 43). In remarking upon
an epic poem written by a friend, Hobbes claimed that the virtues represented
therein were thus ‘so deeply imprinted, as to stay for ever [in my fancy], and
govern all the rest of my thoughts and affections’ (The answer of Mr. Hobbes to
Sir William D’Avenant’s preface before Gondibert, pp. 457–458).15
Hobbes treated the education of the people as a kind of sacrament of remem-
brance. The fountain metaphor used to describe the universities in Leviathan
deliberately recalled a Baptismal font from whence ‘the preachers and the gentry,
drawing such water as they find, use to sprinkle … upon the people’ (‘Review &
conclusion’, p. 496). The end result of this kind of popular education would not
be – as it was in the universities – simply the consequentialist embrace of civil
society as always the lesser of two evils, but also a positive ‘love of obedience’
(Behemoth, p. 59). A well-educated populace, according to Hobbes, would think
of themselves as ‘monks and friars, that are bound by vow to … simple obedi-
ence’ (Leviathan, 46:32, p. 464). This praise of unreflective obedience weighs
against those who find in Hobbesian education primarily a ‘respect for individu-
als as reasoning beings … determine[d] to analyze politics and get to the bottom
of human affairs’ (Waldron, 1998, p. 143). Such a reading becomes still more
implausible when one considers the final site of education to which the sovereign
must attend – namely, the family.
Hobbes raised no children of his own, but he was well aware of the impor-
tance of the ‘first instruction of children’ by their parents for their later develop-
ment, and hence for the commonwealth as a whole (Leviathan, 30:11, p. 223).16
An individual’s opinions and beliefs were not, for the most part, the result of
considered reflection or evident teaching, but of this early instruction. This was
most evident, again, in the case of religious belief, wherein ‘the ordinary cause of
believing … [is] the hearing of those that … teach us, as our parents in their
houses, and our pastors in the churches’ (43:8, p. 401). Parents, moreover, were
responsible for the work of discipline through which children might first be
habituated to obedience. Indeed, ‘it is by the rod that boys’ dispositions toward
all things are shaped as parents and teachers wish’ (De homine, 16:4, p. 65). In
De cive, Hobbes claimed that ‘all men (since all men are born infants) are born
unfit for society and very many (perhaps the majority) remain so throughout
their lives, because of mental illness or lack of discipline’. ‘Man is made fit for
Society not by nature, but by discipline [disciplina]’, and this correction of
children by their parents through the application of educative punishments was
thus the cause of their sociability and a necessary precondition for the peaceful
reproduction of society over generations (1:2n.1, pp. 24–25).17
As for what, specifically, Hobbes would have the sovereign teach young
children, he suggested that they ‘be taught that originally the father of every man
was also his sovereign lord, with power over him of life and death, and that the
fathers of families, when … instituting a commonwealth … resigned that abso-
lute power’ (Leviathan, 30:11, pp. 223–224). By calling on children to analogise
their fathers to the civil sovereign in this way (and vice versa), Hobbes made the
family the first school of the commonwealth, wherein the relationship of rule
between father and child served to model the later relationship of simple obedi-
ence to the sovereign. While he habituates his children to obedience, the father
acts as a placeholder for the sovereign until their majority, whereupon their
obedience is transferred to its primary object. The family is ‘Leviathan writ small’
(Chapman, 1975). Hobbes even went so far as to argue that parental power over
children, as an example of sovereignty by acquisition, is derived not naturally by
‘generation’, ‘but from the child’s consent, either express or by other sufficient
arguments declared’ (Leviathan, 20:4, p. 126). Because every individual ‘ought
to obey him by whom [he] is preserved; because preservation of life [is] the end,
96 Teresa M. Bejan
for which one man becomes subject to another’, the child can be presumed to
have exchanged his obedience for his protection, like any adult citizen of the
commonwealth (20:5, p. 130). In this way, the family represents the Hobbesian
commonwealth to children and thereby schools them implicitly in (rational)
subjection from infancy. Although the child, like the adult, never consented
explicitly to being ruled, both will be taught to understand themselves as having
done so. (For Hobbes’s analogies between adults and children: De cive, 1:2n.1,
p. 25; Leviathan, 11.2,1 p. 61.)
On Hobbes’s account, parents serve – just like the state-licensed teachers and
pastors – as representatives of the sovereign power, and hence as public ministers
in the home, ‘allowed and appointed to teach’ by the sovereign (Leviathan,
43:8, p. 401). Although the sovereign will generally leave subjects at liberty
otherwise to ‘institute their children as they themselves think fit’, they do so only
at his discretion (21:6, p. 138). In Hobbes’s commonwealth, parents hold their
children in trust until such time as the sovereign reclaims his right. This work of
first instruction in the family prepares children for Hobbesian ‘citizenship’ and is
meant to attach securely those ‘artificial chains, called the civil laws’, that run
from the sovereign’s lips to the people’s ears (21:5, p. 138).
Far from neglecting early education, Hobbes’s commonwealth stands or falls
by it. In Leviathan, Hobbes suggests that ‘the common people’s minds, unless
they be tainted by dependence on the potent, or scribbled over with the opinions
of their doctors, are fit to receive whatsoever by public authority shall be
imprinted in them’ (30:6, p. 221). Hobbesian education requires that the minds
of all citizens, the vulgar as well as the wise, be prepared for such imprinting by
their primary instruction in the family and the pulpit. But keeping the paper of
the people’s minds clean and white requires not only that they be kept free from
dependence on the powerful, but also that ‘the dependence of subjects on the
sovereign power of their country’ be emphasised and reinforced at every turn
(46:18, p. 460).18 Thus, indocibility should be no impediment to Hobbesian
‘imprinting’ for the sovereign sufficiently attentive to the junior members of the
commonwealth.
V
Hobbesian education is an education in civic virtue. By reformulating the
doctrine of Leviathan for presentation to each of the different parts of the
commonwealth it aims to produce obedient citizens capable of the kind of stable
consensus requisite to peace. In his response to his Oxford critics, Hobbes
claimed that Leviathan in its original form, even in the absence of ‘digestion’ by
wiser men to better suit it for public teaching, ‘hath framed the minds of a thou-
sand gentlemen to a conscientious obedience to present government’ (Six lessons,
pp. 335–336). How much more might it accomplish if aptly summarised and
systematically taught?
As we have seen, Hobbes’s contention that public education was a duty of
sovereignty was not unique at the time – nor, for that matter, was government
regulation of education. Nevertheless, the educational programme developed in
Leviathan has struck Hobbes’s readers, from his contemporaries down to the
present day, as something unusual. Its distinctiveness is summed up nicely in the
image of ‘imprinting’. Hobbesian education – whether conducted in the univer-
sity, from the pulpit, or in the family – aims always at uniformity; the virtuous
citizen it produces is the same across all nations and regimes, which are
themselves uniform with respect to their common end, peace. Such an education
does not seek to cultivate the student’s individual capacities, for judgment or for
anything else.19 Imprinting is not the cultivation of personality, but rather
conformity to true civil doctrine, designed and systematically imposed from
without by the sovereign power upon the ‘clean paper’ of men’s minds. Students
come thereby to understand themselves as equal and atomistic, each tethered
individually and so unified through their mutual relationship to the sovereign.
The end result of this education would, Hobbes hoped, be a secure consensus
and, at last, peace. The scope and character of the necessary consensus was, like
most things, to be left to the sovereign’s discretion. (Hobbes thought that a
good sovereign would leave his subjects at liberty in many things, interfering
with them only in those matters he deemed essential to peace.)
Modern students of Hobbes’s educational thought have tended to focus on
this argument – that is, that the comprehensive education of society (whether as
‘popular enlightenment’ or indoctrination) constitutes a necessary precondition
to peace because it alone can fashion citizens capable of this kind of consensus.
Whereas an earlier generation – much like those troublesome Oxford professors –
recoiled from Hobbes’s educational project, emphasising what they saw as its
totalitarian aspirations, scholars in recent years have taken a decidedly more
favourable view. For these authors, his educational thought reveals instead a
more ‘liberal’ Hobbes, one who believed that political stability could be secured
only by respecting individuals as reasoning beings.20 I have sought to show that
neither view is wholly sustainable.21 What is clear, however, is that Hobbes
believed the only architect and agent capable of fashioning a consensus adequate
to the preservation of peace would be an absolute sovereign – and this would
require, in turn, a state that might be relatively minimal in practice, but must be
utterly authoritarian in principle. Thus, the conscientious sovereign would
vigilantly oversee the intellectual life of his subjects from the cradle to the univer-
sities, and from there to the grave.
Acknowledgements
I have incurred many debts in writing this article. Meredith Edwards, Shawn
Fraistat, Bryan Garsten, Samuel James, Quentin Skinner, and Megan Wachspress
read earlier drafts, and I thank them for their comments and criticisms. Jonathan
Bruno, Alin Fumurescu, Calvert Jones, and Steven Smith were generous with
their insights in various contexts during its development. I would also like to
thank the anonymous reviewer for the Oxford Review of Education and the
tireless and endlessly helpful guest editors. I am especially grateful to Quentin
98 Teresa M. Bejan
Skinner and Mark Goldie for their wonderful supervision of my earliest work
on Milton and early modern education reform in the context of the English
Civil War.
Notes
1 Hobbes’s life in print began with his English translation of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian
War (1629) and ended with translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey in 1676; Behemoth,
finished in 1668, was published posthumously. Over this long period, Hobbes’s inter-
ests, methods and conclusions underwent significant changes, most notably with his
storied ‘discovery’ of Euclidean Geometry in 1629. However, I find his treatment of ed-
ucational matters to be reasonably consistent across his political philosophical writings,
beginning with The elements of law (1640). For the purposes of this discussion I draw
from a wide selection of works.
2 Lloyd cites this as evidence that Hobbes would not stifle all dissent (1997, p. 48);
Nelson in his introduction to Hobbes’s translations of Homer somewhat undercuts such
optimism (pp. xxxiii–xl); see also Hoekstra, 2006, p. 45.
3 In Six lessons, Hobbes spoke favourably of the idea of a lay-university (pp. 345–346); this
comment was intended as a provocation to Ward, not as a serious proposal, although
Tuck (1998) argues that it should be taken as evidence of Hobbes’s support for free
inquiry in the universities; see also Garsten, 2006, p. 39.
4 This claim allowed Hobbes’s critics to cast Leviathan as a work written expressly in
defence of Cromwell’s title. See Skinner’s ‘Hobbes and the engagement controversy’
(2002, p. 307) for emphasis on the similarities between Hobbes and other de facto theo-
ries of the period.
5 On possible similarities to the ‘Rawlsian’ notion of public reason, see Garsten (2006,
pp. 27, 116), Gauthier (1995), Lloyd (1992 and 1997), Button (2008).
6 This question of influence over meanings is a point of controversy in scholarly assess-
ment of Hobbesian eduction; see Pettit, 2008, pp. 115–132; Hoekstra, 2006, esp.
pp. 34–35.
7 Hobbes insisted that although the sovereign could be guilty of iniquity he could not, by
definition, commit injustice (Leviathan, 18:6, p. 113). Whether Hobbes meant his claim
that the sovereign could sin against the law of nature as a serious appeal to a power higher
than the sovereign’s self-interest is controversial. Supporters of the ‘Taylor-Warrender’
thesis argue that a belief in God is necessary to ground Hobbesian moral obligation
(e.g. Warrender, 1957; Hood, 1964), while others argue that Hobbes’s political theory
is secular in form and secularising in purpose. Johnston (1986) and Strauss (1953), for
example, have argued that Hobbes wanted to ‘disenchant the world’ through education.
Lloyd (1992) and Vaughan (2002) emphasise the importance to Hobbesian education
of shaping – but not necessarily eradicating – religious belief.
8 I substitute ‘perspicuity of reasons’ (from ‘Philosophical rudiments concerning
government and society’ (Hobbes, 1991), the 1651 English translation of De cive) for
Silverthorne’s ‘clarity of arguments’. Although the former was long thought to have
been authorised and approved by Hobbes, this has since been disproved. See Tuck’s
introduction to De cive (Hobbes, 1998, pp. xxxiv–xxxvii). Malcolm (2002) argues that
the translator was Charles Cotton. The Latin version runs: ‘Quoniam autem opiniones
non imperando, sed docendo; non terrore poenarum, sed perspicuitate rationum’.
9 Heaven and hell obviously complicate the picture; it is therefore especially important for
the sovereign to regulate closely doctrines pertaining thereunto. Whereas in Elements and
De cive, Hobbes seemed content to maintain more or less traditional versions of heaven
and hell – so long as eternal punishments could be shown to be annexed (like all tem-
poral ones) to violations of the civil law alone – in Leviathan he revised them so as to be
consistent with his materialism and therefore denied the immortal soul (pp. 418–431).
Johnston argues against those who read Hobbes as a sincere Christian that a belief
in hell – or in the Christian God, for that matter – could not possibly withstand a
Hobbesian education (Johnston, 1986, pp. 142–150). While Hobbes clearly intends
to undermine hell for those taught the doctrine of Leviathan in the universities, it is
less clear that he thought it desirable for this part of his doctrine to be publicized to
the population as a whole via public preaching, although the full arguments would
certainly be available to those who should inquire.
10 For brief treatments of this puzzle, see Tarcov (1999, pp. 48–49) and Chapman
(1975, pp. 87–88). See also the growing literature on the role of rhetoric in Hobbes’s
thought, which considers directly the limits of reason to persuade (e.g. Kahn, 1985;
Johnston, 1986; Skinner, 1996; Vaughan, 2002; Garsten, 2006).
11 Failure to appreciate this distinction between the rights of the sovereign as teacher
versus those of the Church has led some scholars to draw a sharp distinction between
teaching and coercion, thus neglecting the expansive role for educative punishments
in Hobbes’s thought (see Lloyd, 1997, pp. 51–52 and 1992, p. 140; and Waldron,
1998, p. 142). Button (2008) acknowledges that this distinction is overdrawn (p. 64),
yet continues to employ it elsewhere in his discussion (pp. 38, 62–69). Hobbes is very
clear that the distinction does not apply in the case of sovereign-teachers, or those
who act as ministers of the sovereign power; the discussion of teaching as ‘fishing’ as
opposed to ‘hunting’ is meant to delimit ecclesiastical power only, not civil (Leviathan,
42:8, p. 337).
12 An earlier generation of scholars treated Hobbes as straightforwardly advocating a
programme of indoctrination and mind control; more recently scholars have made
the case for ‘a more tolerant’ Hobbes – see Ryan (1983 and 1988), Tuck (1990 and
1998); Burgess (1996). Tuck goes so far as to suggest that Hobbes desired the uni-
versities to be places of protected free inquiry (1998, p. 155) – an interpretation I find
implausible. I favour Murphy’s characterisation (1997) of Hobbes’s position as ‘toler-
ant anti-toleration’.
13 Hobbes says as much in his discussion of Galileo (Leviathan, 46:42, p. 468). There, he
argues that ‘disobedience may lawfully be punished in them that against the laws teach
even true philosophy’. This passage, along with his claim that truth is by definition
consistent with peace and the sovereign’s judgment of the same (18:9, pp. 113–114),
has been a source of much scholarly contention. Arendt cited it as evidence that the
sovereign can teach his subjects falsehoods in order to preserve the commonwealth
(pp. 297–298); Waldron and Lloyd find it far less sinister (Waldron, 1998, pp. 142,
146 n.12; Lloyd, 1997, pp. 43–45).
14 I dissent from Johnston’s suggestion that Leviathan was meant to be read by the public
at large and attempted ‘to shape public opinion directly’ (1986, p. 89).
15 See also Malcolm’s discussion of the role of such images in education in the context of
the frontispiece of Leviathan (2002, p. 228).
16 Some of Hobbes’s early critics accused him of fathering an illegitimate daughter and
this claim has been accepted by some scholars, most recently Martinich (2005, p. 8).
17 Again, I depart from the Silverthorne translation which has ‘training’ in place of
‘discipline’. Because the original English version translated disciplina here as ‘educa-
tion’, many have assumed that this was Hobbes’s preferred translation. The original
translation appeals especially to those authors who want to maintain a hard distinction
between education and coercion in Hobbes’s thought; however, given that Hobbes
refers to ‘discipline’ frequently in his writings, while also taking care at points to
distinguish it from ‘education’ (e.g. Leviathan, 29:8, p. 213, ‘Review & conclusion’,
p. 489), I believe this is to misrepresent his meaning in this passage.
18 Malcolm, following Johnston, describes Hobbesian education as the ‘liberation’ of the
people’s minds from both superstitious falsehoods and ‘the power of those groups,
elites and confederacies that manipulate falsehood for their own ends’ (2002, p. 544).
However, in this passage Hobbes states explicitly that he aims to combat such doctrines
100 Teresa M. Bejan
and factions because they serve to lessen the dependence of individuals on the sovereign
power. This is, at best, a peculiar sort of liberation.
19 Garsten (2006) argues that Hobbes’s attempt to devalue judgment and seriously
restrict its role in politics was a deliberate departure from classical political thought,
and from his neo-republican contemporaries.
20 Although their specific arguments differ, Johnston (1986), Lloyd (1992 and 1997),
Waldron (1998), Tuck (1998), Malcolm (2002) and Button (2008) can be seen alike
as representatives of this trend, and all endorse Hobbes’s educational project to a
greater or lesser extent. These accounts depart significantly from that of Voegelin, who
claimed in 1938 that Hobbes’s system would be the envy of ‘a modern minister of
propaganda’ (p. 55; see also Arendt, p. 290-1n.3). Ryan, while making the case for a
more tolerant Hobbes, suggests that although ‘Hobbes’s sovereign cannot condition
children as the Director in Brave New World can … there is no evident reason of prin-
ciple to stop him applying the techniques when they are discovered’ (1983, p. 217).
Vaughan (2002) and Hoekstra (2006) are notable exceptions to the recent trend.
21 Both groups treat Hobbesian education as though it were concerned with what people
would be like; however, it is clear that Hobbes did not entertain high hopes that
human nature could be changed (it was evidently quite stubborn) and so did not much
care what people were like on the inside, so long as they were simply obedient in exter-
nals. Furthermore, when it comes to Hobbes the dichotomy between enlightenment
and indoctrination is altogether inadequate. After all, the doctrine to be imprinted is,
strictly speaking, ‘true’ – though what this means for Hobbes is (fittingly) subject to
controversy. For a recent discussion, see Hoekstra (2006).
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7 Locke on education and
the rights of parents
Alex Tuckness
Introduction
John Locke (1632–1704) is often taken as a canonical defender of the rights of
parents in education, even as someone who carries the rights of parents too far
in that sphere (Gutmann, 1987; Carrig, 2001). This is somewhat ironic given
the fact that in his own day he was famous for limiting the rights of fathers as
part of his rejection of the divine right of kings. In response to those who
thought that Adam, by virtue of fatherhood, was monarch of the world and that
his paternal sovereignty was passed on to his oldest heir, Locke argued that
paternal power exists for a different purpose than political power and the power
of parents over children is limited to the purpose of families, the proper care and
raising of offspring (TT, 1.50-72, 2.52-76).1 Nonetheless, it is true that Locke
argued in favour of education at home by parents or tutors selected by parents,
and it is also true that Locke talked about the education of children primarily as
a right and duty of parents rather than of the state. This is a topic of no small
importance now given the substantial number of children educated at home
by parents and the frequent conflicts between parents and schools over policies
and curricula. This chapter challenges the traditional reading of Locke’s view of
education.
Locke’s reasons for believing parents should play the leading role in educating
children can be divided into pedagogical reasons and political reasons. Each
type of reason requires a different type of argument. Pedagogical reasons
simply explain why one type of educational arrangement is likely to work better
than another in terms of the goals of education itself. While Locke did
favour education by parents rather than schools, when his reasons for doing so
are set in terms of his larger theory of education it follows that many of his
objections to schools apply with less force today than they would have in
Locke’s day.
Political reasons, for Locke, are a qualitatively different kind of reason. Locke
believed that people had rights, including the right to make foolish choices while
raising children (L, p. 34). The question is how far such rights extend. This
article will first explain Locke’s pedagogical reasons for preferring education by
parents and then focus on Locke’s distinctly political reasons that seem to imply
104 Alex Tuckness
a right of parents to control their children’s education even in cases where their
choices do not seem to be in the educational interest of the child. Previous stud-
ies of Locke’s views on the rights of parents have failed to notice the implications
of his larger theory of toleration for his views on the rights of parents. In Locke’s
theory, different entities (a government, a family, a church, a business) exist for
different reasons and may have exclusive rights to act in pursuit of the goals of
that sphere. Locke also realised that two different entities pursuing two different
goals may legitimately make claims to regulate the same activity. In such cases,
Locke allowed the government to enforce its views in the face of opposition so
long as it does so in pursuit of a legitimate governmental goal. This implies a
sphere of legitimate state control over education.
Locke’s pedagogical argument for parental education

Some argue that in the eighteenth century, Locke, well known today for his An
essay concerning human understanding and Two treatises of government, may have
had his most significant immediate influence through his theory of education
(Wood, 1983). His Some thoughts concerning education is based on a series of
letters to his friend Edward Clarke, who was about eight years younger than
Locke (Woolhouse, 2007, p. 175). They were first published under that title in
1693, and he made corrections and revisions on three more editions before he
died in 1704. The book was reprinted and translated at an astounding rate and
was very influential (Axtell, 1968, p. 17). That Locke was considered an expert
on parenting despite having been a lifelong bachelor is less surprising than one
might think, since he was both a tutor for the children of English nobility and a
doctor and was therefore often asked by friends for his advice on the rearing
of children.
Locke began his book by claiming in the first section that ‘of all the Men we
meet with, Nine Parts of Ten are what they are, Good or Evil, useful or not, by
their Education’ (STCE, 1). This claim is related to the philosophical claim for
which Locke is perhaps most famous, his rejection in the Essay of innate ideas. It
is actually in his writings on education that Locke makes the point most strongly.
He states that he imagines the ‘Minds of Children as easily turned this or that
way as Water itself’ (STCE, 2). In the very last paragraph of the book, Locke
reiterates that his focus has been only on the sort of education proper for the son
of a gentleman ‘who being then very little, I considered only as white Paper, or
Wax, to be molded and fashioned as one pleases’ (STCE, 217). Just as Locke
argued in his theory of property that 9/10 (or 99/100 or 999/1000) (TT, 2.40,
2.43) of the value of property comes from the human labour that is invested into
it, so too he thought people come to be what they are by the sort of education
they receive (SCTE, 1).
The implications of this are that education is of monumental importance. It
would be a mistake, however, to assume that Locke considered human beings
completely malleable. Yolton (1989) makes the case that although children are
born with no ideas Locke did not think all children were born with identical
Locke on education and the rights of parents 105
natures. Locke also writes at the end of his book that much more would need
to be said, ‘especially if one should take in the various Tempers, different
Inclinations, and particular Defaults, that are to be found in Children; and
prescribe proper Remedies’ (STCE, 217). Education must, therefore, be tailored
to the diverse personalities of children (STCE, 66, 101–2).2
It is legitimate to infer from these passages that Locke believed education
could have a tremendously important role. Locke believed throughout his life
that most people unthinkingly adopt the beliefs and practices of those around
them rather than revising their beliefs and actions on the basis of reason. In Of
the conduct of the understanding, Locke admonished people to think for
themselves and to love truth more than tradition (C, 10–12), just as he
concluded the last sentence of his book on education by hoping that his book
would give some direction to those who are ‘so irregularly bold, that they dare
venture to consult their own Reason, in the Education of their Children, rather
than wholly to rely upon Old Custom’ (STCE, 217). While some have read this
as an invitation to utopianism in that human nature can be remade through
education, Locke’s tone is not at all utopian. It is, rather characteristically, sober.
The phrase ‘irregularly bold’ indicates Locke’s belief that few people will actually
choose the path he recommends.
Locke’s writing on education begins with the child’s body rather than his
mind. Locke was trained as a doctor and so it is unsurprising that this topic
would be of interest to him. It is important because Locke sees both the educa-
tion of the mind and the education of the body as resting on the same principle,
namely that education consists in the learning of correct habits by engaging in
the requisite actions. Locke recommends that children be exposed to heat and
cold, for example, by giving them ‘Shoes so thin, that they might leak and let in
Water’ (STCE, 7). Training the body to endure hardships turns out to be a
crucial element in the larger goal of education.
As the Strength of the Body lies chiefly in being able to endure Hardships,
so also does that of the Mind. And the great Principle and Foundation of all
Virtue and Worth, is placed in this, That a Man is able to deny himself his
own Desires, cross his own Inclinations, and purely follow what Reason
directs as best, though the appetite lean the other way. (STCE, 33)
Education, for Locke, thus consists in helping people to overcome the tempta-
tions of shortsighted behaviour.
This idea summarises much of the overall message of Locke’s book on
education and connects it with his hedonistic theory of motivation. Locke
argued in the Essay that pain and pleasure were the only motivators of human
behaviour. He wrote that ‘Pleasure and Pain, and that which causes them, Good
and Evil, are the hinges on which our Passions turn’ (E, 2.20.3). Human beings
therefore naturally act in pursuit of their own pleasure. Locke proceeded to
explain why it is that human beings so often act in ways that are not likely to
bring them pleasure if human beings are always motivated to pursue the greatest
106 Alex Tuckness
pleasure. He thought that pleasure or pain will move us to act only if there is
some ‘uneasiness’. He wrote:
This Uneasiness we may call, as it is, Desire; which is an uneasiness of the

Mind for want of some absent good. … But here all absent good does not,
according to the greatness it has, or is acknowledged to have, cause pain
equal to that greatness; as all pain causes desire equal to itself: Because the
absence of good is not always a pain, as the presence of pain is. And
therefore absent good may be looked on, and considered without desire’.
(E, 2.21.31)
Locke thought that human beings neither automatically perceive the pleasures
and pains that will flow from particular actions nor automatically desire pleasures
that are not immediately present. He then explained that ‘by a due consideration
and examining any good proposed, it is in our power, to raise our desires, in due
proportion to the value of that good’ (E, 2.21.46). While we do not have the
power to act for something that we do not perceive to be for our good, we do
have the power to suspend judgment so that we can think through the ramifica-
tions of our actions and choose the action that is truly in our best interests
(E, 2.21.47).
Locke used these ideas to explain how virtue is acquired in Some thoughts
concerning education. He repeated the hedonistic assumptions of the Essay when
he stated that ‘Good and Evil, Reward and Punishment, are the only Motives to
a rational Creature; these are the Spur and Reins, whereby all Mankind are set
on work, and guided, and therefore they are to be made use of to Children too’
(STCE, 54). The task of education is therefore to help children both perceive the
consequences of actions and, even more importantly, to become ‘uneasy’ about
the possibility of missing out on important pleasures in the future. Since a
present pain may seem to overwhelm a future good, much of the task of educa-
tion is helping children to acquire the habit of learning to endure a present pain
for the sake of a greater future pleasure and to forgo present pleasure to avoid a
greater future pain (STCE, 45).
Locke employed several different educational strategies to achieve this goal.
Parents should not give children things that they do not need or are not good
for them simply because the children demand them (STCE, 35). The father
should be more stern with the child when the child is young to establish an
appropriate ‘Awe and Respect’ (STCE, 44) but this can be relaxed as the
child grows older (STCE, 41). Interestingly, a child should not be offered
material rewards for behaving well since this will only increase his tendency to
govern his behaviour by the pursuit of immediate rewards. ‘To make a good, a
wise, and a virtuous Man, ‘tis fit he should learn to cross his Appetite, and
deny his Inclination to riches, finery or pleasing his Palate, etc. whenever his
Reason advises the contrary, and his Duty requires it’. And thus parents
who motivate a child by promising a treat or new clothes to get a child to do
something ‘by misapplied Rewards and Punishments sacrifice their Virtue, invert
the Order of their Education, and teach them Luxury, Pride, or Covetousness,
etc.’ (STCE, 52).
Locke’s alternative was to cultivate a different kind of motive which is more
indirect, the desire for esteem and the desire to avoid disgrace which Locke says
are ‘the most powerful incentives to the Mind, when once it is brought to relish
them’ (STCE, 56). These words are essential to understanding Locke’s approach.
He had argued in the Essay that to a great extent popular conceptions of virtue
and vice ‘in a great measure everywhere correspond with the unchangeable Rule
of Right and Wrong, which the Law of God hath established; there being
nothing, that so directly, and visibly secures, and advances the general Good of
Mankind in this World, as Obedience to the Laws he has set them’ (E, 2.28.11).
He also stated that the fear of being punished by a loss of esteem from other
people is a more powerful motivator for most people than the fear of divine or
governmental punishment (E, 2.282.12). In his book on education he stated
that although reputation is not ‘the true Principle and Measure of Virtue’ (which
stems from knowledge of God’s rewards and punishments) it is nonetheless
‘that, which comes nearest to it’ (STCE, 61).
Locke’s remark that esteem and disgrace are the mind’s most powerful
motives ‘once it is brought to relish them’ is also extremely important. The
pleasure of being esteemed, like any other pleasure, will move a person only once
he or she is uneasy about losing it. Parents, therefore, must nurture this desire
to be well thought of by praising the child’s good actions and letting him or her
know their disappointment when he or she behaves wrongly. Children should
also be taught that those who are esteemed for doing well ‘will necessarily be
beloved and cherished by everybody, and have all other good Things as a
Consequence of it’ (STCE, 58). Reputation thus becomes a way to habituate
children to seek pleasures that are more likely to correspond with the actual
principles of right and wrong.
Parents who do this will be able to minimise the use of corporal punishment.
‘Frequent Beating or Chiding is therefore carefully to be avoided’ (STCE, 60).
Children should be praised in front of others, but reprimanded in private (STCE,
62). Locke was particularly critical of parents who give children complicated
rules to follow and then punish them when they fail to follow them. Instead,
parents should keep things simple and teach children by getting them to practise
the action in question until it becomes a habit (STCE, 64). The one instance
where Locke thinks corporal punishment should be used is when children are
insubordinate (STCE, 78), since this is necessary to establish the parent’s
authority.
It is against this background that we can understand Locke’s criticisms of the
schools of his day and his reasons for recommending education under the super-
vision of parents. Schools, in Locke’s opinion, lacked the ability to provide
adequate supervision for the children outside the periods of formal instruction.
Moreover, teachers were not able to tailor education to the specific needs of each
child. Locke thought it highly likely that the child would learn rudeness, dishon-
esty, and a host of other vices from the other children at the school. Locke asks
108 Alex Tuckness
whether a father will ‘hazard your Son’s Innocence and Virtue, for a little Greek
and Latin’ (STCE, 70). Moreover, the schools tended to practise exactly the kind
of pedagogy that Locke criticised (beating children for making mistakes in Latin,
for example). Locke was convinced that children would learn far more if learning
was part of play and was not forced upon them (STCE, 72–74). As much as
possible, children should learn additional languages (French, then Latin) in the
same way they learned English to the extent possible, ideally finding a tutor who
would speak to the child only in that language (STCE, 165).
In the home, by contrast to the school, the father can find a tutor who will
instruct and model virtue and manners for his child. Locke’s list of praiseworthy
virtues presents a helpful picture of the sort of adults he sought to produce. A
child should be taught civility, humanity (abstaining from cruelty), generosity,
gracefulness, honour, humility, industry, kindness, love of God, love of study,
modesty, politeness, prudence, reverence, self control, self-denial, and self-
restraint (Yolton & Yolton, 1989, pp. 22–23). Locke’s discussion of generosity
is instructive because Locke explained that a child’s rational faculties are not
advanced enough for the child to understand property, and therefore
justice. Instead, since humans incline naturally to selfishness, parents are to
contrive things so that self-sacrifice actually ends up being beneficial for the
child, so that the child will develop a habit of generosity and will more
generally desire the esteem that goes along with being thought generous
(STCE, 110).
Locke favoured education by a tutor because, given his views on education, it
seemed at the time the better option. Locke believed each child was different and
that individualised education was therefore important. Locke thought esteem
the most important motivator and was eager to capture the natural desire to be
esteemed by parents that children have and harness it for the purposes of educa-
tion. He was also writing in a historical context where the crucial choice would
be whether to have the child educated at home or whether to send the child off
to a school wherein his contact with the family would be limited to a few weeks
each year. Because, as indicated above, Locke’s view of education was signifi-
cantly intertwined with developing virtuous character, allowing children to be
without adequate supervision so many hours per day was too risky. Ruderman
and Godwin (2000, pp. 508–509), for example, assume that since Locke was
critical of schools he would have obviously opposed a system of public schools.
Tarcov (1984, p. 210) on the other hand points out that Locke admitted that
both home and school education had inconveniences and that some of Locke’s
opposition to schools may have stemmed from the fact that they were boarding
schools. A public school system where children can conveniently attend school
and still live at home under the supervision of their parents is a very different
system from the one Locke criticised. Tarcov is right to see that we must be
cautious in making claims about how Locke would apply his ideas in a radically
different historical context. Locke’s statements were a judgment based on his
assessments of the positives and negatives of the two forms of education in his
day; they were not a statement of a timeless principle.
Locke and the rights of parents

Where Locke did claim to be offering a timeless principle is with his political
statements about the natural rights of individuals. In his more political works,
Locke made a number of statements that taken together have been thought to
mark him as a strong supporter of the rights of parents in education relative to
the rights of communities. Locke argued against the theory of the divine right
of kings articulated by Robert Filmer (1588–1653) in which Adam was under-
stood to have been created king of the earth by God and to have passed that
right on to his eldest son and so on through the generations. Filmer argued that
fathers have complete power over their children, including the power to put
them to death. Political power and paternal power for Filmer differ only in scale,
not in kind. Against this position, Locke argued in the First treatise that fathers
have a much more limited power over their children. Locke argued persuasively
from the Hebrew text of the Bible (or Torah) that God’s grant of authority to
Adam was not to him in particular but to mankind in general (TT, 1.21-43).
Locke argued in the Second treatise that the appropriate term is ‘Parental Power’
not ‘Paternal Power’ since God commanded children to honour both father and
mother (TT, 2.52). Unlike Filmer who believed human beings were born
obligated to a particular family and political regime, Locke believed that ‘we are
born Free as we are born Rational; not that we have actually the Exercise of
either: Age that brings one, brings with it the other too’ (TT, 2.61). Since chil-
dren are not able to act rationally, they are to obey their parents until they are
adults, at which point they owe their parents only honour, not obedience (TT,
2.67-69). It is the power and duty of the parent to educate the child (TT, 2.69).
Locke’s strategy, therefore, was to distinguish sharply between parental power
and political power. Locke says that they are ‘built upon so different Foundations,
and given to so different Ends, that every Subject that is a Father, has as much a
Paternal Power over his Children, as the Prince has over his’ (TT, 2.71). The
power and duty of parents is to educate their children until the point at which
they can care for themselves (TT, 2.58), while the purpose of the government
is to use its coercive power to secure the lives, liberties, and properties of its
citizens (TT, 2.123).3
Locke must grapple with the fact that parents’ views on the education of their
children may conflict with the views of the government about what will best
secure the lives, liberties and properties of citizens. It is true that Locke holds
that the right, duty, and power of educating children are with parents. Some have
seen this as an even more important ‘separation of powers’ than Locke’s distinc-
tion between legislative and executive power (Tarcov, 1984; Ruderman &
Godwin, 2000). Locke states in the Second treatise that parents are ‘by the Law
of Nature, under an obligation to preserve, nourish, and educate the Children, they
had begotten, not as their own Workmanship, but as the Workmanship of their
own Maker, the Almighty, to whom they were to be accountable for them’ (TT,
2.56). Locke made it clear that the power parents have over children stems from
the duties they have to care for children (TT, 2.58). The question then arises
110 Alex Tuckness
whether any part of this power is transferred to the government when individu-
als leave the state of nature. Locke went so far as to say that ‘Parents in Societies,
where they themselves are Subjects, retain a power over their Children, and they
have as much right to their Subjection, as those who are in the state of Nature’
(TT, 2.71). When Locke described ‘Conjugal Society’ he described it as a
‘voluntary Compact between Man and Woman’ to unite for the propagation of
offspring and the care of those offspring until the children are ‘able to provide
for themselves’ (TT, 2.78). We have already seen that Locke regarded education
as part of that care.
What this reading of Locke ignores is the fact that more than one entity can
have a legitimate claim over a given human activity and that it is not enough to
show that someone has a legitimate power, one must also know what happens
when legitimate powers conflict. In his writings on toleration, Locke introduced
the idea that what he called ‘societies’ exist for limited purposes and act
legitimately only when trying to attain those purposes. He rejected the position
of his opponent, Jonas Proast (1640–1710), who argued that governments can
in principle regulate any action to produce any type of good. Locke responded
that either societies are limited in the ends they can pursue by the purposes the
parties who entered into the society agreed upon, or any society may act for any
beneficial end. In other words, a prospective beneficial outcome does not justify
acting for an end that a society does not exist to promote. Failure to recognise
this, Locke argued, means ‘there will be no difference between church and state;
a commonwealth and an army; or between a family, and the East India Company;
all of which have hitherto been thought to exist for different ends’ (W, 6:117).
The idea that different societies (commonwealth, corporation, church, family)
exist for different ends is very important in Locke’s thought. By understanding
how church and state relate to one another, we can learn about how state and
family interact. Locke’s argument is that the family is a society that comes
together for a particular end: the propagation, care, and education of children.
Religious societies come together to further the spiritual interests of their
members. Civil societies come together to further the civil interests of citizens.
When Locke describes reasons for and ends of civil society (government), he
states that:
the pravity of Mankind … obliges Men to enter into Society with one
another; that by mutual Assistance, and joint Force, they may secure unto
each other their Properties in the things that contribute to the Comfort and
Happiness of this Life; … But forasmuch as Men thus entering into
Societies, … may nevertheless be deprived of them [goods], either by the
Rapine and Fraud of their Fellow-Citizens, or by the Hostile Violence of
Foreigners; the remedy of this Evil consists in Arms, Riches, and Multitude
of Citizens; the Remedy of the other in Laws …. (L, 47–48)
What is important to notice here is that Locke believed that protecting civil
interest required the government positively to pursue ‘Arms, Riches, and
Multitude of Citizens’ so that the state could defend itself from foreign attack.
This is central to Locke’s argument for religious toleration and has important
implications for his views on education as well because in both cases different
societies pursuing different ends may try to assert authority over the same
actions. In the toleration case, governments do not exist to pursue religious ends
and act illegitimately if they use their power for those ends, but they do act
legitimately when pursuing the civil interests of citizens. Although one can argue
about how broadly Locke would define civil interests, a point to which we will
return, at a minimum it includes things like an economy that can support a well
funded and highly educated military to guard from attack. Governments must
pursue positive goals to have the resources to protect ‘negative’ rights to
non-interference with life or property (Tuckness, 2008).
The complication for Locke is that a given act, killing an animal for example,
might be commanded by a church as part of a religious purpose and forbidden
by a government trying to protect the national economy. Locke gave the
example of a case where many animals have died from disease and the govern-
ment bans the slaughtering of animals for a time so that the numbers can be
replenished. Such a law would restrict the freedom of religious groups who want
to practice animal sacrifice. Locke argued that such a law is legitimate, even
though it restricts religious liberty, because the government is still acting for
civic, not spiritual ends (L, 42). The implication is that in the case of parents and
education, even if we grant that nurturing children is the purpose of parents, and
promoting civil interests the purpose of government, the commonwealth might
legitimately restrict parental rights in education so long as it can claim that it is
doing so for the sake of legitimate civil purposes such as improving the strength
of the nation to resist enemy attack. Requiring parents to teach children to
read or to learn science might be important for having a viable military and
economic system.
Suppose that the government, in pursuing what it takes to be the civic interests
of the nation, requires children to learn things to which the parents object. Again,
Locke gives us a parallel case with his writings on toleration. If a person thinks
that the government, pursuing civic interests in good faith, has nonetheless issued
an order that would violate the person’s religious beliefs to obey, he has the
option of disobeying the law and accepting the appropriate punishment. On the
other hand, if he thinks the policy is one that in fact has ends other than the civil
interests of the people (the policy was enacted to try to change people’s religious
beliefs or practices), he can regard the government actions as illegitimate uses of
government force and regard the government as illegitimate and resist it (L, 49).
Let us now take this as a model for how Locke would handle conflicts between
parents and the state regarding education issues. Since Locke gives parents, not
governments, the primary duty and power of educating children, the presump-
tion is generally in favour of parental control. Nonetheless, a system of public
education and some restrictions on parental rights are permissible if they have,
so to speak, a non-educational justification related to improving the safety and
security of the state. This would imply that public education should not restrict
112 Alex Tuckness
parental rights on the grounds that it will make the child a better or more knowl-
edgeable person alone. A political reason, the public good, is needed.
Perhaps the strongest objection against this interpretation is that it actually
underestimates the extent to which political society can aim at virtue simply for
its own sake. In Locke’s earliest defence of toleration he claimed that govern-
ments had no power to enforce morality if the vice did not affect the preservation
of human life (PE, p. 144). In his later writings, he states that magistrates should
‘impartially set themselves against vice, in whomsoever it is found, and leave men
to their own consciences; in their articles of faith, and ways of worship’
(W, 6:65). Marshall argues that Locke expanded the range of moral concerns
open to the magistrate so that it would include moral reformation in general
even if this did not directly improve the public good (1994, pp. 379–383). These
texts would need to be weighed against others where Locke rules out laws of this
sort. The best harmonisation of the various texts is likely that Locke later realised
that the virtues he was concerned about (recall the list earlier in the paper) are
all virtues that do affect the civil interests of the society and that it only confused
matters to imply that the government had no legitimate interest in regulating
such matters.
What we are left with is an account of Locke’s views on the rights of parents
that gives the state more authority to intervene in the realm of education than
previous interpretations have suggested. While Locke was adamant that different
societies exist for different ends, he recognised that certain actions affect more
than one end and that there will therefore be conflicts over whose will should
prevail. Locke believed that government would be unworkable if the state had to
suspend the pursuit of its basic goals every time it came into conflict with a claim
from another sphere and so he permitted the state to act in ways that restrict the
rights of religious believers, and by extension the rights of parents, so long as the
policy could be justified as one necessary to keep the lives, liberties, and proper-
ties of the citizens safe.
Conclusion
An overlooked contribution of Locke to modern educational theory rests in his
theory of toleration and its account of societies. The state, and the public school
systems it supports (and in some cases requires students to attend), is not a family,
and states and families do not exist for the same purposes. There is a sense in which
states can be improperly paternal, acting as if the reasons that might motivate
parents to educate children in a certain way must also be reason enough for the
state to do it. Yet Locke also realises that the state’s interest in promoting the civil
interests of citizens, even if interpreted narrowly as the defence of rights, gives the
state an interest in producing citizens who will be able to safeguard those rights in
the future. Setting up a public school system and regulating home schooling to
insure that both provide an education compatible with citizens who will protect
rights is thus a perfectly legitimate goal for governments to pursue. But it is also
one that may legitimately conflict with a parent’s sense of how best to raise a child.
The parent, in seeking the best interest of the child, is also aiming at an end
legitimate for familial society. Locke would say that each is justified in acting on its
best judgment, and thus the state could be justified in pursuing a policy against
the wishes of parents if it believed there was a legitimate civil interest at stake.
Notes
1 References to Locke’s primary works will be given as follows: E = Essay concerning
human understanding (Locke, 1979) by book, chapter and section number; C = Of the
conduct of the understanding (Locke, 1996) by section number; L = Letter concerning
toleration (Locke, 1983) by page number; PE = Political essays (Locke, 1997) by page
number; STCE = Some thoughts concerning education (Locke, 1989) by section num-
ber; TT = Two treatises of government (Locke, 1988) by treatise and section number;
W = Works (Locke, 1963) by volume and page number. The original formatting, spacing
and punctuation are retained in quotations unless otherwise noted, but spellings have
been modernised.
2 While Passmore has tried to argue that Locke’s Some thoughts was ‘the great turning
point’ (2000, p. 242) in the transition to an optimistic view of human nature that saw no
limits to human perfectibility, Spellman points out that Locke’s rejection of the Calvinist
understanding of original sin did not necessarily imply a utopian view of human nature
and human possibilities (1988). Locke, for example, believed that children had a natural
inclination towards power and dominion (STCE, 103).
3 This strategy has been criticised from various angles. Gutmann (1987) argues that
Locke’s position fails to recognise the legitimate claims that the state has in producing
citizens with the requisite skills and knowledge for democratic self-governance. Carrig
(2001) goes even farther in claiming that Locke’s liberalism is really despotism by
parents. If we are nine-tenths of what we are by education and if parents control educa-
tion, their rule over children is far more extreme than that of a political tyrant. Similarly,
Sumser (1994) sees in Locke’s substitution of internalised controls (like the need for
esteem) for external force (corporal punishment) a system that leaves people no more
free than they were before. Neill (1989) and Leites (1979) both claim that if autonomy
is correctly understood it is compatible with parents raising children in the way Locke
suggested. These suggestions do not, however, respond to Gutmann’s contention that
the state should have more say in the shaping of its future citizens. This paper does not
challenge Gutmann’s conclusion about the interest of the state in its future citizens, it
instead challenges her reading of Locke.
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8 Rousseau’s philosophy
of transformative,
‘denaturing’ education
Patrick Riley
Introduction
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) is widely, and correctly, viewed as the
greatest political philosopher of the French Enlightenment. He is also widely,
and correctly, viewed as the most important philosopher of education in the
eighteenth century. For Rousseau, politics and education are strongly connected:
he gives education the task of transforming naturally self-loving egoists animated
only by their own ‘private wills’ into polis-loving citizens with a civic ‘general
will’ (CW 4.140-1/OC 3.363).1 In Book 2, Chapter 7 of the Social contract,
Rousseau introduces the figure of the ‘Great Legislator’ who must, over time, be
‘capable of changing human nature, so to speak’, by turning self-lovers into
lovers of the general good (CW 4.155/OC 3.381). This paper argues that we
should see the ‘legislator’ as a ‘civic educator’.2
Rousseau gives absolute primacy to radically transformative education which
makes people ‘what they ought to be’. Only Plato among earlier philosophers
emphasised such transformation. But Rousseau also insists that education,
however transformative, however ‘denaturing’, must finally produce autono-
mous adults who can say to their teachers (with Emile), ‘What course have I
chosen! To remain what you have made me’ (CW 13.665/OC 4.855). How far
Rousseau succeeds in finding a stable equilibrium between denaturing education,
stability in a political society of citizens, and final adult autonomy is the central
difficulty of his social thought, as the following pages will try to show.
In this chapter Rousseau’s theory of the general will is compared with ‘Kantian’
universal morality. At times something like a conversation between Rousseau and
Kant is broached. Of course, Rousseau’s relevant work was produced in the 1750s
and 60s; Kant’s philosophical works appeared in the 1780s. But there is a signifi-
cant sense in which Rousseau can intelligibly be read as doubting (in advance of
Kant) that a Kantian kind of morality and moral subject was possible, although in
many other ways he can be read as a precursor of Kantian ideas. Rousseau’s
account of general morality involves an understanding of education which takes
place in the biological and human time that frames individual subjects, and which
takes place also in the ‘civic’ or ‘political’ time in which the institutions and prac-
tices of societies and states bring about changes in the public political culture, and
116 Patrick Riley
in the mentality and morality, of citizens and subjects. For Kant, by contrast, one
is not made free or moral in time: one simply knows the moral imperatives, and
takes oneself to be free and able to comply with their commands. Where Kant
offers rational universal cosmopolitan morality valid for persons, Rousseau offers
educator-shaped, general, legislated, political civility for citizens. However, there
are also passages in Rousseau which suggest that Rousseau also has an idea of ‘the
end of time’ – a point at which freedom is perfected and authority perfectly
accepted. At such points Rousseau’s theory seems to be ‘out of time’.
The next, extensive, section of this paper analyses how Rousseau understands
the relationships between generalised (as opposed to individual, particular) will,
individual autonomy, and educational authority and power. In setting out his
philosophical understanding of these matters, Rousseau’s relationship to the
intellectual currents of his time, and, in particular, his consideration of the rival
‘kantian’ (in advance of Kant) position is explored.
Freedom, the general will and education

In order to make sense of some of the structural features of Rousseau’s political
thought, we have to see that he was concerned centrally and above all with
freedom. In particular, the notion of the general will could not otherwise have
become the core idea of his political philosophy. The general will as a concept
goes decidedly beyond the idea of generality or unity – the ‘many as one’ – as
that is articulated by Plato (Republic, 462b) or Montesquieu (1949,
pp. 1134–44). Instead, Rousseau speaks in the Considerations on the government
of Poland (and elsewhere) of generalising the will as something central but as
difficult as squaring the circle (CW 11.170/OC 3.955). It is difficult because one
must ‘denature’ particularistic beings without destroying their (ultimate) auton-
omy. It is necessary because ‘taking away all his freedom of will is taking away all
morality from his actions’ (CW 4.135/OC 3.356) and ‘civil association is the
most voluntary act in the world’ (CW 4.200/OC 3.440).
The Legislator has to achieve his civic results by strikingly tortured means – he
has to ‘win over without violence and persuade without convincing’ (CW
4.156/OC 3.383). Plato did not worry about this kind of difficulty because the
philosopher-king simply knew the eternal verities, such as ‘absolute goodness’
(Phaedo, 7d) which even the gods know and love (Euthyphro, 10d-e), and there-
fore he deserved to educate and rule (Republic, IV). For Rousseau in the Social
contract, ‘the union of understanding and will’ is needed for perfect politics so
that the Legislator’s civic knowledge is finally, at the end of civic time, absorbed
into an (originally ignorant) popular general will which is ultimately as ‘enlight-
ened’ as it was always ‘right’ (CW 4.154/OC 3.380).
The general will before Rousseau

Here the history of the general will before Rousseau is illuminating. (For a
full treatment of the subject, see Riley, 1986.) In Rousseau, the general will is
Rousseau’s philosophy of transformative, ‘denaturing’ education 117
non-natural: it is artificially produced (over time) through the ‘denaturing’,
counter-egotistic educative ministrations of a Legislator – although at the end of
education informed, independent choice must finally be possible. In the thought
of the 17th-century inventors of the idea, however, the general will of God to
‘save all men’ after the Fall is naturally general: the will of a perfect being could
not be ‘denatured’ or transformed, or made over time to become what he
‘naturally’ was not. Rousseau knew intimately the entire seventeenth-century
controversy over ‘general will’ and knew too that a non-divinity must be (to
revise a phrase) ‘forced to be general’. Indeed, the central problem of all
Rousseau’s thought is to find a form of non-authoritarian educative authority
which will make men ‘what one needs them to be’ (CW 3.148/OC 3.251),
without (permanently) depriving them of the freedom without which, as he put
it in the ‘Letter to Franquières’, ‘neither virtues, nor vices, neither merit, nor
demerit, nor morality in human actions’ is conceivable (CW 8.269/OC 4.1145).
Rousseau’s aim is to ‘generalise’ will over time without destroying freedom. This
makes it crucial that he find a non-authoritarian authority that can ‘win over
without violence’.
Rousseau’s reasons for using ‘general will’ as his central political concept were
essentially philosophical. This is no matter how ready-made for his purposes the
seventeenth-century theological notion may seem to have been. Does not the
Spartan mother have a ‘general’ will to ‘save’ the city, as God has a general will
to save ‘all men’? Philosophically, though, the two terms, ‘will’ and ‘generality’,
represent two main strands in Rousseau’s thought. ‘Generality’ stands, inter alia,
for the rule of law, for civic education that draws us out of ourselves and toward
the general (or common) good, and for the non-particularist citizen-virtues of
Sparta and republican Rome (see especially the Considerations on the government
of Poland, CW 11.167-240/OC 3.951-1041). ‘Will’ stands, again, for Rousseau’s
conviction that civil association is ‘the most voluntary act in the world’, that
‘taking away all [one’s] freedom of will is taking away all morality from [one’s]
actions’. And if one could ‘generalise’ the will, so that it ‘elects’ only law, citizen-
ship and the common good, and avoids willful self-love, then one would have a
general will in Rousseau’s particular sense. The (originally divine) volonté
générale of Pascal, Malebranche, Fénelon and Leibniz corresponded closely to
these moral aims; why not employ a term already rendered politically usable by
Bayle in the Pensées diverses sur la comète (Bayle, 1704, pp. 452ff)?
Kant and Hegel

At this point a comparison with Kant and Hegel will be helpful. (For full discus-
sion of Rousseau, Kant and Hegel on voluntarism, see Riley, 1982.) All three are
voluntarists who make ‘will’ ethically weighty (in the shape of ‘general will’,
‘good will’ and [so-called] ‘real will’). All three are in search of a non-willful will;
all are in full flight from capricious particular will. According to Kant one ‘ought’
to move on to a universal Kingdom of Ends or (failing that) at least to universal
republicanism and eternal peace (Kant, 1922, pp. 161–162; see also Riley, 1983,
118 Patrick Riley
pp. 167ff). Hegel wants our ‘real’ will to be ‘recognition’ of the state as rational
freedom concretely realised (Hegel, 1942, p. 105; see also Kelly, 1978,
pp. 113–114; Oakeshott, 1975, p. 160). For Rousseau, by contrast, the flight
from egoism and the invidious comparative self-love that he calls amour propre
ends with the conduct of the ‘Spartan mother’ in Emile who does not want to
know whether her sons are dead, but whether the state has won the battle
(CW 13.164/OC 4.249). Kant, more easily than either Rousseau or Hegel,
preserves freedom or autonomy – because what ‘generalises’ (or rather universal-
ises) will is reason-ordained ‘objective ends’, not a Legislator nor self-formation
in education. Rousseau doubted that there could be a reason-ordained universal
morality. For him the crucial line should be drawn between the ‘general’ and the
‘universal’, the polis and the cosmopolis. Rousseau set himself the daunting task of
generalising will without recourse to ‘objective ends’ – but with recourse to
educative authority whose highest ambition is to wither away after injecting its
(civic, ‘politan’) knowledge into beings who become free in the course of time.
Kant and Kantianism

That our reason has causality, or that we at least represent it to ourselves as
having causality, is evident from the imperatives which in all matters of conduct
we impose as rules upon our active powers. ‘“Ought” expresses a kind of
necessity … which is found nowhere else in the whole of nature. The under-
standing can know in nature only what is, what has been, or what will be …
When we have the course of nature alone in view, “ought” has no meaning
whatsoever’ (Kant, 1998, A 547/B 575).
Precisely here – and equally in The critique of practical reason’s insistence that
the moral law is just there as a ‘fact of reason’, underivable from anything else
(nature, custom, God) (Kant, 1996b, p. 164) – lies the gulf that separates
Rousseau and Kant (anti-willful voluntarists though they both are). If, for
Rousseau, reason had ‘causality’, we would not stand in need of the Legislator’s
educative ‘causality’. The will would be generalised (or rather universalised) by a
Kantian ‘objective end’ (respect for persons as members of a kingdom of ends)
which is unproblematic for freedom because all rational beings simply ‘see’ that
end (at the age of reason). The whole Kantian ‘universalising’ operation is
completely impersonal: there is no person (Lycurgus) bending backwards to be
impersonal, non-authoritarian, persuading-without-convincing. In Kant one is
not made free (in time): one simply knows ‘ought’ and takes oneself to be free
(able to perform ought’s commands) ab initio. Of course – and Rousseau would
(reasonably) insist on this – Kantianism works only if there are universal, reason-
ordained ‘objective ends’ which we ‘ought to have’. Rousseau worried about
every term in that sentence: whether we can know a universal morality which is
‘beyond’ the general, whether ‘reason’ ordains anything (morally), whether
there are ‘ends’ that all rational beings ‘see’ (as facts of reason). Negatively, Kant
and Rousseau are companions-in-flight from self-loving particular will. Positively,
they offer contrasting possibilities once that flight is over. Kant offers rational,
universal, cosmopolitan morality valid for persons. Rousseau offers educator-
shaped, general, political civility valid for a Citizen of Geneva, or of Sparta.
Diderot
Rousseau’s radical doubts about the real existence of any universal, reason-
ordained morality come out most plainly and brilliantly in the (unpublished)
First version of the Social contract, the so-called Geneva manuscript, where he
refutes Diderot’s article for the Encyclopedia on ‘Natural Right’. Diderot had
argued that ‘if we take from the individual the right to decide the nature of the
just and the unjust’ we must then ‘bring this great question … before the human
race’, for the ‘good of all’ is the ‘only passion’ that this most-inclusive group has.
Paralleling Rousseau (initially), Diderot goes on to say that ‘individual wills are
suspect’, for they can be indifferently good or wicked, but that ‘the general will
is always good’, since ‘it has never been mistaken’ and never will be. It is to this
always-good, never-deceiving general will that ‘the individual should address
himself’, Diderot insists, ‘in order to find out to what extent he should be man,
citizen, subject, father, child, and when it is suitable for him to live and to die’
(Diderot, reprinted in Rousseau CW 3.137).
So far, no great gap has opened up between Diderot and Rousseau. But when
Diderot begins to indicate where the general will is deposited, he moves in the
direction of a proto-Kantian universalism which is (usually) foreign to the citizen
of Geneva. One can ‘consult’ the general will, he urges, ‘[i]n the written princi-
ples of Right of all civilized nations, in the social actions of savage and barbarian
peoples, in the tacit conventions of the enemies of the human race amongst
themselves; and even in indignation and resentment, the two passions that nature
seems to have even given to animals to make up for the absence of social laws
and public vengeance’ (CW 3.138). Diderot’s nominal generality is, in fact, a
universal morality (to use his own term). It relates to all humans, and seems to
extend even to honour among thieves. Rousseau’s general will – of Rome, of
Sparta, of Geneva – is a great deal more particular. Indeed in the Considerations
on the government of Poland Rousseau insists on the importance of national
peculiarities and particularities that should not be submerged in a cosmopolitan
universalism. For Diderot, then, the general will is to be found almost every-
where, whereas Rousseau doubts that it has ever been fully realised anywhere.
In the next section of ‘Natural Right’, Diderot goes on to urge that ‘the
general will is in each individual a pure act of the understanding which reasons
in the silence of the passions on what a man can demand of his fellow and on
what his fellow has the right to require of him’ (CW 3.138). At this point,
Diderot begins to be separated from Rousseau. Rousseau would have stressed
precisely ‘citizenship’ and ‘Geneva’, and would never have urged that general
will is immediately dictated by understanding or reason (as distinguished from
will-generalising civic education). Had Rousseau thought that, the passions being
‘silent’ (a phrase Diderot borrows from Malebranche), understanding and reason
could alone dictate what is right, he would never have made his famous claim in
120 Patrick Riley
The social contract that the ‘general will is always right, but the judgment that
guides it is not always enlightened’ (CW 5.154/OC 3.380). If reason alone
dictated right (as in Kant it furnishes ‘ought’), Rousseauean men would have no
need of a Legislator, nor of an Educator, to help effect ‘a union of understanding
and will’.
Book 1, chapter 2 of the Geneva manuscript is a refutation of Diderot’s ration-
alism and universalism; but it also provides more than a hint of what Rousseau
would have said about Kant’s distinctive way of combining ‘ought’ and freedom.
At one time, to be sure, Rousseau had himself stressed a roughly comparable
universal morality; in an early, unpublished fragment from around 1737 called
the Universal chronology he had appealed to Fénelon’s notion of a universal
Christian republic:
We are all brothers, our neighbor ought to be as dear to us as we ourselves;

I love the human race more than my fatherland, said the illustrious M. de
Fenelon, my fatherland more than my family, and my family more than
myself. Sentiments so full of humanity ought to be common to all men …
The Universe is a large family of which we are all members … however small
the extent of a private individual’s power might be, he is always in a condi-
tion to make himself useful somewhere to the great body of which he makes
up a part; if he can, he owes it indispensably. (CW 11.2/OC 5.488)
Later, and most clearly of all in the Geneva manuscript, Rousseau would abandon
the universal in favour of the general, and would exchange the ‘Christian repub-
lic’ for the more modest Sparta, Rome and Geneva. That Rousseau is not going
to argue for a reason-ordained universal morality valid for the entire human race
is evident in the opening sentence of the Geneva manuscript: ‘Let us begin by
inquiring why the necessity for political institutions arises’ (CW 4.76/OC
3.281). If a passion-silencing reason spoke to and governed all men, no mere
particular political institutions would arise at all (as Locke had already shown in
section 128 of the Second treatise, saying that only a ‘corrupt’ rejection of reason
keeps a unitary, unified mankind from being perfectly governed by natural law).
Rousseau is struck by the beauty of Diderot’s universal morality: ‘Indeed, no one
will deny that the general will in each individual is a pure act of the understand-
ing, which reasons in the silence of the passions about what man can demand of
his fellow man and what his fellow man has the right to demand of him’ (CW
4.80/OC 3.286). But, Rousseau immediately and characteristically asks, ‘where
is the man who can be so objective about himself; and if concern for his self-
preservation is nature’s first precept, can he be forced to look in this manner at
the species in general in order to impose on himself duties whose connection
with his particular constitution is not evident to him’ (CW 4.80/OC 3.286)? If
reason is not directly morally efficacious (as it cannot be, if great legislators are
to have the important formative function that is assigned to them in the Social
contract), and if ‘natural law’ is scarcely natural (as the Second discourse tries to
prove), then the natural man who fails to find his particular good in the general
good will instead become the enemy of the human race, allying himself with the
strong and the unjust to despoil the weak. ‘It is false’, Rousseau insists, ‘that in
the state of independence, reason leads us to cooperate for the common good
out of a perception of our own interest’ (CW 4.79/OC 3.284).
So strongly does this current of thought sweep Rousseau along that he
mounts a brief assault on generality that would be fatal not just to Diderot, but
to his own political aims as well:
If the general society [of the human race] did exist somewhere other than
in the systems of Philosophers, it would be, as I have said, a moral Being
with qualities separate and distinct from those of particular Beings constitut-
ing it, somewhat like chemical compounds which have properties that do
not belong to any of the elements composing them. There would be a
universal language which nature would teach all men and which would be
their first means of mutual communication. There would be a kind of central
nervous system which would connect all the parts. The public good or ill
would not be merely the sum of private goods and ills as in a simple aggre-
gation, but would lie in the liaison uniting them. It would be greater than
this sum, and public felicity, far from being based on the happiness of private
individuals [des particuliers], would itself be the source of this happiness.
(CW 4.78-9/OC 3.284)
Plainly this argument goes too far, since Rousseau himself wants to argue for
a general good that is more than a mere sum or aggregation of private goods and
ills; it is no wonder that he suppressed the Geneva manuscript. Nevertheless the
dilemma remains that a general society cannot be produced by passion-silencing
‘reason’ alone. The only way out of the dilemma, according to Rousseau, is
through denatured, non-natural ‘new associations’ (Sparta, Rome, Geneva) that
take the place of well-meant but imaginary reason-governed general societies,
and which, through rigorous civic education, draw natural beings out of their
(equally natural) ego-centrism, bringing them to think of themselves (finally) as
‘parts of a greater whole’ – a whole less extensive, but more realisable, than a
‘Christian republic’ or a kingdom of ends. The particular social remedies
designed to overcome particularity and self-preference at the end of the second
chapter of the Geneva manuscript are rather abstractly, even vaguely character-
ised (‘new associations’, ‘new insights’, ‘perfected art’) (CW 4.82/OC 3.288);
but one knows from other works such as the Discourse on political economy and
the Considerations on the government of Poland how Rousseau proposes to
produce, through an educative shaping which finally yields ‘enlightened’ free
choice, a civic general will which is certainly no cosmopolitan ‘universal spirit’.
Reason and freedom

Rousseau shared with modern individualist thinkers (notably Hobbes and
Locke) the conviction that all political life is conventional, that it can be made
122 Patrick Riley
obligatory only through voluntary, individual consent. Despite the fact that he
sometimes treats moral ideas as if they simply ‘arise’ in a developmental process,
in the course of socialisation (in, for example, the ‘Letter to Beaumont’,
CW 9.35/OC 4.945), he often falls back on the view that the wills of free men
are the ‘causes’ of duties and of legitimate authority. Thus, in an argument
against slavery in the Social contract, Rousseau urges that ‘taking away all [one’s]
freedom of will is taking away all morality from [one’s] actions’ (CW 4.135/OC
3.356), and that the reason one can derive no notion of right or morality from
mere force is that ‘[y]ielding to force is an act of necessity, not of will’
(CW 4.133/OC 3.354). In the Second discourse, in a passage that almost prefig-
ures Kant, he insists on the importance of free agency, arguing that while
‘Physics’ (natural science) might explain ‘the mechanism of the senses and the
formation of ideas’, it could never make intelligible ‘the power of willing, or
rather of choosing, and in the sentiment of this power are found only spiritual
acts about which the Laws of Mechanics explain nothing’ (CW 3.26/OC 3.142).
It is this power of freely willing, rather than reason, that distinguishes men
from beasts.
All of this is confirmed by what Rousseau says about will in Emile, where he
argues (through a speech put into the mouth of the Savoyard Vicar) that the
‘principle of every action is in the will of a free being’, and that ‘[o]ne cannot go
back beyond that’, for ‘[i]t is not the word freedom which means nothing; it is
the word necessity’ (CW 13.442/OC 4.586). The will is ‘independent of my
senses; I consent or I resist; I succumb or I conquer; and I sense perfectly within
myself when I do what I wanted to do or when all I am doing is giving way to
my passions’ (CW 13. 441/OC 4.585-6). ‘If man is active and free’, the Vicar
concludes, ‘he acts on his own’ (CW 13.442/OC 4.587). Moreover, human free
will does not derogate from Providence, but magnifies it, since God has ‘given
him an excellent nature’ and has ‘put in man’s actions the morality which
ennobles them’ (CW 13.442-3/OC 4.587). Rousseau cannot agree with those
theologians (for example, Hobbes) who argue that human freedom would
diminish God by robbing him of his omnipotence:
[Providence] has made him free in order that by choice he do not evil but
good… What more could divine power itself do for us? Could it make our
nature contradictory and give the reward for having done well to him who
did not have the power to do evil? What! To prevent man from being
wicked, was it necessary to limit him to instinct and make him a beast?
(CW 13.442-3/OC 4.587)
To be sure, the pre-Kantian voluntarism of Emile and of the Second discourse

is not the whole story. In the Moral letters of 1757, which were used as a source
in writing Emile, the relation of free will to morality is complicated and problem-
atical. (On the importance of the Letters see Shklar, 1969, pp. 229–230.) The
opening of the fifth Letter – ‘The entire morality of human life is in man’s
intention’ (CW 12.193/OC 4.1106) – seems at first to be a voluntarist claim,
almost prefiguring Kant’s notion in the Groundwork that a ‘good will’ is the
only ‘unqualifiedly’ good thing on earth (Kant, 1996a, p. 49). But this
intention refers not to the ‘will’ of Emile, but to ‘conscience’ – which is a ‘divine
instinct’ and an ‘immortal and celestial voice’ (CW, 12.197/OC 4.1111).
Rousseau, after a striking passage on moral feelings – ‘Does one see some act of
violence and injustice in the street or on a path, instantly a movement of
rage and indignation rises up in the depths of one’s heart’ (CW 12.194/
OC 4.1106) – goes on to speak of ‘the cry of remorse that punishes hidden
crimes in secret’; and this ‘intrusive voice’ he calls an ‘involuntary feeling’
(sentiment involontaire) which ‘gives us so many torments’ (CW 12.194/
OC 4.1107). That the phrase sentiment involontaire is not a mere slip of the
pen (or of the mind) is proven by Rousseau’s deliberate repetition of
‘involuntary’:
There is then in the depths of all souls an innate principle of justice and
moral truth anterior to all national prejudices, to all maxims of education.
This principle is the involuntary rule [la règle involontaire] based on which
we judge our actions and those of others as good or bad in spite of our own
maxims, and it is to this principle that I give the name of conscience.
(CW 12.195/OC 4.1108)
Conscience, then, is an involuntary moral feeling – not surprisingly, given

Rousseau’s view that ‘our sensitivity is incontestably prior to our reason itself’
(CW 12.196/OC 4.1109). And so, while the fifth of the Moral letters opens with
an apparent anticipation of Emile’s voluntarism, this is only an appearance that
proves that it is not straightforwardly right to find in Rousseau a predecessor of
Kant. Rousseau’s morale sensitive (one strand of his thought) is not easy to
reconcile with rational self-determination (another, equally authentic, strand) for
Rousseau says both that to deprive the will of freedom is to deprive one’s actions
of morality, as we have seen, and also that conscience is a sentiment which is
involuntaire.
The fact remains, however, that while Emile was published, the Moral letters
were held back. And in Emile Rousseau insists on the moral centrality of free will.
Hence he can understand ‘will’ as an independent moral causality with the power
to produce moral effects. He definitely thought that he had derived political
obligation and rightful political authority from this ‘power’ of willing: ‘For civil
association is the most voluntary act in the world. Since every man is born free
and master of himself no one, under any pretext whatever, can subject him with-
out his consent’ (CW 4.200/OC 3.440). Indeed, the first four chapters of the
Social contract are devoted to refutations of erroneous theories of obligation
and right – paternal authority, the ‘right of the strongest’ and obligations derived
from slavery. ‘Since no man has any natural authority over his fellow man’,
Rousseau concludes, ‘and since force produces no right, there remain only
conventions as the basis of all legitimate authority among men’ (CW 4.134/
OC 3.355).
124 Patrick Riley
Educational authority and time

‘Will’ is plainly a central moral, political and theological notion in Rousseau’s
thought, and his constant aim, indeed, is to ‘generalise’ will (CW 4.96-7/OC
3.307) – either through civic education, as in the Social contract and the
Considerations on the government of Poland, or through private education, as in
Emile. In his view, ancient societies such as Sparta and Rome had been particu-
larly adept at generalising human will. Through their simplicity, their morality of
the common good, their civic religion, their moral use of fine and military arts,
and their lack of extreme individualism and private interest, the city-states of
antiquity had been political societies in the proper sense. In them man had been
part of a greater whole from which he ‘receives, in a sense, his life and his being’
(CW 4.155/OC 3.381). On the other hand, modern ‘prejudices’, ‘base philoso-
phy’ and ‘passions of petty self-interest’ (CW 11.171/OC 3.956) assure that ‘the
moderns no longer find in themselves any of that vigor of soul that everything
inspired in the ancients’ (CW 11.173/OC 3.959). And that ‘vigor of soul’ may
be taken to mean the avoidance – through identity with a greater whole – of
self-love, ‘this dangerous disposition from which all our vices arise’ (CW
3.155/OC 3.260). Political education in an extremely unified (‘generalised’)
state will, Rousseau writes in the Discourse on political economy, ‘draw us out of
ourselves’ and provide us with a general will before the human ego ‘has acquired
that contemptible activity that absorbs all virtue and constitutes the life of petty
souls’ (CW 3.155/OC 3.260). It follows that the best social institutions, he says
at the start of Emile, ‘are those that best know how to denature man, to take his
absolute existence from him in order to give him a relative one and transport the
I into the common unity’ (CW 13.164/OC 4.249).
Rousseau found difficulty in making free will and rational, educative authority
coexist in his practical thought. How to retain the moral attributes of free will
while doing away with will’s particularity and selfishness and ‘willfulness’; how to
generalise this moral ‘cause’ without causing its destruction? Freedom of the will
is as important to the morality of actions for Rousseau as for any voluntarist
coming after Augustine’s insistence that a good will (bona voluntas) alone is
good (Augustine, 1993, book 1, chapter 12). But Rousseau was suspicious of the
very ‘faculty’ – the only faculty – that could moralise. Thus he urges in the
Discourse on political economy that the ‘most absolute authority is that which
penetrates to the inner man and is exerted no less on his will than on his actions’
(CW 3.148/OC 3.251). Can the will be both an autonomous ‘moral cause’ and
subject to the rationalising, generalising effect of educative authority? This is
Rousseau’s constant difficulty. Even Emile, the best educated of men, chooses to
continue to accept the guidance of his teachers right at the end of the work:
‘Advise us and govern us. We shall be docile. As long as I live, I shall need you’
(CW 13.675/OC 4.868). How much more, then, do ordinary men need the
guidance of a ‘great legislator’ – the Numa or Moses or Lycurgus of whom
Rousseau speaks so often, for example, in the Considerations on the government
of Poland (CW 11.171-4/OC 3.956-9) – when they embark on the setting up
of a system which will not only aid and defend but also moralise them. The
general will is dependent on ‘the union of understanding and will in the social
body’ (CW 4.154/OC 3.380); but that understanding, which is provided (at
least initially) by educative authority – rather than by a Kantian ‘fact of reason’
giving (timeless) ‘objective ends’ – is difficult to make perfectly congruent with
‘will’ as an autonomous ‘moral cause’.
This notion of the relation of educative authority to will appears both in
Rousseau’s theories of public or civic education and also in his theory of private
education. In educating a child, Rousseau advises the tutor in Emile, ‘Let him
always believe he is the master, and let it always be who you are. There is no
subjection so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom. Thus the
will itself is made captive’ (CW 13.257/OC 4.362). One can hardly help asking
what has become of ‘will’ when it has been ‘made captive’, and whether it is
enough to preserve the mere ‘appearance’ of freedom. It has been argued that
Rousseau simply was not ‘worried by the gap which opens up between the
appearance and the reality of freedom’ (Charvet, 1974, p. 58). Actually Rousseau
appears to have been of two minds: the poor who ‘agree’ to a social contract that
merely legitimises the holdings of the rich preserve the appearance of freedom,
but Rousseau in the Second discourse dismisses this contract as a fraud (CW
3.53-4/OC 3.177). On the other hand, will is ‘made captive’ in Emile, and
‘penetrated’ by authority in the Discourse on political economy; and neither that
captivity nor that penetration is criticised by Rousseau – despite his dictum
about depriving one’s actions of ‘all morality’ if one takes away the freedom of
the will. So one sees again why a general will would appeal to him: capricious
willfulness would be ‘canceled’, will rationalised by authority, ‘preserved’ (Hegel,
1967, p. 234).
If will in Rousseau is generalised primarily through an educative authority, so
that volition as ‘moral cause’ is not quite as free as he would sometimes prefer,
it is at least arguable that any tension between ‘will’ and the authority that
‘generalises’ it is only a provisional problem. Rousseau seems to have hoped that
at the end of political time (so to speak) men would finally be citizens and would
will only the common good in virtue of what they had learned over time; at the
end of civic time, they might actually be free, and not just ‘forced to be free’
(CW 4.141/OC 3.364). At the end of its political education – no more ‘denatur-
ing’ or transformative than any true education – political society would finally be
in a position to say what Emile says at the end of his ‘domestic’ education, that
he chooses to ‘remain what you have made me’ (CW 13.665/OC 4.855). At this
point (of ‘decision’) there would be a ‘union of understanding and will’ in
politics, but one in which ‘understanding’ is no longer the private possession of
a legislator. At this point, too, ‘agreement’ and ‘contract’ would finally have real
meanings: the ‘general will’, which is ‘always right’, would be enlightened as
well, and contract would go beyond being a mere rich man’s confidence trick
(legalising unequal property) that it is in the Second discourse. At the end of
political time, the general will one has ‘as a citizen’ would have become a kind
of second nature, approaching the true naturalness of volonté générale in the
126 Patrick Riley
seventeenth-century version of the divine modus operandi. ‘Approaching’,
however, is the strongest term one can use, and the relation of will to the educa-
tive authority that generalises it remains a problem in Rousseau – the more so
because he often denied (in his more Lockean moods) that there is any natural
authority on earth (CW 4. 134/OC 3.355).
We still might ask how one can reconcile Rousseau’s insistence on an all-
shaping educative authority with his equal insistence on free choice and personal
autonomy. A possible answer is: through his theory of education, which is at the
heart of his thought – the one thing that can make Rousseauianism ‘work’. At
the end of civic time, when men have been denatured and transformed into
citizens, they will finally have civic knowledge and general will – just as adults
finally have the moral knowledge and the independence that they (necessarily)
lacked as children. For Rousseau there are unavoidable stages in all education,
whether private or public. The child, he says in Emile, must first learn necessity,
then utility and finally morality, in that inescapable order. If one says ‘ought’ to
an infant he simply reveals his own ignorance and folly. This notion of necessary
educational time, of becoming what one was not, is revealed perfectly in Emile’s
utterance, when he chooses ‘to remain what you have made me’. That is
deliberately paradoxical – many of Rousseau’s central moral/political beliefs are
cast in the form of paradoxes. However, it does show that the capacity to ‘decide’
is indeed ‘made’. It is education that ‘forces one to be free’ – by slowly ‘gener-
alising’ the will. Similarly, Rousseau’s ‘nations’ are at first ignorant: ‘For nations
as for men there is a time of youth, or maturity if you prefer, that must be
awaited before subjecting them to laws’ (CW 4.158/OC 3.386). Waiting,
however, requires time; autonomy arrives at the end of a process, and the general
will is at last as enlightened as it was (always) right. On the most favourable read-
ing, then, Rousseau does not, as some critics allege, vibrate incoherently between
‘Platonic’ education and ‘Lockean’ voluntariness; if his notion of becoming-
in-time works, then the généralité of antiquity and the volonté of modernity are
truly fused by this ‘modern who has an ancient soul’.
Conclusion
In the end, for Rousseau, no universal morality – not a Christian one based on
universal charity, nor a Diderotian one grounded in passion-silencing reason, nor
a Kantian one resting on reason-ordained ‘objective ends’ – can help in the
transformation of natural men into denatured citizens. The générale must be
(somewhat) particulière. This explains the weight which Rousseau gives to
education. For him, men do not naturally think of themselves as parts of a greater
whole – a genre humain or a Reich der Zwecke – and must therefore be brought
to a non-natural civic belief. But at the end of civic time – if volonté is to be equal
to généralité – they must finally see the force of Emile’s decision ‘to remain what
you have made me’.
Rousseau not only wanted to ‘secularise’ the general will – to turn it (mainly)
away from theology (and God’s will to save ‘all men’); he wanted to endow
human beings with a will, a really efficacious ‘power’ of choosing, which can then
be subjected to the generalising influence of civic education – a republican
education which Montesquieu eloquently described but took to have vanished
from the modern (monarchical) world. First real will, then general will: that is
what Rousseau would say to his great French predecessors. And if that will can
be generalised by a non-authoritarian educative authority, the final product will
be the realisation of Rousseau’s highest civic ideal: the volonté générale one has
‘as a citizen’.
Notes
1 For all references to Rousseau’s texts in this paper, CW refers to the University Press of
New England’s Collected Writings of Rousseau edition and OC to the Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade’s Oeuvres complètes, followed by the relevant volume and page numbers.
2 This paper is a revised and edited version of ‘Rousseau’s general will: freedom of a
particular kind’, Political Studies, XXXIX, pp. 55–74, 1991; by permission of John Wiley
and Sons.
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& Row).
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9 Educational theory and the
social vision of the Scottish
Enlightenment
Ryan Patrick Hanley
Introduction
The Scottish Enlightenment is celebrated for its many contributions to the
natural sciences, the social sciences, and the moral sciences; a wide range of
modern academic disciplines – including economics, history, and sociology – can
even trace their origins to it. But for all this attention, one aspect of the Scottish
Enlightenment has been almost entirely neglected by popular commentators and
specialists alike: its educational theory.
In what follows, I aim to illuminate the relationship between the educational
theory of the Scottish Enlightenment and the moral psychology and political
theory of commerce, corruption, and the civilising process that have long been
recognised as distinguishing features of Scottish thought in the eighteenth
century. In so doing I aim to complement the many existing studies of eighteenth-
century Scottish educational institutions – from the parish and burgh schools to
the universities – that have emphasised the relationship between such institutions
and the improving spirit associated with the Scottish Enlightenment.1 This spirit
was particularly evident in the universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen and
Edinburgh, which have long been recognised as major centres of pedagogical
innovation as well as theological liberalisation as they struggled to emerge from
the domination of Calvinism in the first half of the eighteenth century,2 and
become dynamic institutions of education in both public virtue and practical
morality and the natural sciences and mathematics.3 All of this has been carefully
and well studied. Yet what has not been a focus of study is the close relationship
of eighteenth-century Scottish educational theory to the social vision of the
Scottish Enlightenment.
To begin: what exactly was this ‘social vision’? Scholars have uncovered a
remarkable number of diverse concerns under this general aegis, but it seems fair
to say that at its heart lay a certain understanding of human flourishing and the
social institutions and individual virtues that best promote its realisation. This
conception of human flourishing was particularly rooted in an effort to reconcile
the pursuit and achievement of material opulence on a collective level with the
pursuit and achievement of moral excellence on an individual level – that is, to
combine ‘wealth and virtue’ (Hont & Ignatieff, 1983). In this sense, Scottish
130 Ryan Patrick Hanley
concern with progress was hardly limited to material progress, but extended to
a concern to promoting the moral development of both the individual and
society. Of course, to some degree such concerns were common to the European
Enlightenment taken as a whole, yet in Scotland the question of the challenges
and benefits of commercial society had a decidedly central place. In particular,
the effort to reconcile wealth and virtue contributed to the development of
several of the Scottish Enlightenment’s most distinctive contributions to the
social sciences, including the effort to define a ‘science of man’ dedicated to the
empirical study of human phenomena, the development of historical narratives
capable of explaining the progress of society from savagery to civilisation or
‘rudeness to refinement’, the emergence of a distinctive approach to political
economy, and the articulation of an ethical system suited to a commercial age.4
The educational theory of the Scottish Enlightenment was conceived in this
context and sought to contribute to this social vision. Among its principal aims
was to explain how modern citizens might be best equipped to meet the new
challenges of commercial modernity. This project compelled a creative rethink-
ing of the aims of a liberal education (Rhyn, 1999, pp. 5, 12), and particularly a
shift to the view that ‘the liberal arts were not to be indulged as ornamental
accomplishments, but as a vital forming-process for the character of citizens in a
modern Scottish res publica’ (Jones, 1983, p. 90). At the same time, the Scots
were hardly civic republicans in any simple sense; as Roger Emerson has recently
and convincingly argued, ‘the Scottish Enlightenment was not principally about
politeness or civic humanism but something more basic, the remaking of a
society so that it could produce men able to compete in every way in a rapidly
changing world’ (Emerson, 2009, p. 19). This ambition particularly compelled
a reorientation of liberal education towards ameliorating the specific challenges
posed by commercial civilisation in a manner that complemented the reform of
educational institutions happening simultaneously on practical level in response
to this stimulus (Withrington, 1970, esp. pp. 169–170, 177–181). For all their
ostensible contributions to ‘the invention of the modern world’ (Herman,
2001), the Scots knew that their invention came at a potential cost of its own –
and nowhere is this so clear as in their writings on education, which, as I argue
below, play a central role in the larger Scottish inquiry into how to maximise the
benefits of commercial society while also controlling its costs.
Taken as a whole, the educational theory of the Scottish Enlightenment
focused on two main questions. First, what particular virtues are necessary in a
commercial society and how can education properly conceived contribute to
their cultivation? Second, what particular vices are endemic to a commercial
society and how can education properly conceived contribute to their mitiga-
tion? These questions govern the brief remarks on education to be found in the
works of the most prominent thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, including
David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, as well as the extensive reflec-
tions found in the Scottish Enlightenment’s three main treatises on education:
George Turnbull’s Observations upon liberal education (1742), David Fordyce’s
Dialogues on education (1745–1748), and Henry Home, Lord Kames’ Loose
Educational theory and the social vision of the Scottish Enlightenment 131
hints on education (1781). These works attest to the fact that eighteenth-century
Scotland’s contributions to innovation in education go well beyond its justly
celebrated institutions and extend to a reconsideration of the proper aims of a
liberal education in commercial modernity – an understanding deserving the
attention of intellectual historians and educational theorists alike.
George Turnbull (1698–1748)

While recent editions of his works have helped to reinstate George Turnbull in
the canon of the Scottish Enlightenment, he remains best known today for his
service at Marischal College, Aberdeen, where he was tutor to Thomas Reid, the
great Scottish philosopher. But in his own day, Turnbull was recognised as an
authority on educational theory.5 Educational theory and educational reform are
indeed a principal focus of all three of his major works: The principles of moral
and Christian philosophy (1740), A treatise on ancient painting (1740), and
Observations upon liberal education (1742). Taken collectively, these works offer
the Scottish Enlightenment’s most comprehensive reflection on education’s role
in ameliorating the ills of commercial society.
The Principles is a broad and sprawling work treating subjects from theology
to metaphysics to epistemology.6 But the departure point for this inquiry was a
characteristically Scottish treatment of the foundations of civil society. These
foundations are in part to be found in human moral psychology; following
Shaftesbury and Hutcheson and many other challengers to the egocentric
moralities of Hobbes and Mandeville, Turnbull insists that it is not egoism but
sociability that is natural to man.7 Our fitness for society, he argues, is evident
not simply in our natural sociability, but also in our very needs and wants – needs
and wants that require the assistance of others for their satisfaction. The very
origin of society indeed lies in ‘mutual wants’ that necessitate ‘mutual dependence’
and give rise in time to the ‘reciprocal interchange of friendly offices’ among men
defined by ‘diversity’ and ‘inequality of talents’ (Principles 1.212–218; see also
Observations 94, 119–120, 329, 358) – a vision of commercial society built on
specialised interdependent labour that anticipates Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations
1.1–2). But Turnbull especially anticipates Smith in his clear-eyed assessment of
the advantages and disadvantages of such a society. Turnbull knows well that some
think we ‘would be happier in small bodies, without any arts, but such as are
necessary to mere subsistence’. He clearly thinks this untenable and that man can
only develop fully in society (see esp. Ahnert, 2007, p. 99), but at the same time
is under no illusions with regard to what is at stake in our choice. To think that
one can enjoy the benefits of opulence without also being subject to its character-
istic vices ‘is as absurd as to eat our cake and cry for it’ (Principles 1.353–54). It
thus belongs to us to choose whether we prefer a ‘simple state’ without arts or one
dedicated to ‘opulence and greatness’, but our choice is to be made knowing that
we ‘cannot have the goods of both at the same time’ (Principles 1.358–59).
Turnbull’s own preference was clear. Yet in choosing commercial modernity,
he insisted that it is also necessary to mitigate the particular ills endemic to it.
What then are these ills, and in what exactly did he think ‘our present corruption’
consists (Principles 1.331)? Some direct light is shed in one of his short
essays:
In the age we live in, every thing conspires to insinuate early into young
minds the desire of riches, as that which makes the chief joy and honour of
life; and a dread and contempt of poverty, as that alone which makes
miserable, or brings disgrace and shame. Avarice is now the universal
passion: ambition is no more. But ’till the mind is fortified against this fatal
error, none of the great virtues can grow up in it. (Prefatory discourse x; see
also Observations 123)
Here and elsewhere Turnbull’s main target is his society’s exacerbation of

egocentrism, which expresses itself in a love of money that transforms men into
‘narrow souls, who live as if they were born for themselves only’ (Prefatory
discourse xii). This position might seem to parallel a now-familiar language of
classical republicanism that was a prominent feature of eighteenth-century
critiques of luxury. Turnbull however pointedly rejects this ‘general, confused
way of declaiming against luxury’ (Principles 1.360; Painting viii; Observations
385), and herein lies the interest in his argument. Unlike the republicans,
Turnbull criticised commercial society from the inside rather than the outside.
His concern was not simply that commercial avarice would lead to an effeminacy
that would vitiate martial virtue (Principles 1.361; Observations 410), but rather
that the excesses of the emergent commercial society in which he lived might
vitiate its capacity to deliver the genuine goods of which it is capable.8 Put differ-
ently, opulence requires the stimulation of passions that promote the pursuit of
external goods, yet successful attainment of such goods seems to sap the industry
necessary to sustain such pursuits; in Turnbull’s words, ‘the temper and spirit
necessary to acquire them’ is ‘lost by great indulgence in the enjoyment of them’
(Principles 1.355).
The challenge of commercial civilisation is then to establish a balance that
‘would produce consumption necessary to the maintenance and encouragement
of industry, without the decrease of the industrious spirit’ (Principles 1.357) – a
challenge as much for educators as for statesmen. A primary aim of Turnbull’s
Observations is thus to explain how such a balance is to be achieved in practice.
And it is here that the book’s value lies. Much in the Observations, it should be
said, is hardly novel; its recapitulations of previous teachings on such common-
place subjects as the relationship of active to contemplative life, the real value of
the study of classical languages, and the import of encouraging children’s curios-
ity, can be tedious. Yet Turnbull breaks new and genuinely important ground in
his treatment of education’s social role. Some of this is the result of grounding
his conception of education in a new epistemological framework. In the
Observations, the key problem concerns a mistake in the ‘association of ideas’.9
This epistemological focus enabled Turnbull to connect his theory of education
to his political diagnosis. For in the Observations, the ‘principal art’ of a
well-regulated education was to establish in the mind of the child a just associa-
tion of ideas – a task of crucial importance for both individual and social happi-
ness as it is by the ‘association and repetition of ideas that desires or aversions are
kindled into propensities or passions’ (Observations 195, 222). On these
grounds, it seems right to say that ‘advice regarding the identification of
unsuitable associations lies at the heart of Turnbull’s educational theory’
(Broadie, 1994, pp. 40–43, at 40; Stewart-Robertson, 1981, p. 515). What
remains to be seen is the intimate connection between the educational uses
of association and Turnbull’s conception of commercial civilisation and its
challenges.
Turnbull’s key claim on this front is that the present corruption of commercial
civilisation is in fact the result of a false association of ideas. Chief among these
is the too-common association of happiness with external goods, and especially
with wealth – a false association that has given rise to restless anxiety and
‘splenetic fretting’ (Observations 338), as well as to a mistaken conflation of
material ‘pomp and pageantry, ribbons, jewels, and other shining gew-gaws’ with
‘true beauty, real honour, and genuine unfading greatness’. And with this
Turnbull explains the ‘great art of education’ in commercial society: to overcome
this false association of happiness with external goods by accustoming ‘young
minds early to the inward work of regulating fancy, and rectifying opinion, on
which all depends’ (Observations 136–137). To some degree this could be
accomplished by ‘weeding’ out those false associations (Stewart-Robertson,
1981, pp. 520–521), but better would be to nip them in the bud before they
take root (see Observations 29, 67, 93, 206). Turnbull’s faith in our capacity to
succeed in such an endeavour attests at once to his faith in the natural goodness
of man and the essential artificiality of vice (e.g. Principles 1.320, 327–329,
364), as well as his optimistic insistence that happiness, far from the mere effect
of our circumstance, is rather ‘in a great measure our own work and acquisition’
(e.g. Principles 1.318, 334–335, 339, 344–345). In a practical sense, this insist-
ence culminates in the claim that it is ‘the great business of education’ to
pre-empt the association of happiness with wealth and instead ‘form early in
minds a just notion of glory; and to strengthen in them a passion for honour’
(Prefatory discourse xviii–xix; cf. Principles 1.193 and esp. Observations 80–81,
132, 138–139, 175, 268, 289). Turnbull’s hope was that by interrupting this
association of happiness with signs of external opulence, a proper education
would encourage its students to ‘look down with disdain upon wealth and
outward grandeur’ and prefer instead the self-sufficiency of one unencumbered
by dependence on external goods (Observations 333). In so doing, Turnbull
sought to call the citizens of his incipient commercial republic to a reverence for
‘true magnanimity’ by preserving ‘our natural Love of Knowledge, our Sense of
Beauty natural and moral, our publick and generous Affections, and our Love of
Greatness; to improve and perfect which Dispositions is certainly the principal
Scope of Education’ (Observations 362; Painting xxiii), and thereby provide ‘the
means of inculcating the personal responsibility necessary for living in a free
society’ (Moore, 2003, p. ix).
David Fordyce (1711–1751)

Like Turnbull, Fordyce’s principal aim as an educational theorist was to set forth
a vision of the proper education for citizens of modern commercial republics.
Fordyce further focused on remedying several more vicious psychological
dispositions – dispositions which would, in time, occupy a central place in the
critiques of commercial modernity developed by Rousseau, among others.
Fordyce’s educational theory begins with a set of assumptions already familiar
to readers of Turnbull. First, he assumes that the principal aim of education is to
instruct its recipients in the nature and obligations of the best life – a concern
reflected both in the quotation from Plato’s Republic that opens the Elements, as
well as his definition of ethics at Elements 3.5.10 Second, Fordyce assumes that
this best life is to be found in action rather than contemplation; indeed the
denigration of the ‘mere bookworm’ and concomitant celebration of the virtues
of ‘men of action and business’ – men whose virtue is cultivated in the bustle of
the world rather than the quiet of the cloister or library – is among the most
frequently repeated tropes across his two quite repetitive works (e.g. Elements
57, 71; Dialogues 1.27, 1.87, 1.156–157, 2.63–64, 2.302). This concern is itself
evidence of Fordyce’s ‘Scottish’ perspective; indeed in claiming that man is
‘principally formed for Action’, Fordyce would proclaim his allegiance to one of
the Scottish Enlightenment’s central articles of faith (Dialogues 2.223; cf.
Hanley, 2008, 36–38). And this would play a prominent role in Fordyce’s educa-
tional theory, particularly in the Dialogues, dedicated chiefly to articulating a
vision of ‘an ideal academy’ whose activities and ends are ‘civic rather than
merely educational’ (Jones, 1983, p. 109, see also p. 116).
Yet Fordyce’s most important connection to the social theory of the Scottish
Enlightenment lies in his conception of the origins and nature of society.
Fordyce’s social theory begins with the insistence that human beings are
naturally sociable (Elements 102). On such a foundation, he built his theory of
society – a theory which, echoing Turnbull and anticipating Smith, would seek
to employ this natural sociability in a system of mutual interdependence or
‘mutual necessity’ which promotes the ‘connection’ that binds those of diverse
station into a unified body capable of satisfying reciprocal needs (see e.g.
Elements 88–89, 94–98). But Fordyce’s discussion of sociability also goes a step
further – a step that takes his discussion beyond Turnbull and brings him closer
to some of the more sophisticated social analyses of Smith and the later Scottish
Enlightenment. This was to recognise that natural sociability is not only the
impetus for the development of civil society but also a force that continues to
shape social interaction in civil society via its manifestation in sympathy (Elements
26, 44, 90–91; cf. Dialogues 1.350, 2.157–158). Fordyce was neither the first
nor the last Scottish thinker to attend to the role of sympathy. What makes his
analysis unique was his explicit emphasis on its dual nature. On the one hand,
sympathy – and especially the indignation it sometimes prompts – promotes
justice (see Elements 45). On the other hand, sympathy – and especially its
tendency to be seduced by appearances which subvert judgment – plays a key
role in corruption.11 Like Turnbull, Fordyce gives prominent emphasis to the
mechanism of association in this process (see Wasserman, 1953, pp. 46–47;
Wood, 1993, p. 54) and indeed traces corruption to seduction of wealth – itself
an effect of an improper association of ideas in the disordered imagination
(Elements 124–125; Dialogues 1.255–256). Thus Fordyce insists that a chief aim
of education is to reorganise the mind by ‘disjoining Unnatural and forming just
Associations’ and instead form a ‘correct Imagination’ (Dialogues 1.253–254;
Virtue 2) which will serve to ‘connect our Ideas of moral Excellence and Good
with their natural Images and Representatives’ and thereby dispel these mislead-
ing ‘Phantoms of Good’ (Dialogues 1.266–268).
For all their similarities, Fordyce’s emphasis on the role of sympathy in this
process takes him beyond Turnbull. Given the propensity of the imagination to
be seduced by appearances, Fordyce recognises that the danger in such confused
associations is not simply the harm that the individual is likely to do to himself
but rather the harm that such an individual is likely to do to others; that is, it is
not simply the restless pursuit of external goods that worries Fordyce but the
duplicity and cruelty of those who regard the manipulation of appearances as a
useful tool in the pursuit and acquisition of such goods (Dialogues 2.8, 2.12,
1.74; cf. 1.77). Ultimately it is these moral concerns that form the problem to
which his proposed education aims to respond.
This practical education is built on Fordyce’s understanding of human
psychology. On this view, the proper task of education is to cultivate or develop
our natural passions. This point is made in several places by both Fordyce and his
fictional interlocutors (Elements 50, 126; Dialogues 1.168, 1.108). As has been
noted (Tatton, 1988, p. 81), at times this takes the form of a critique of culture
and celebration of nature reminiscent of Rousseau: ‘Nature gives us Talents, it is
Education that applies them right or wrong. Nature bestows Propensions and
Affections, which may be directed to Good, either public or private. ’Tis Culture
that improves or perverts them’ (Dialogues 1.168). More often, however, the
emphasis of Fordyce’s interlocutors is on the responsibility of education to ‘work
up’ nature’s gifts by polishing the passions (Elements 126; Dialogues 1.108).
As an educator, Fordyce’s strategy is to develop the natural passions by
channelling them to optimal ends. His interlocutors thus routinely and optimis-
tically speak of their conviction that every natural passion can be cultivated into
a virtue (Dialogues 2.69–70). In so insisting, Fordyce and his interlocutors
frequently champion the modern commercial virtues. Fordyce himself dedicated
one section of the Elements to the explication of the ‘social duties of the
commercial kind’, and here and elsewhere one finds a pronounced emphasis on
redirecting the passions associated with self-love towards virtues and duties that
best promote the wellbeing of all; indeed it is in this vein that Fordyce celebrates
‘Justice, Fair-dealing, Sincerity, Fidelity to Compacts, and the like’ – a celebra-
tion of modern commercial virtues (Elements 94, 97; cf. Dialogues 1.15).
In sum, much of Fordyce’s educational theory was dedicated to explaining
how we might redirect ‘that little wretched Thing we call – Selfishness’ to habits
and principles that are in both the public and in our private interest (Dialogues
1.304–307). At the same time, Fordyce shared the Scottish mixed feelings
towards what has been called the ‘new-model man’ of commercial civilisation
(Lerner, 1979), insisting on the limits of such a man’s horizons. This is particu-
larly clear in his several accounts of the ways in which we might cultivate certain
virtues beyond the modern commercial virtues, including a love of tranquillity
and beauty (Dialogues 1.240). His interest explicitly extends to two higher
classes of duties that lie beyond the social duties of a commercial kind: duties to
political society and duties to God. And on the latter front, one of Fordyce’s
central aims is the recovery of what he calls the ‘true Religion’ or ‘true Theism’
that constitutes the ‘Completion of Morality’ (Elements 112–116). Fordyce’s
interest in such binds him to an important if underemphasised line of thinking
within the Scottish Enlightenment on the nature of ‘true religion’. But here I
only want to call attention to his emphasis on the idea that religion is needed to
‘complete’ morality, for it is in this vein that Fordyce insists that ‘the various and
solemn Offices of public Religion, are Duties of indispensible moral Obligation,
among the best Cements of Society, the firmest Prop of Government, and the
fairest Ornament of both’ (Elements 118) – a line of argument reaching its
striking conclusion in the claim that ‘to be thoroughly social then, one must be
truly religious’ (Dialogues 1.310).
Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782)

In his introduction to the Observations, Turnbull lamented that the ancients
‘took care to educate the heart as well as the understanding: but who thinks of
the strange task at present!’ (Observations 27). As his century progressed, several
would rise to Turnbull’s challenge, with Rousseau being by far the most famous.
But in Scotland, Turnbull’s challenge would be most directly taken up by the
eminent jurist, Henry Home, Lord Kames. In 1781, Kames published the first
edition of his Loose hints upon education, chiefly concerning the culture of the heart.
The Loose hints has been almost wholly forgotten today, yet it remains of crucial
import for the response it gives to Turnbull’s challenge as well as for the way in
which it unifies its author’s wide-ranging intellectual project. One of the most
important threads running throughout his work is his insistence on the superior-
ity of the heart and the passions over reason and understanding (see Lehmann,
1971, p. 242). Loose hints addresses this question directly, arguing that the heart
is ‘the seat of emotions and passions, and of moral perceptions, such as right and
wrong, good and bad, praise and blame’, and that ‘the chief branch of education’
is nothing less than ‘the culture of the heart during childhood’ (Loose hints 1n,
v; cf. Introduction ix–x; Elements 32). On Kames’ view, the primary aim of educa-
tion is thus to cultivate our natural passions (Essays 62). At the same time, Kames
recognises the challenges of such a project, given that ‘nature may be warped by
circumstances’ (Loose hints 69). And that Kames believed that the natures and
hearts of his countrymen had been so warped seems beyond doubt. As has been
noted, in Loose hints Kames ‘picked up the theme of corruption of civilisation
which he had introduced in Sketches of the history of man’ (Ross, 1972, p. 366);
indeed in Loose hints one finds its author lamenting ‘this degenerate age’ given
over to vanity (vi), just as he had insisted in Sketches that ‘the epidemic distempers
of luxury and selfishness are spreading wide in Britain’, leading to ‘gradual decay
of manhood’ and reducing London and Westminster to scenes of ‘luxury’ and
‘love of show’ and ‘love of gain’ (Sketches 1.220, 2.426, 2.554). To be sure:
Kames knew well the social and political benefits of commerce, and was on the
whole a friend rather than a foe of commercial society, yet this conception of its
effects on the heart and mind is remarkable (see e.g. Sketches 2.372; Elements
3–4) and led him to the striking conclusion that ‘[r]iches, selfishness, and luxury,
are the diseases that weaken prosperous nations’, and ‘corrupt the heart,
dethrone the moral sense, and make an anarchy in the soul’ (Sketches 3.761).
Kames’ analysis of the moral effects of ‘a flourishing commerce’ forms the
foundation of his vision of the proper role of modern education: not simply to
cultivate the heart, but to cultivate those natural passions which have been
obscured and rendered unrecognisable. In developing this claim, Kames
necessarily sounds like Rousseau. And this is hardly an accident; Kames was
clearly a careful reader of Rousseau, and at several points the Loose hints engages
directly with Emile. But for all their shared convictions about the nature of the
problem, Kames and Rousseau hardly agreed on the proper remedy, and thus for
all their common ground on cultivation of natural sentiment, Kames ultimately
concludes that while Emile may be ‘a work of great genius’, its author ‘has
unhappily too much imagination’ and ‘builds castles in the air, and in vain
endeavours to give them a foundation’ (Loose hints 27). Kames goes on to delin-
eate these differences at length, noting in particular their differing conceptions
of the utility of force and fear in the education of youth (e.g. Loose hints 53, 145),
their differing conceptions of the naturalness of industry and property (e.g. Loose
hints 81, 100–101), their differing conceptions of the appropriateness of reli-
gious education in early childhood (e.g. Loose hints 238, 243), and their differing
conceptions of the place of intellectual instruction in early childhood (e.g. Loose
hints 5, 276). But all these are relatively minor in light of their principal differ-
ence. Rousseau’s aim was of course to educate a single individual, and render
such an individual capable of living as a natural man in the midst of society.
Kames’ aims were much more comprehensive; far from wanting merely to
educate one man to render himself impervious to the corrupting influences of
society, Kames sought to create a new model for the modern citizen. Interestingly,
this ambition arises most clearly in an aspect of Kames’ educational theory closely
aligned with Rousseau’s: namely their mutual hostility to books. Like Rousseau,
Kames would have his students avoid books for as long as possible: ‘as man is
intended to be more an active than a contemplative being, the educating of a
young man to behave properly in society, is of still greater importance than to
make him even a Solomon for knowledge’ (Loose hints 15). But in Kames’ hands,
this observation takes on a Scottish cast as it leads him to align himself not with
Rousseau’s project to recover natural man in society but to the view that unlike
animals and natural savages content with food and rest, ‘man is not so made,’ as
‘his constitution fits him for action’ (Loose hints 282).
In practical terms, this leads Kames particularly to focus on two sorts of
virtues: the restraining and the active. The aim of the ‘restraining virtues’ was
specifically to mitigate the corruptions of commercial society. In this sense,
Kames regarded early childhood as a period in which early intervention could
preserve natural instincts towards moderation prior to their corruption by
commerce; thus his belief that ‘you cannot begin too early, to check the desire
that children have for toys and gewgaws’, as they are ‘perverted’ by such indul-
gence (Loose hints 98) and his insistence that ‘when any irregular appetite breaks
out, endeavour immediately to repress it’ (Loose hints 111). Such early interven-
tions, Kames believes, are needed to mitigate and circumvent the dangerous
propensities that he diagnoses in his studies of luxury, including that ‘miserable
restlessness, the fruit of intemperance in grovelling pleasures’, as well as that
pride or ‘imagined superiority’ and ‘self-partiality’ that leads the egocentric to
neglect their social and moral duties (Loose hints 284, 315–316). Again and again
Kames thus attests to the import of restraint, avoidance of intemperance, and the
willingness to accept cheerfully one’s lot. It is in this vein – and indeed in unmis-
takably Rousseauian terms – that he insists that we need to cultivate both a resist-
ance to the lure of opinion as well as a desire for a happiness that comes from the
heart and is resistant to the judgments of others (see e.g. Loose hints 85, 106,
152; Art of Thinking 53–54). Yet Kames also is hardly any simple advocate of
what Rousseau called ‘negative education’ and which seeks to keep all tempta-
tions at arm’s length. Thus at the same time that he praises the restraining virtues
of self-command, Kames also encourages the active virtues of beneficence;
indeed ‘there is no branch of education more neglected than the training of
young persons to be charitable’ (Loose hints 86). The Loose hints are indeed full
of praises not only of the polite modern virtues of cheerfulness, industry, and
cleanliness (e.g. Loose hints, 61, 71, 74), but also the higher virtues of gratitude,
forgiveness, and the sentiment of righteous indignation at spectacles of unwar-
ranted suffering that is the origin of justice (Loose hints 89, 130, 221). Ultimately,
this side of education is every bit as important to Kames as the negative educa-
tion in the virtues of restraint, as both are necessary for providing that training
of the moral sense so susceptible to ‘great refinements by culture and education’,
and when properly refined gives rise to an agent in which the ‘selfish passions are
tamed and subdued, and social affections gain the ascendant’ (Essays 64).
Conclusion
The three thinkers profiled above offer the most significant and extended educa-
tional theories of the Scottish Enlightenment. How then do their studies
comport with the thoughts on education offered by the more prominent think-
ers of the Scottish Enlightenment? In fact the connection between commercial
corruption and education that lies at the heart of the educational theories of
Turnbull, Fordyce, and Kames forms the core of the briefer thoughts on educa-
tion set forth by Ferguson and Smith. Of these two, Ferguson tends to be
more readily associated with the critique of commercial corruption. Among his
principal worries was that the corruption endemic to commercialisation vitiates
human excellence; ‘recommending employments in proportion as they are lucra-
tive, and certain in their gains’ merely ‘drives ingenuity, and ambition itself, to
the counter and the workshop’. In order to preserve within commercial society
the natural human concern for perfection, a renewed emphasis on education is
required. But not any sort of education; too often modern education itself, on
his view, further encourages this mediocrity. In this vein the growth of libraries
and university education, often viewed as a great advance, is in fact detrimental
insofar as it leads us to ‘become students and admirers, instead of rivals; and
substitute the knowledge of books, instead of the inquisitive or animated spirit
in which they were written’ (Essay 206).
Adam Smith would in time come to extend both Ferguson’s lament of the
conditions of contemporary education, as well as his insistence that the best
remedy for the challenges posed by commercial corruption was an education of
a quite different sort. Indeed the tie that binds all of Smith’s reflections on
education is this theme of corruption. Smith introduces this theme in his
comments on the state of contemporary educational institutions. Too often, he
laments, no real instruction is given there – a fact he famously blames on the
absence of incentive structures for faculty pay (Wealth of Nations 5.1.f.3–6). But
this is only the tip of the iceberg, for in truth the modern European university
system itself represents little more, on Smith’s view, than a set of ‘sanctuaries in
which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices found shelter and protection’
(Wealth of Nations 5.1.f.34). Founded originally for the training of clergymen,
curricula failed to adapt to meet the needs of a new class of students, and far from
teaching their students ‘the real business of the world’, colleges chose to focus
on the ‘austerities and abasement of a monk’ rather than ‘the liberal, generous,
and spirited conduct of a man’ (Wealth of Nations 5.1.f.30–35). Smith’s empha-
sis on the uselessness of contemporary education to provide men of the new
commercial age with what they need to know (Wealth of Nations 5.1.f.46)
parallels several criticisms set forth in the educational treatises examined
above, as well as the justifications for several more practical attempts to reform
eighteenth-century Scottish university curricula in a manner that would render
them more fit for a commercial people (see Gerard, 1755; Thom, 1762; see also
Stewart-Robertson, 1981, p. 510; Jones, 1983, pp. 113–114).
But Smith hardly stops here. For all the corruptions of the contemporary
institutions of education, Smith still insists that it is to education that we need to
turn to discover a remedy for the most acute forms of commercial corruption
itself. Here we find perhaps the clearest parallels between Smith and the Scottish
educational theorists profiled above. Smith’s account of commercial corruption
is in fact one of the most developed in the Scottish Enlightenment. He particu-
larly notes that for all the benefits of the division of labour, its gains are often
bought at a high human cost, as specialisation of labour often leads to repetition
that leads a labourer to become ‘as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a
human creature to become’ (Wealth of Nations 5.1.f.50). Smith’s worry was
that in this state of ‘drowsy stupidity’ or ‘mental mutilation, deformity, and
wretchedness’ that ‘all the nobler parts of the human character may be, in a great
measure, obliterated and extinguished in the great body of the people’ (Wealth
of Nations 5.1.f.51, 60). Much of Smith’s later moral philosophy can be under-
stood as an attempt to provide a normative solution to this problem (Hanley,
2009). But more immediately, Smith turned to educational institutions as a
remedy for this particular form of corruption (e.g. West, 1996, p. 100; for
further references, see Hanley, 2009, p. 60 n.12). It is Smith’s conviction that
where the great majority of citizens are placed in circumstances disadvantageous
to both their own and the civic wellbeing, ‘some attention of government is
necessary, in order to prevent the almost entire corruption and degeneracy of the
great body of the people’ (Wealth of Nations 5.1.f.49). His particular recom-
mendation is that government should especially fund science education – and for
specifically political reasons, as such a citizenry would be susceptible to ‘the
delusions of enthusiasm and superstition, which, among ignorant nations,
frequently occasion the most dreadful disorders’ (Wealth of Nations 5.i.f.61). On
the grounds that ‘science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and
superstition’, Smith’s hope was that a people trained in scientific analysis might
be rendered more discriminating, if not impervious to manipulation by interested
factions (Wealth of Nations 5.1.g.14).
Thus Smith and Ferguson, like their contemporaries, insisted that the chief
aim of proper education was to fit the citizens of a commercial society to respond
to the challenges – at once intellectual, moral, and political – posed by commer-
cialisation itself. In so doing, they testify to the broader consensus within the
Scottish Enlightenment that the true aim of education is not merely the produc-
tion or dissemination of knowledge but the preservation and perpetuation of the
virtues required for life in liberal, commercial society. Perhaps nowhere does this
conviction find such eloquent testimony as in the brief reflections on education
set forth by two of the greatest luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment, Francis
Hutcheson and David Hume.12 Hutcheson is more typically understood as a
defender of the view that virtue is education’s proper aim (Short introduction
1.3.4; Meditations 6.16). But it is Hume who particularly drives this point home.
Hume is not typically regarded today as a theorist of character education.13 Yet
even Hume claims that virtue never flourishes except in a state ‘where a good
education becomes general’. In so saying he largely reaffirms the claims of his
Scottish contemporaries, insisting that ‘general virtue and good morals in a state,
which are so requisite to happiness, can never arise from the most refined
precepts of philosophy, or even the severest injunctions of religion; but must
proceed entirely from the virtuous education of youth’ (History of England
1:179; Essays 55).
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Colin Heydt and Ingrid Gregg, as well as to the
editors and reviewers for the Oxford Review of Education, for their many helpful
suggestions.
Notes
1 See e.g. Cant, 1967 and 1982; Camic, 1983, pp. 64–71; Valdés Mirayes, 2005,
pp. 102–103; cf. Anderson, 1995, pp. 1–23.
2 See e.g. Sloan, 1971, pp. 9–32; Berry, 1997, pp. 12–16; Emerson, 2003, pp. 18–20.
This evolution itself paralleled contemporaneous struggles of evangelicals and moder-
ates in the Kirk; see e.g. Cameron, 1982; Sher, 1985, esp. pp. 324–328.
3 For the former, see esp. Sher, 1990; for the latter, see esp. Wood, 2003.
4 For comprehensive treatments of these themes, see esp. Phillipson, 1981; Skinner,
1990; Berry, 1997.
5 See e.g. Benjamin Franklin’s prominent reliance on Turnbull’s work in his Proposals
relating to the education of youth in Pennsylvania (1749).
6 The work is nowadays mainly read as an attempt to domesticate moral philosophy
within the broader context of epistemology, and is often read in contrast to Hume’s
more famous execution of the same project; see e.g. Broadie, 2003b, pp. xiv–xv. For
further important comparisons, see esp. Norton, 1975, p. 705; Mackinnon, 1987,
p. 109; Broadie, 1994, p. 39; Ahnert, 2007, p. 89.
7 For studies emphasising this ‘Shaftesburianism’, and the harmonisation of morality,
religion and the moral and physical sciences, see esp. Wasserman, 1953, pp. 45–52;
Norton, 1975, pp. 704–706, 712; Mackinnon, 1987, p. 105; Stewart, 1987, p. 99;
Wood, 1993, pp. 46–55; Rivers, 2000, pp. 179–184.
8 Thus Ahnert’s helpful description of Turnbull’s recognition that ‘the natural, provi-
dential rewards for industry’ also ‘to some extent contained the seeds of its corruption’
(2007, p. 101).
9 Turnbull’s employment of this self-conscious ‘philosophical style’ (Observations 74)
may have been the effect of his engagement with Hume’s treatment of association-
ism in the just-published Treatise; or, perhaps more likely, the influence of Locke and
Hutcheson (see e.g. Broadie, 1994, pp. 35–43; Moore, 2003, pp. xii–xiii).
10 In this respect Fordyce is indeed representative of what has been called ‘the preference
for the Socratic over the Lockean position in Scottish educational thinking’ (Stewart-
Robertson, 1981, p. 522).
11 In lamenting the corruption of their age, Fordyce’s speakers (2.13, 2.18) echo
Turnbull and also anticipate better-known arguments of Ferguson and Smith from
several decades later.
12 Hutcheson and Hume are today often regarded as on different sides of this particular
issue in light of their notorious epistolary interchange on the normative duties of the
moral philosopher. Yet that debate focused on the more specialised question of the na-
ture and aims of moral philosophy itself. With regard to education understood broadly,
however, one finds greater agreement.
13 Thus Paul Russell has noted that Hume has ‘little or nothing to say in his major writ-
ings about how the virtues are actually acquired, developed and sustained’ (2006,
p. 162; cf. Hanley, 2011, on Hume’s emphasis on the claim that the natural moral
sentiment of humanity is a sufficient foundation for modern virtue).
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10 Mary Wollstonecraft
and Catharine Macaulay
on education
Elizabeth Frazer
Introduction
In 1790 Mary Wollstonecraft was 31, a published author, editor and translator,
with experience running a school, working as a ladies’ companion, and as a
governess in an aristocratic household. She moved in dissenting circles, and
in the radical circles of her publisher Joseph Johnson in central London.1 At
the end of November 1790 Wollstonecraft published her Vindication of
the rights of men, a riposte to Edmund Burke’s hostile attack on the French
Revolution (Reflections on the revolution in France) which had been published on
November 1, 1790.2
Catharine Macaulay was 59; and a famous woman in the sense that chinaware
figurines of the ‘Female Patriot’ were manufactured by the Crown Derby porce-
lain factory in the 1770s.3 Her History of England (Macaulay, 1763–1783)
rivalled and for a time outsold David Hume’s work of the same name (Hume,
1883/1754–1762). Macaulay was remarkably involved in daily political contro-
versy as a partisan of the ‘old’, ‘true’, or ‘real’ Whig cause (Hume was associated
with the ‘Tory’ position). She was the author of a number of pamphlets on
philosophical and political matters including one on Thomas Hobbes (Macaulay,
1767) and one contesting Burke’s moderate Whig analysis of problems of parlia-
ment and administration (Macaulay, 1770; cf also Macaulay, 1775). She was
celebrated in revolutionary north America, and in Paris, and was accordingly a
figure of suspicion for the Hanoverian state. By the 1780s her reputation had
suffered from the pitfalls of celebrity culture. As aspects of her family life were
lampooned, her reputation and power as a Whig propogandist receded and the
later volumes of her History were not the best sellers that the earlier ones were.
Her intellectual efforts turned to religion and morality and in 1783 she published
her Treatise on the immutability of moral truth. This then developed into her
Letters on education published in 1790 (Part III of the Letters is more or less a
reproduction of the Treatise).
The December 1790 issue of the Analytical Review included warm reviews of
both Wollstonecraft’s Vindication and Catharine Macaulay’s Observations on the
Reflections of ... Edmund Burke on the revolution in France which was published
in December 1790 (Anon, 1790a, 1790b; Hill, 1995 p. 182). The reviewer
146 Elizabeth Frazer
judged Wollstonecraft’s and Macaulay’s works very favourably as compared with
Burke’s. In November 1790 the Analytical Review had published an admiring
review by Wollstonecraft of Macaulay’s Letters on education (published November
1790). Wollstonecraft and Macaulay were in private communication at this time,
although to Wollstonecraft’s lasting regret they were never to meet (Hill, 1995).
Macaulay died in 1791, before Wollstonecraft turned to writing her Vindication
of the rights of woman, in which she spent more words on Macaulay’s praise
(Wollstonecraft, 1994/1792, p. 180).
There is then a personal and an intellectual link between Macaulay and
Wollstonecraft, and reason to attach weight to the similarities in their views on
education. Macaulay and Wollstonecraft both participated in controversy (which
continues to our own time) about whether ‘virtue’ can be taught, as opposed to
being a natural capacity that everyone is simply given. In the eighteenth century,
the whole question was bound up with theological matters, and also political
ones. Given agreement that virtue can be taught, there is the question whether
this involves teaching knowledge of propositions and principles, or whether,
rather, ethical education is more like teaching skill. There are many diverse and
subtly distinct positions within this schematic framework. Above all, Macaulay
and Wollstonecraft both dissent from any model of education as manipulation,
or the use of concealment or subterfuge. For both, the matter of truth that is at
the heart of virtue, and hence should be at the heart of political and social life,
must be enacted also in the process, as well as the outcome, of education
(Wollstonecraft, 1974/1787, pp. 7–9; Macaulay, 1996/1790, pp. 85, 185).
There are also politically significant contrasts between the two. In particular
we can emphasise a difference in their respective theories of rights, which bears
on the questions of feminism and of education. Macaulay attacks Hobbes’s
abstract theory of rights; and she also resists Burke’s theory which makes rights
a matter of tradition (Macaulay, 1767, pp. 8–10; 1790, pp. 13–14, 31). For her
rights are historical, but they are also natural. She is concerned to establish the
correct philosophical foundation for rights, and her historical and political
writing emphasises a continuing struggle to recover lost and continually threat-
ened rights (e.g. Macaulay, 1770, p. 31; Hill, 1992, pp. 31, 229; Pocock, 1998,
pp. 248f). Wollstonecraft follows this theory of rights as natural (Wollstonecraft,
1994/1790, p. 12). She insists that they are properties of women as well as men
(Zagarri, 2005, pp. 667–670). The most important thing is to secure them
culturally and legally (Wollstonecraft, 1994/1792, intro. pp. 66–67, ch. 1, p. 79;
Taylor, 2003, pp. 213–214). She is suspicious of inherited rights (1994/1790,
p.10) and aware of the novelty of the rights she proposes – women’s enfranchise-
ment, their right to paid occupation, transformed rights within marriage and the
family. So history, whether near or distant, has a different significance for her
than it has for Macaulay.
In this paper I aim to put these respective theories of rights and education into
the complicated context of eighteenth-century factional and intellectual debates
and inheritances. I want to emphasise the striking accord between Wollstonecraft
and Macaulay in matters of religion and morality in relation to education.
Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay on education 147
Here in particular it seems that Macaulay’s work has some direct influence on
Wollstonecraft, although the ideas that infuse their thinking are very much part
of the general heritage of progressive, oppositional eighteenth-century intellec-
tual culture.4
Intellectual and political context

Macaulay’s response to Hobbes on the one hand and Burke on the other is
centred on considerations about civilisation, human sympathy, governmental and
social responsibility, and the possibility of education.5 She puts these possibilities
against views of human fear and failing, the need for absolute authority, and the
claims of monarchs. She asserts a powerful version of a doctrine of popular
sovereignty (e.g. Macaulay, 1767, pp. 3–1, 1770, pp. 7–13, 1790, pp. 13–14,
44–45, 75, 95). Theories like Macaulay’s face an obvious riposte: people cannot
be relied upon to be good. The Hobbesian solution is that they must be ruled
by the sword of an absolute power. An alternative response, associated with
Hume, is that doubt about moral values, about the validity and objectivity of
moral precepts, should lead to a focus instead on what cannot be doubted: the
self-interest of human individuals is the surest foundation we have for morality
and civilisation (Hume, 1975/1751). Alexander Pope popularised this kind of
rationalism in his influential Essay on man which expounds the ‘deist’ view that
our belief in God is rational, and does not depend on any organised religion,
revelation, or dogma (Pope, 1950/1733–4).
Macaulay argues against any idea that self-interest is the foundation for moral-
ity, belief in God, or our understanding of the law of nature, and against any hint
of deism (Macaulay, 1996/1790, Pt. 3 II p. 346, VIII p. 409). Her defence of
Christian virtue centres on essential and eternal discriminations of good and evil,
just and unjust, and the certainty of a regular, simple, and universal rule of action
for all intelligent nature (Pt 3 II p. 347). Nothing in morality can depend on our
enjoyment or our pain, on what is in our material interests or their negation. She
also defends ‘stoicism’. Stoic themes were pervasive in intellectual and political
culture at the time, and references to self-sacrifice, putting the state or common-
wealth before personal interests or needs, were ubiquitous in popular culture
(and recur in her historical writing). In the Treatise and in the Letters on educa-
tion she responds to those who criticise stoic philosophy because it is ‘pagan’,
and also to those who, like Hobbes and Hume, reject it because its philosophical
anthropology is inconsistent with modern scientific understanding of passion and
interest (Macaulay, 1783, pp. 289–325, 1996/1790, Pt. 3 X–XII pp. 428–453).
Aspects of stoic doctrine are ‘consonant to the purity of Christian doctrine’
(1996/1790, Pt. 3 XII p. 448). First, the idea that the proper exertion of ration-
ality in overcoming difficulty or weakness gives rise to a consciousness of merit
which is, itself, a reward for virtue (1996/1790, Pt. 3 IX p. 424). Second, that
knowledge of virtue is one of the most important means for the acquisition of
virtue, and that knowledge of the mechanisms of human mind is ‘a necessary and
useful auxiliary in the contest between wisdom and folly’ (Pt. 3 IX p. 426).
Third, she quotes Epictetus: no great thing is to be brought to perfection
suddenly (p. 427). That is to say, education, of body, of volitions, and of reason
and understanding, is key in stoic ethics.
Macaulay’s insistence on the ‘immutability of moral truth’ is her answer to the
various errors of the Humeans, the Hobbesians, and the Deists as represented by
her and thinkers like her. Against theorists of ‘free will’ Macaulay argues that
their own views about the efficacy of education, and of institutions of punish-
ment and blame, undermine any idea that our will can be indifferent to truth
(Macaulay, 1996/1790, Pt. 3 XIV p. 463). According to her compatibilist view,
rational agency cannot be prevented from distinguishing differences in the
nature of things (e.g. the difference between good and evil, vice and virtue), and
actually the necessity of morality ‘constitutes the very essence of rational agency’
(XVIII p. 499). That is, necessity presupposes rationality and freedom.
These philosophical considerations underpin Macaulay’s insistence that educa-
tion of body, of understanding, and hence of will, involves an education in values
(Macaulay, 1996/1790, Pt. 1, e.g. IX pp. 84, XIII pp. 119–121). Equally,
education is a necessary condition for morality itself. Confusion, and evil, will
arise from confounding laws and customs of society with obligations which are
founded on correct principles of equity and justice, or from assimilating right
and wrong to pleasure and pain. One rule of right for all rational beings must
prevail; so virtue must be taught on principles (Pt. 1 XXI p. 201).
In her review of Macaulay’s Letters Wollstonecraft explicitly approves the
centrality of these religious and moral themes. She approves Macaulay’s clear and
succinct account of the doctrines of the Stoics, and her repudiation of misread-
ings of them (Wollstonecraft, 1790, p. 241). She also appreciates Macaulay’s
treatment of the problem of good and evil, while dissenting from some of the
detail of Macaulay’s treatment of God’s will (pp. 246, 250–253). As Wollstonecraft
puts it:
These acute observations on moral necessity, are a very judicious conclusion

to a book on education, for the influence of motives on human conduct, and
necessity of informing the understanding that it may regulate the will, is the
ground spur to industry, in every attempt to promote domestic and national
education. (p. 253)
I shall return to this theme of the central relevance of religion and morality to
Wollstonecraft’s educational and political theory.
First, though, we must turn to an important source for both Macaulay and
Wollstonecraft – the inheritance of the conflicting views of John Locke and Jean-
Jacques Rousseau on education (Rousseau, 1979/1762, esp. Bk III pp. 89–90;
Locke, 1989/1693).6 Lockean themes pervade both Macaulay’s and
Wollstonecraft’s views of education: experience as the only efficiacious instructor,
the superiority of reason over instinct, as well as detailed views about diet, dress,
play, sleep, techniques and topics of instruction, and so forth. (Wollstonecraft,
1787, p. 11, 1994/1792, ch. IV p. 123, ch. XI p. 237; Macaulay, 1996/1790,
Pt.1 e.g. III p. 23, IV pp. 40–45). In particular, of course, they both endorse
Locke’s views about educational equality between girls and boys (Locke,
1989/1693 passim; Wollstonecraft, 1994/1792, intro. p. 71; Macaulay,
1996/1790, Pt.1, IV pp. 46–50). Rousseau’s Emile, by contrast, with its roman-
tic conceit of keeping a child from society and the world, sheltering him from
understanding of truth and falsity in order to preserve innocence and guard
against corruption, is rejected by both Macaulay and Wollstonecraft in favour of
a sterner, more rationalist project of moral education and the learning of hard
lessons backed up by precept and principle (Wollstonecraft, 1787, p. 11;
1994/1792, ch.1 p.79; Macaulay, 1996/1790, e.g. Pt1.VI p. 60, VII p. 66, IX
p. 85, XIII p. 119). However, versions of the Emile project are ubiquitous in the
educational works that Macaulay and Wollstonecraft are writing to and from, and
they both produce versions of the uncorrupted educated individual as the prod-
uct of a pedagogic social process. I shall go on to discuss how Wollstonecraft’s
Original stories, in particular, explicitly echo a Rousseauian educational project.
But by far the most significant aspect of the inheritance of Locke and Rousseau
on education is Macaulay’s attack, echoed and theoretically elaborated by
Wollstonecraft, on Rousseau’s depiction of the education of a girl, and his model
of ideal womanhood in the person of Sophie (Rousseau, 1979/1762, bk. V).
Macaulay’s and Wollstonecraft’s lines of attack on Rousseau are paralleled by
some of the lines of their attack on Burke. By the 1760s Macaulay was divided
from Burke by Whig factionalism (Macaulay, 1770; Hill, 1992, pp. 74–6, 122).
The antagonisms between them widened as her History became more famous
and hence more criticised, with Burke referring in correspondence to ‘the patri-
otick scolding of our republican Virago’ and calling her an ‘Amazon’ (Hill,
1992, p. 173). Of course in 1790 Burke’s attack on the French revolution inten-
sified the bitterness of the controversy between him and the defenders of repub-
licanism, equality, and rights. Both Macaulay and Wollstonecraft attack Burke for
his treatment of sex. They also attack his written style as over-rhetorical and
over-emotional. Wollstonecraft’s version of this line, while sharing a good deal
with Macaulay’s, is theoretically and politically elaborated in a distinctive way.7
Macaulay and Wollstonecraft against

Rousseau and Burke
Macaulay identifies a central problem with both Burke and Rousseau – commit-
ment to hierarchy. In Rousseau’s case this is squared with anti-hierarchical republi-
canism and the kind of popular sovereignty to which Macaulay herself is committed;
in Burke’s case it is assimilated to hierarchical monarchical authoritarianism. In both
cases, although in different ways, hierarchy turns on sexual difference.8
In Rousseau’s case ideal femininity is a necessary condition of ideal ethical
masculinity; and the education of a girl must encourage hypocrisy and
dependence, she must be corrupted and debilitated in mind and body
(Macaulay, 1996/1790, Pt. 1 XXII pp. 207, 211–212). Rousseau’s representa-
tion of Sophie lowers him (a genius) to the level of ‘licentious pedant’ (p. 206).
His philosophical status is cut down by his inability to escape from his own
masculine sexuality which must explain this otherwise unaccountable misunder-
standing (XXIIII pp. 212–213). Wollstonecraft picks up this theme: Rousseau’s
‘voluptuous reveries’ are shot through with the fantasy of an apparently modest
woman who is really coquettish (Wollstonecraft, 1994/1792, ch. II pp. 90–91).
Rousseau’s account of sex and gender, and his educational philosophy which
centres on withholding the faculty of reason from girls, can only be understood
if his expressed understanding of and normative strictures regarding femininity
are put in the context of the mundane (and depressing) popular manners of the
day. Everywhere Macaulay and Wollstonecraft look there is evidence of a sexual
system which purportedly rewards women for the appearances of weakness,
ignorance and timidity. In acting this way women are, at one level, conforming
to standards of femininity that are all the stricter for being understood as natural.
But praise of such femininity always also carries an admixture of censure. From
Macaulay and Wollstonecraft’s perspectives the material rewards that can follow
on a successful acting out of feminine helplessness (such as the security of a
successful marriage) are always liable to be matched by material punishments
(such as the reproach of hypocrisy, or the disadvantages stemming from the
marriage contract). Even if this social fate is avoided, women have to live with
themselves as cut off from the right standards of virtue (Macaulay, 1790, Pt. 1
XXII p. 207, XXIII pp. 211–212, XXIV p. 221; Wollstonecraft, 1994/1792, ch.
IV pp. 122–126, 135–136; ch. VIII p. 215).
Burke, in his celebrated Philosophical enquiry into our ideas of the sublime and
the beautiful (1757), had pushed home exactly this sexual distinction (Hicks,
2002, p. 172). The sublime – powerful, terrible – is associated with the great
virtues of fortitude, justice, and wisdom (Burke, 1990/1757, Pt. 2 §.I, Pt. 3
§.X). The association of the beautiful – delicate, small, smooth – with lesser
virtues and with femininity is underlined by his remarks about beauty in women
(Pt. 3 §§. X, XII–XVI). This is associated with weakness, delicacy, timidity, and
the like – an association of which women are very sensible ‘for which reason, they
learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, to counterfeit weakness, and even sickness.
In all this, they are guided by nature’ (S.IX; cf. Wollstonecraft, 1994/1790,
p. 45). Gendered distinctions such as Burke’s sublime versus the beautiful, the
distinction between reason and emotion, or sense and sensibility, mind and body,
are central to eighteenth-century systems of thinking. In particular, we should pick
out Burke’s invocation of ‘nature’, as opposed to artifice or to culture. Strikingly,
we should note, Burke associates ‘nature’ with ‘learning’ here – although some
characteristic is natural it must nevertheless be learned.
Macaulay and Wollstonecraft both tackle this set of dualisms. They do this in
three ways. First, their arguments about the objectivity of moral precept and
virtue, universally applicable, push home the themes that ‘mind has no sex’, there
is one standard of virtue, and reason, which applies to all. Second, the associa-
tions made by Burke, Rousseau, and others between femininity and weakness,
dissimulation, hypocrisy and vanity, emotion rather than reason are insulting and
ridiculous. More to the point, they overlook the complicated social arrangements,
cultural conventions, and legal force that are required to secure them. If women
are uneducated it is because education is denied them; if they are dependent it is
because laws deny them property or autonomy; if they are dissimulating or
hypocritical it is because the ‘reward’ of marriage and social approval will only be
won by obsessive attention to appearances. The exaggerated sexual differences
that associate women’s (but not men’s) virtue with a particular form of ‘chastity’
are taken on by Wollstonecraft in a chapter-length treatment of the theme, its
history, its effects, and the alternative thesis that chastity is indeed a virtue
that applies in a specific way to men and women alike (Wollstonecraft,
1994/1792, ch. VII).
Third, though, they take Rousseau and Burke to task for exhibiting the kind
of vices and disvalued tendencies that are attributed to women. So, Rousseau
associates women in general with voluptuousness, and his idealised picture of
Sophie is of a creature who is really voluptuous while appearing to be chaste (but
the appearance of chastity belies the voluptuousness). In writing these passages
he reveals his own pornographic imagination (Wollstonecraft, 1994/1792, ch. II
p. 90; Macaulay, 1996/1790, Pt. 1 XXII pp. 205–207). Burke is accused of
being over-emotional, with his overwrought metaphors, his abusive angry
language against the revolutionaries, and his protest that Marie-Antoinette’s
person ought to be sacred (Macaulay, 1790, p. 53; Wollstonecraft, 1994/1790,
p. 24, 1994/1792). Macaulay and Wollstonecraft deploy reason and the under-
standing of truth to discern and reveal the lacunae in Rousseau’s and Burke’s
thinking. They impugn their reason by imputing emotion and rhetorical excess
to their writing, and their thought. In the Vindication of the rights of man
Wollstonecraft repeats this point about Burke’s emotional and rhetorical excess,
to the point where she herself is unable to express her disgust any further and
her text trails off into a series of ellipses (Wollstonecraft, 1994/1790, p. 60).9
Wollstonecraft on education
Three of Wollstonecraft’s works are particularly salient for analysis of her theory
of education – her first published work: Thoughts on the education of daughters
(1787); her book about and for the education of children: Original stories from
real life (1788); and the Vindication of the rights of woman (1792). Perhaps the
most striking thing about these works is the pervasiveness of the themes of
virtue, analysis of the corruption and possible improvement of society, and the
relationship of these to religion. In the two Vindications the themes of state and
law are added, so that the critique of society is supplemented by an explicit
theory of public policy.
Thoughts on the education of daughters was written in the midst of
Wollstonecraft’s career in education – after shutting down the school she ran
with her sisters in Newington Green, prior to embarking on a new job as a
governess. In the preface she makes reference to several popular books on this
topic that were extant, and the inheritance of Rousseau’s Emile and Locke’s
Thoughts is also prominent (Wollstonecraft, 1974/1787, p. 11). Education
includes care and socialisation from the earliest days of infancy. She is concerned
to repudiate harshness, and to affirm values such as respect and affection, and
early in the book she adverts to the theme of truth: ‘Children are taught revenge
and lies in their very cradles’ (Wollstonecraft, 1974/1787, p. 10). This emphasis
on truth and truthfulness is underpinned by an account of truth similar to the
one that is so central to Macaulay’s Letters on education and to her Treatise. This
is that ‘principles of truth are innate’ – our assent to many truths is without
‘reasoning’ (Wollstonecraft, 1974/1787, p. 13). Our understanding and
apprehension of truth is not based on inference (from our senses, or from
evidence). It is rather that ‘we feel their force’ (1787, p. 13). In turn, like
Macaulay, Wollstonecraft links this philosophy of truth and reason to her opposi-
tion to ‘deism’. For both Macaulay and Wollstonecraft our belief in God is based
on revealed truth. Reason and rationality are certainly to be brought to bear in
human affairs. But the prospects for educating virtuous persons are threatened if
the truth of moral principles is in doubt.
In Original stories Wollstonecraft crafts a book out of the pedagogical
technique of story-telling. The book itself is a story, about two young girls whose
misfortune it is to have been deprived of adequate education and socialisation
and accordingly are ignorant and badly behaved. These girls come under the
tutelage of Mrs Mason who
in order to eradicate these prejudice and substitute good habits instead of

those they had carelessly contracted ... never suffered them to be out of her
sight. They were allowed to ask questions on all occasions, a method she
would not have adopted, had she educated them from the first. (1788, p. vii)
We can only read this as a rejoinder to Emile. Emile’s tutor is able to educate him
from a very early age, bringing him up to embody the ideal of natural, uncor-
rupted understanding and virtue. Wollstonecraft’s teacher has to be more in the
remedial line. Mrs Mason’s method of education is largely based on story-telling,
often with the stories illustrated by the real life of the neighbourhood and
countryside in which the girls live.
The Original stories are of interest for present purposes mainly for the substan-
tive set of virtues that Wollstonecraft’s teacher is concerned to instil in her pupils:
kindness and the repudiation of cruelty; honour, integrity, truthfulness; generos-
ity and charity; industriousness; fortitude and courage. In the Vindication of the
rights of woman the theme of virtue is central. Virtues are potentially realisable
characteristics of the human condition in civilisation. Virtuous conduct is
predictable and stable. The courageous or benevolent person is reliable, not just
in the sense that they can be relied upon to be benevolent or courageous, but in
the double sense that we know what benevolence and courage are, how they
manifest themselves (Wollstonecraft, 1994/1792, ch I pp. 76–77, ch III
pp. 113–115). By contrast, vice is all over the place – the vicious parent can be
randomly kind to her children, which only shows up not only the lack, but the
very corruption of, benevolence (ch. X pp. 232–234). It is this random,
unpredictable, out of control quality of the vices – extravagance, intemperance,
cruelty, mendacity – that make them so significant and so evil. Critically
Wollstonecraft ties virtues and vices to the political circumstances of the society.
Laws, public institutions, and cultural norms are all critical in determining
whether a person acquires the virtues, and in determining the distribution of
virtuous and vicious conduct in the society (ch. II p. 82, ch. IX pp. 228f).
Above all, education is pervasive in, and central to, this work of ethics, politi-
cal theory, philosophical anthropology, and social theory. The first edition’s
dedication includes a specific reference to ‘National Education’ (Todd, 1994,
p. 382n). The book begins by adverting to education:
I have turned over various books written on the subject of education, and
patiently observed the conduct of parents and the management of schools;
but what has been the result? – a profound conviction that the neglected
education of my fellow-creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore.
(Wollstonecraft, 1994/1792, p. 71)
In many ways the Vindication is continuous with Wollstonecraft’s earlier educa-

tional works. First, in the broad conception of education as encompassing early
socialisation, formal learning of knowledge and skills, and also the acquisition of
conduct and patterns of behaviour that are incentivised, as we might put it, by
the costs and benefit structure of social and cultural rules and norms. Second, for
Wollstonecraft, education is virtue-centred. Third, I want to return to the
questions of religious philosophy that are intimately intertwined with
Wollstonecraft’s thinking about virtue. Fourth, there is the clear continuity with
the Vindication of the rights of man and a programmatic view that rights – to
education, to work, to equal standing in marriage and in parenthood – must be
institutionalised if virtue, private or public, is to be realised. However, there are
also discontinuities, attributable to Wollstonecrafts’s developing political posi-
tion. In the Vindication of the rights of woman she launches a powerful argument
for schools (as opposed to private education at home), for day schools (as
opposed to boarding schools), and for nationally funded and regulated schools
(as opposed to schools which are private businesses).
At the beginning of chapter one, Wollstonecraft sets out in summary form her
convictions about philosophical anthropology, centred on reason, virtue,
passion, experience, and wisdom. Many philosophers disagree with this basic
picture, including Rousseau who, despairing of the viciousness of society and
state, becomes enamoured of solitude (p. 78); he has a wrong idea of what is
‘natural’ for man (p. 79n) – and his exaltation of nature altogether overlooks our
social capacities, our duties to care for others (p. 79). She also reads Rousseau as
rejecting passion in favour of an entirely reason-dominated life (pp. 78–79).
Wollstonecraft argues that passion cannot be treated as a curse – why should God
lead us from love of ourselves to the sublime emotions which the discovery
of his wisdom and goodness excites, if these feelings were not set in motion
to improve our nature, of which they make a part? (Wollstonecraft,
1994/1792, p. 79)
Here enter Wollstonecraft’s rehearsals of anti-deist arguments. Rousseau argues

that evil is introduced into the world by man (p. 78); but he also wants to argue
that while God has made all things right, men, like him, must reject civilisation
and return to ‘nature’. This cannot be correct. Wollstonecraft’s argument is that
God has indeed made human beings with the capacity for good and evil; that he
has endowed us with passions and reasons and that these two are connected; that
he has given us the capacities for civilisation. But mainly she, like Macaulay, needs
to argue that all these reasonings about the nature of God’s creation are likely to
undermine truth, and, pace the purposes of the present paper, that is likely to
undermine education.
Wollstonecraft’s arguments that mind, reason, and virtue cannot be sexed
centre on a sceptical point. Do the men who argue for sex-specific virtue, that
there are different standards of conduct for men and women, really mean to say
that women do not have souls (Wollstonecraft, 1994/1792, ch. II p. 84; ch. III
p. 110; ch. IV p. 133)? Positively, Wollstonecraft’s arguments that the same
standards of rationality, virtue, and knowledge apply to men and to women
encompass a range of consequentialist considerations – children will be brought
up to be reliable and responsible, women will no longer be dependent on the
whims of others and hence will have no need to dissimulate, cruelty and other
vices will be marginalised in society. At the heart of these possibilities lie a
number of questions about how education is to be delivered.
In her earlier work Wollstonecraft had argued that schools, at least the ones
with which she was familiar, were not good for children, who were at the mercy
of illtreatment at worst, and bizarre educational ideas at best (Wollstonecraft,
1974/1787, pp. 57–60). This is in part a Lockean theme.10 His model of educa-
tion features the trusted and skilled tutor, whether that be a parent or a wise and
thoughtful man like himself. Macaulay concurs that education should be domes-
tic (Macaulay, 1996/1790, Pt 1 II pp. 16–20). And Wollstonecraft in Original
stories, as we have seen, continues the conceit of the teacher in an essentially
domestic setting. By the time of the Vindication Wollstonecraft had changed
her mind:
The good effects resulting from attention to private education will ever be
very confined, and the parent who really puts his own hand to the plow will
always, in some degree, be disappointed, till education becomes a grand
national concern. A man cannot retire into the desert with his child.
(Wollstonecraft, 1994/1792, ch. XII p. 241, also II p. 86)
Wollstonecraft’s hostility to the anti-social aspects of Rousseau’s thought has, by

1792, evolved into a commitment to the political provision of social institutions.
To be sure, ‘till society be differently constituted, much cannot be expected
from education’ (Wollstonecraft, 1994/1792, ch. II p. 86), and she still considers
schools as they mostly are now to be ‘hot-beds of vice and folly’ (ch XII p. 242).
In particular, boarding schools put children of one sex together in a hothouse
atmosphere that might be deliberately designed to generate bullying, obsessions
with fashion, sentimentality, and worse (ch.VII p. 205, XII p. 242).11 Even at
their very best, Wollstonecraft is averse to boarding schools because they produce
an ‘unsettled state of mind’ at the constant prospect of the vacations; and vaca-
tions at home are not conducive to any proper acquisition of domestic virtues
(p. 246). Children should be educated at home, where the ‘domestic affections’
can be instilled in them while spending a ‘great part of their time, on terms of
equality, with other children’ (p. 243). This latter aspect of schools is absolutely
key to Wollstonecraft’s political vision:
(of) the social affections that are to constitute the happiness of life as it
advances ... equality is the basis, and an intercourse of sentiments unclogged
by that observant seriousness which prevents disputation, though it may not
inforce submission. (p. 241)
Wollstonecraft’s ideal standard for relationships between marital partners, and

between parents and children, as for all social and political relationships, is
friendship (Abbey, 1999; Frazer, 2008) and she elaborates this model in her later
work, in particular in her book on the French revolution. In particular, the only
defensible political relationship is citizenship (compare it with subjection to a
monarch). Citizens together can govern themselves, and can maintain friendly
relationships in society, in the home, and between those with office and author-
ity, and the mass of political participants. Here her egalitarianism, as far as
children are concerned, is radical – it is crucial for children to be socialised and
educated in relationships of equality. These can be corrupted, to be sure, in
situations where emotions and domination lead to bullying and manipulation, as
can happen in certain school settings. True friendship cannot be attained except
in situations where equality prevails. And all education, at school and at home,
must be education to citizenship.
Conclusion
Bridget Hill remarks that Macaulay’s Letters contain a ‘bewildering variety of
ideas’ and that large parts of it do not seem to be about education at all (Hill,
1992, pp. 160f). This raises the critical question of genre – are ‘educational
treatises’ actually about education? The matter is critical in reception and inter-
pretation of Wollstonecraft. Thoughts on the education of daughters is written very
much in the tradition of didactic advice books to parents and tutors (V. Jones,
2002). Although wider theses about reason and subjectivity, and philosophical
anthropology, are undoubtedly present there can be no doubt that this is a book
‘about education’. But the Vindication of the rights of woman is also a book that
is centred in the late eighteenth-century tradition of republicanism, and rights
theory, is steeped in theology, is a seminal contribution to feminist philosophy
and ethics, contains an outline of prescriptive political theory, and, we must
add, makes a distinctive and lastingly significant contribution to social theory.
In focusing on the educational aspects of the Letters and the Vindication this
paper produces, accordingly, a partial reading. In doing so, though, I have
wished to resist the idea that we can ignore theology, ethics, cultural critique, or
political and social theory, when we analyse Macaulay and Wollstonecraft on
education.
Stoic ethics and concerns about theological and philosophical truth are
present in Wollstonecraft’s work from the outset, but Catharine Macaulay’s
extended discussion in the Treatise and the Letters undoubtedly influenced
Wollstonecraft in her writing of her second Vindication and later works, and
reinforce our sense that the two are united in a theoretical and political effort.
This effort is directed against currents of philosophy and politics that argue that
‘self-interest’ and ‘commercial’ impulses not only have to be accommodated, but
can further be made central to our ethics and promoted in our polity. For both,
any evident tendencies to individualism and the predominance of relations of
exchange and profit are to be understood both as corruptions of ethical life, and
also as explicable by reference to social and political conditions. Far from being
impressed by rationality as self-interest, we should see it as a matter of laws and
customs which can, of course, with political will, be reconstructed.
For both, this political reconstruction must involve the institutionalisation of
rights, including for women. But the discernment of right rights, and the politi-
cal construction of a virtuous polity, demands education. Macaulay was engaged
in direct demands on government: demands for a constitution centred on human
dignity and self-government, an administration that reflects republican values,
and policies and laws that reward virtue and punish vice. For Wollstonecraft, a
new distribution of rights is indissolubly linked to a thoroughgoing transforma-
tion in culture and in conduct. One reason why Wollstonecraft is such a signifi-
cant figure in the history of political theory is that her project is that of an
uncompromising politicisation of social and cultural relationships.12 The values,
virtues, and rights that her and Macaulay’s visions seek to realise in government,
and in political society, must also be realised in social and cultural settings.
Among these rights are those of women to work, and their rights to the
prerogatives, and the duties, of citizenship. Women’s citizenship is a condition
of the decent socialisation and education of children. But more, education is the
only way to morality and to effective citizenship, because morality requires
discernment, of truth and of virtue, and the rejection of what passes for truth in
a world of unequal power, and corruption.
Notes
1 For biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and accounts of intellectual and political context
see Todd, 2000; C. Jones, 2002; Taylor, 2003; Gordon, 2005.
2 For further detail on the writing of the Vindication see Bromwich, 1995.
3 For biography of Catharine Macaulay and intellectual context see Hill, 1992; Hicks,
2002; Davies, 2005; O’Brien, 2009.
4 In the case of both Wollstonecraft and Macaulay there is considerable controversy about
how to classify them in political theory terms – as republican, liberal, etc., and how
exactly they relate to subsequent feminisms – and about their exact position vis-à-vis
the complex range of religious and partisan positions of their time and inheritance; see
Barker-Benfield, 1989; Hill, 1992; Pocock, 1998; Taylor, 2002, 2003; Davies, 2005;
O’Brien, 2009. Wollstonecraft in particular has been taken to be a key figure in the
‘feminist canon’, although her understanding of sexuality and embodiment (and the
question of her ‘puritanism’) was a matter of controversy for late twentieth-century
feminist thinkers as also were her assumptions about domestic labour and class, and
hence the identification of feminism as a middle-class concern: see Gatens, 1991;
Coole, 1993.
5 For commentary and discussion of Macaulay’s work on education see Gardner, 1998;
Gunther-Canada, 2003.
6 The opposition between Rousseau as a ‘natural’ educator and Locke as ‘rationalist’ is
an interpretation that structures presentation of the two to now – see e.g. Curren (ed.)
2007; it is possible, of course, to read them in ways that bring them closer than this
emphasising e.g. Locke’s consistent emphasis on ‘age appropriateness’ and interpreting
Rousseau’s criticism of ‘reasoning with a child’ as criticism of arguing with a child.
7 For more detailed discussion of these engagements with Burke than is possible here see
Sapiro, 1992; Bromwich, 1995; Hicks, 2002.
8 For a more detailed account of rank and gender in 18th-century thought see O’Brien,
2009, esp. ch. 5.
9 It is difficult to locate the irony here, as Wollstonecraft’s own emotion overcomes her
in her criticism of Burke’s emotion; see Sapiro, 1992, pp. 204–206.
10 For more on this point, Cohen, 2005, esp. pp. 226ff.
11 For an account of Wollstonecraft’s educational theory that puts it in the context of
contemporary concerns about sex, see V. Jones, 2005, and 2002.
12 According to this interpretation, Wollstonecraft makes more congenial reading for
theorists who deconstruct models of political power, and resist the identification of
politics with public and state matters, than she does for either liberals or republicans of
later times.
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11 Self-cultivation (Bildung)
and sociability between
mankind and the nation
Fichte and Schleiermacher
on higher education
Alexander Schmidt
Introduction
In the decades around 1800 the German public witnessed a substantial and
controversial debate about the reform of higher education with contributions by
nearly every thinker of note. This debate was informed by a deep concern with
individual self-cultivation (Bildung) in a society marked by an increasing division
of labour and by the questions about the status and unity of (scientific) knowl-
edge that were posed by Kantian epistemology.1 Historically, this discussion
responded both to the institutional crisis of the university as an ancien régime
corporation and to French expansionism with its ensuing destruction of the
political structures of the German empire. This confrontation with Revolutionary
and later Napoleonic France intensified an ongoing German (and European)
controversy about the final purpose of education: should all education eventually
be ‘cosmopolitan’, as Kant contended (Kant, 1923, p. 448); or should it rather
be concerned with the political and cultural unity of the nation? And if higher
education had to form, in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s words, the ‘pinnacle of all
that is undertaken for the cultivation of the nation’ (Müller, 1990, p. 273)
should the university not be abandoned in favour of the seemingly more efficient
French model of polytechnics?
The somehow surprising reassertion of the university against the centralised
post-Revolutionary French system of special écoles, particularly by Prussian think-
ers (Schubring, 1991), is usually considered as the starting point of what
was much later labelled as the ‘Humboldtian’ model of the modern univer-
sity, combining teaching with research in ‘solitude and freedom’ (Müller,
1990, p. 274). As a common narrative goes, this model, epitomised by the
newly-founded university of Berlin (1809/10), had a considerable influence on
nineteenth- and twentieth-century educational policies and university reforms
across Europe, including Britain, and North America (Turner, 1987; Rüegg,
2004; Schalenberg, 2002). In recent years, however, both this model and its
heroic narrative have been eroded and questioned in various ways. Historians of the
university have stressed that, within the plurality of German states, Berlin did not
present the only type of academic reform and that the characteristic combination
Self-cultivation (Bildung) and sociability 161
of research and teaching was achieved in various ways (Rüegg, 1997; cf. Eichler,
2012).
This historicising of the ‘Humboldtian university’ allows us to take a fresh
look at the plurality of competing visions for the future university around 1800.
This article concentrates on three pivotal contributions to the debate: Johann
Gottlieb Fichte’s Some lectures on the vocation of the scholar (1794) and his later
Deduced plan of a higher institute of education to be erected in Berlin (1807, fp.
1817), and the Occasional thoughts about universities in a German spirit (1808)
by Daniel Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). The two latter texts were
interventions in the discussion about the foundation of a new university in
Berlin, of which both thinkers were later to preside as rectors. My analysis
focusses on two interrelated issues of the debate: first, the relation between indi-
vidual self-cultivation (Bildung), human society and the state and, second, the
role of the university in the acquisition, organisation, and economy of knowledge.
According to these thinkers, should priority be given to ‘universal’ knowledge or
to particular knowledge, preparing students for their future professions?
To understand the solutions Fichte and Schleiermacher offered to these
questions it is important to identify their historical context. It is no accident that
the debate about higher education was particularly differentiated in Germany,
which boasted 35 universities in 1789. In the absence of major urban centres like
Paris, provincial places such as Göttingen, Königsberg, or Jena were focal points
of intellectual life. In an essay that was published in the Monthly Register in 1803,
Friedrich Carl von Savigny (1779–1861) succinctly depicted this national signif-
icance of the university to a British audience. Written in the year of the
Reichsdeputationshauptschluss, the last phase of the dissolution of the Holy
Roman Empire, he conceded that Germany lacked nearly every element usually
considered essential for a flourishing intellectual culture: economic wealth, a
capital city, a constitution, political power and civic spirit.
But that which in Germany supplies the want of almost all these advantages,
and in which it is unparalleled in any other country, is its Universities. To
them, more than to any thing else, Germany is indebted for its vast progress
in the arts and sciences. By means of them, Germany is that which it in all
other respects is, in so slight a degree, a nation. It may even be asserted, that
Germany is contained in its Universities.
(Wellek, 1931, p. 534)
Savigny pointed in particular at the moral and social effects of university training
and student life in the socialisation of every educated individual. Students from
poor backgrounds would, for the first time, experience independence and their
real moral worth, while students from wealthy and privileged families were
forced to accept equality – an aspect he later reasserted in his review of
Schleiermacher’s Occasional thoughts in 1808. Creative intellectual pursuit, he
wrote against Schleiermacher, was probably not the most formidable result that
should be highlighted in defence of academic freedom. Rather it was this
162 Alexander Schmidt
experience of mutual moral and intellectual exchange between students that
would ‘humble excessive sense of status’ and thus form a moral counterweight
to the often arbitrary differentiation of society old and new (Savigny, 1808/1990,
p. 265).
With a slightly different emphasis, modern social historians stress a similar
aspect of higher education around 1800. Despite declining student numbers,
university training was decisive in the gradual transformation of the old society
of estates (ständische Gesellschaft) into a modern bourgeois society (bürgerliche
Gesellschaft) based on functional differentiation, property, and individual skills
which predated the Industrial Revolution in Germany. As will be shown below,
university education was central in a social vision of a nonviolent evolution of
society. Preceding the Bildungsrevolution of the nineteenth century, recipients of
higher education increasingly believed that they formed a new meritocracy,
representing the common concern of mankind and the nation. Against an
eroding society of privileges based on birth, they claimed a prime access to key
positions of public life such as state and church service as well as literary and
scientific authority (cf. Müller, 1990, pp. 39–42). These claims were rooted in
the Enlightenment concern with, to borrow John Robertson’s coinage, the
‘betterment in this world, without regard for the existence or non-existence of
the next’ (Robertson, 2005, p. 8). An increasing part of the enlightened public,
however, was sceptical as to whether the majority of current universities or even
the institution itself would be up to the task. Many, particularly the smaller
universities, were underfunded, with outdated curricula, declining student
numbers, academic inbreeding and favouritism, and a general inability to reform.
A special problem was posed by student discipline, resulting from the privileged
corporate status of German universities with their own jurisdictions on the one
hand and a mercantile competition for students on the other. Many university
cities were filled with unruly and often armed adolescents. There was an endemic
problem of riots, abuse, duels, and alcohol. Student fraternities could exert
enormous pressure on university officials and fellow students, often leading to
rather mild punishments of transgressions.
Concerned with the problem of how to provide a wider population with
practical and morally useful knowledge, a number of German enlightened think-
ers such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), Joachim Heinrich Campe
(1746–1818), and the members of the famous Wednesday Society in Berlin thus
agreed in a scathing criticism that the university was a moribund medieval insti-
tution (Stölzel 1889, cf. König, 1935, pp. 22–29). These vocal critics wanted
profound reform of many universities, if not their complete abolition, in order
to promote enlightenment and meet the demands of the state, social utility, and
a greater adaptation to future professions. Echoing a Rousseauian scepticism
about the wider use of theoretical knowledge, Herder and the Popularaufklärer
put their main emphasis on school reform, leaving the future of intellectual
debate to the select few scientific and literary academies. They harangued against
young men allegedly flocking in their thousands to universities to gain the useless
knowledge of a scholarly type, although student numbers were in fact declining.
To achieve reform of learning, Herder and others demanded, governments had
to rein in academic autonomy through review committees and to exert greater
control of student numbers, particularly those from poorer backgrounds
(Schmidt, 2012).
Fichte’s reassertion of university education

To counter this criticism of university education and to redefine the social role
of the academic, potent arguments were needed. They were provided by the
vocal reassertion of the worth of academic philosophical studies in meeting the
demands of moral progress emerging from Kantian and post-Kantian idealist
thought (Kant, 1798a/1917). Despite some important differences between
thinkers like Fichte, Schelling, and Humboldt, they all basically agreed that the
university was the paramount institution within which individuals could achieve
self-directed autonomy through the active appropriation of knowledge.
‘Universities are thus schools of self-cultivation (Selbstbildung) ... where it is
granted to all spirits to pursue their own direction’, wrote the Norwegian-
born philosopher and professor at Halle, Henrik Steffens in 1808 (Anrich, 1956,
pp. 352–353).
Nowhere was the central historical and social importance of university
education guided by philosophical principles formulated more powerfully than
in Fichte’s Some lectures on the vocation/determination (Bestimmung) of the
scholar held at the university of Jena in 1794 and published in the same year (La
Vopa, 2001, pp. 214–230). To be sure, Fichte was equally critical of the tradi-
tional university and later took enormous personal risks in challenging the domi-
nance of the student orders and the practice of duelling at Jena. Yet, as will be
shown below, he was strongly opposed to a higher education that would dissolve
into the purchase of professional skills based on empirical knowledge.
Some lectures was part of Fichte’s characteristically unhumble, yet serious
intellectual struggle to identify the right levers with which to solve such central
political questions of his time as social inequality, moral corruption, and war
(cf. La Vopa, 2001; James, 2011; Nakhimovsky, 2011). On the one hand, Some
lectures can be read as Fichte’s attempt to reformulate Kant’s notion of the
rational public as a force for social reform developed in his essay, What is
Enlightenment? (Kant 1784/1991). On the other hand, Some lectures was the
upshot of a highly original engagement with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s disquiet-
ing analysis of the anthropological origins of modern commercial society. Fichte
tried both taking seriously Rousseau’s demand for a society of free equals, and
correcting him at the same time. Fichte indeed dedicated his entire fifth (and
final) lecture to an ‘examination of Rousseau’s claims about the influence of the
arts and sciences on the well being of mankind’. (Fichte, 1966, pp. 59–68) In
general terms, Fichte’s appraisal of Rousseau came to a rather perplexing result.
For his assertion of learning as essential to human nature and improvement
seemed to propagate something that Rousseau had identified as deeply impli-
cated in the ills of modern society (Rousseau, 1997; cf. Schmidt, 2012).
Fichte began his lectures not, as might be expected, with a positive definition
of what it means to be gelehrt (academically educated). Instead he stressed that
the Bestimmung (denoting both determination and calling) of the academically
educated can only be understood negatively through its relational, i.e. social
character, by distinction ‘from other men who are not scholars’ (Fichte, 1988,
p. 146; Fichte, 1966, p. 27).
The determination of the scholar thus involved answering two questions first:
‘What is the vocation of man within society? ... What is the vocation of man as
such?’ (Fichte, 1988, p. 146; Fichte, 1966, p. 27). Both questions echoed a
wider Enlightenment concern with the ‘science of man’ as a foundation to
understand morality, the mechanisms of human society, and history. Particularly
the second question almost literally repeated the title of Johann Joachim
Spalding’s (1714–1804) influential Reflection on the calling of man (Betrachtung
über die Bestimmung des Menschen) of 1748 which triggered the discourse about
anthropology in Germany (Adler, 1994). Bringing together human anatomy,
epistemology, moral philosophy, and natural theology, its participants tried to
determine such diverse problems as the relation between the body and the mind,
the origins of language, the immortality of the soul, or God’s providence with
respect to human happiness.
Sidelining such issues, however, Fichte set out to answer this question in the
very different terminology of his (post-)Kantian attempt to reconstruct the
relation between freedom and action in a way that gives primacy to practical
reason in the Wissenschaftslehre (Ameriks, 2000, pp. 187–202). By opposing our
absolute self (I or Ich) to a not-I, through which we can understand the I but
from which it is not derived, Fichte formulated a Kantian notion of man as a
rational, i.e. self-determined being which is his own end and thus not heterono-
mously determined in any way (Fichte, 1988, p. 148; Fichte, 1966, p. 29). Yet
while our will is free within its sphere, our empirical features, such as our feelings,
are influenced by external causes. In order to preserve ‘the complete harmony of
a rational being with himself’ man has to acquire the ‘skill to modify and alter
external things in accordance with our concepts’ – a process that Fichte described
as ‘culture’ (Fichte, 1988, pp. 150–151; Fichte, 1966, pp. 31–32).
This goal, Fichte conceded, can never be fully achieved by man as a finite
creature but only approximated. It is here that the second question about man’s
calling in society ties in. For this approximation can only be made possible
through social cooperation in human history. Fichte thereby linked the question
of the purpose of higher education to two interrelated debates in Enlightenment
moral and political thought. The first was concerned with man’s natural fitness
or unfitness for society (Hont, 2005, pp. 37–51 and 159–184), or, to put it
differently, whether civil society was an extension of human propensities or an
artifice. The second revolved around the division of labour in human history and
its relation to social inequality (La Vopa, 2001, p. 215).
A prominent and late contribution to the first debate had been made by
Fichte’s academic teacher Kant. In his Idea for a universal history with a
cosmopolitan aim he argued that it was particularly men’s selfish or unsociable
qualities like pride and greed that made them overcome sloth, develop their intel-
lectual and physical faculties, and found states – consequentially driving the
process of civilization (Kant, 1784/1912, pp. 15–31; cf. Rorty and Schmidt,
2009). Fichte agreed with Kant that it was man’s moral duty to live in society and
‘to cultivate, civilise, and moralise himself through the arts and sciences’ (Kant,
1798b/1917b, p. 324). But he did not share Kant’s emphasis on the antagonis-
tic mechanism of unsocial sociability. In his claim that the ‘social drive is one of
man’s fundamental drives’ and that ‘it is man’s destiny to live in society’, Fichte
rather sided with the proponents of a concept of the natural sociability of man
(Fichte, 1988, p. 156; Fichte, 1966, p. 37) such as Francis Hutcheson (1694–
1746), Isaak Iselin (1728–1782), or Herder. For them, sociability was an imme-
diate propensity which manifests itself, for example, in benevolence or in the
pleasure we take in communication and exchange with our fellow human beings.
By contrast, given his different epistemological point of departure, Fichte
made some important qualifications to their argument. These qualifications
foreshadowed his later, more elaborated concept of recognition, but are also
central to his concept of education. According to Fichte, our sociable drive
resulted not from empirical causes but was an extension of our drive to identity
and harmony with ourselves. In order to reach this, we need to assume the exist-
ence and gain the recognition of other morally-autonomous selves. But we
cannot have certainty about their existence from their mere representation in our
finite consciousness. Hence we had to enter into a ‘free interaction’
(Wechselwirkung durch Freiheit) with other rational beings (Fichte, 1988, p. 157;
Fichte, 1966, p. 37). ‘The social drive’, Fichte contended, ‘aims at interaction,
reciprocal influence, mutual give and take, mutual passivity and activity’ (Fichte,
1988, p. 158; Fichte, 1966, p. 39). Fichte envisioned this domination-free inter-
action as a spiritual and moral struggle between different selves leading not only
to an advancement of the succumbing opponent but also to ‘the improvement
of the species’ in general. His concept of Gesellschaftlichkeit as a reciprocal
mechanism by which we are morally cultivated and natural inequalities mended
can hence be related to a process of education propelling mankind towards
greater perfection and a cosmopolitan unity grounded in the unity of reason. As
he pointed out, the ‘social drive offers man a new, special type of education
(Bildung); that is education for society, as well as an extraordinary facility for
education as such’ (Fichte, 1988, p. 170; Fichte, 1966, p. 51).
Fichte’s account, in his third and fourth lectures, of the division of social ranks
and of the particular role of the scholar was a mere extension of his concept of
sociability. At first glance, the division of classes sat rather uneasily with the goal
of a free society of equals. Again Rousseau’s account of social inequality was an
unavoidable point of reference. And Fichte was well aware that, in contrast to
physical inequality, ‘the inequality of classes appears to be a moral inequality’ –
the very distinction Rousseau used in the Exordium of the Second discourse
(Fichte, 1988, p. 161; Fichte, 1966, p. 42; cf. Rousseau, 1997, p. 131).
The division of labour, however, Fichte contended, would allow us to meet
our needs better, to overcome nature, and thus to facilitate the progress of
mankind towards greater freedom from necessity. In many ways, this was a fairly
conventional defence of the benefits of the division of labour. But Fichte deviated
from this well-trodden path of natural law and political economy when he
focussed on the moral goal of a collective education of mankind. If we accept
‘self-harmony or absolute identity’ as the ‘highest law of mankind’ ‘then the
demand that every person ought to cultivate all of his talents equally contains at
the same time the demand that all of the various rational beings ought to be
cultivated equally’ (Fichte, 1988, pp. 162–163; Fichte, 1966, pp. 43–44).
Paradoxically, this equality can be achieved through specialisation, i.e. by freely
choosing a certain station within society in which we can develop our talents
best. The sociable drive of exchange (Mitteilungstrieb), later redefined as a moral
duty, here is immensely important for it warrants that our fellow human beings,
including future generations, will profit from our achievements (Fichte, 1988,
pp. 164, 168; Fichte, 1966, pp. 44, 49).
On the surface this redefinition of the division of labour in terms of free
communication and public discourse looks like a rather naïve riposte to
Rousseau’s detailed account of the social bonds of spiralling needs and desires
generated in society by our imagination and amour-propre. But as his fifth lecture
demonstrates, Fichte was highly aware of the problem of needs with respect to
human progress (Nakhimovsky, 2011, pp. 151–154). And it is with respect to
the management of needs that the scholar takes a prominent role as ‘the educator
of mankind’ (Fichte, 1988, p. 175; Fichte, 1966, p. 57). For it is his calling to
enlighten society about its real needs and how they can be met under various
circumstances both in the present and in the future. The scholar should detect
the ills of society, such as illegitimate inequalities slowing down its progress, and
thus provide a remedy to them. The scholar thereby presents the moral pinnacle
of a concept of society in which the social drive is transformed into an exercise
of rational discourse aiming at mutual cultivation (Bildung).
The scholar is especially destined for society. More than any other class,
his class, insofar exists only through and for society. Accordingly, it is his
particular duty to cultivate to the highest degree within himself the social
talents of receptivity and the art of communication.
(Fichte, 1988, p. 173; Fichte, 1966, p. 55)
It is no surprise that such passages have been repeatedly quoted to emphasize

the well-established interpretation of Some lectures as a battle-cry against an ivory
tower notion of academe. However, the idea that scholarship and university
education had to serve society was hardly new or contested. What was strikingly
different was that Fichte assigned to the scholar the central managerial role with
respect to mankind’s moral advancement, replacing the Christian narrative of
salvation with a vision of permanent progress – a vision that in many ways came
surprisingly close to Condorcet’s yet unpublished Esquisse d’un tableau historique
des progrès de l’esprit humain of 1793 (first published 1795). The ‘true vocation
of the scholarly class’, Fichte emphatically declared to his audience, ‘is the
supreme supervision of the actual progress of the human race in general and the
unceasing promotion of its progress’ (Fichte, 1988, p. 172; Fichte, 1966, p. 54).
This supreme responsibility could only be matched by an equal moral integrity.
Thus, ‘the scholar ought to be the ethically best man of his time’ (Fichte, 1988,
p. 176; Fichte, 1966, p. 58). According to Anthony La Vopa, Fichte identified
the scholarly community with a modern clerisy of the spiritually elect (La Vopa,
2001, pp. 229–230). Yet Fichte equally stressed that the university was not a
place of contemplative virtue but a school of character which prepared for free,
i.e. non-dependent, action (Fichte, 1971, p. 366).
Fichte’s immodest attempt to inspire his addressees to take up a career that
would contribute to a cosmopolitan aim was part of a wider debate about
transforming society while avoiding the potential setbacks of a violent revolution
(Schmidt, 2009; Schmidt, 2013). In all these alternative accounts, such as On the
aesthetic education of man in a series of letters by Fichte’s Jena colleague, Friedrich
Schiller (1759–1805), education and free public discourse were of crucial essence
in developing human autonomy. In Fichte’s version of this idea, progress ‘would
radiate from the universities to regenerate the entire society’ (La Vopa, 2001,
p. 226). Fichte believed that this cosmopolitan advance would be the result of
man’s natural capacity for free reciprocity enhanced through a class exclusively
committed to furthering mankind’s cultivation. This had rather radical political
implications which were only adumbrated in Fichte’s lectures. Those ancien
régime institutions and corporations which either restrained the natural freedom
to exchange, tried to fix human capacities, or separated society in a detrimental
way – like the church, the nobility, or the student orders – had to be removed.
Even the state, as Fichte made clear, had only a transient role to play in his vision
of history. Its aim was to become superfluous and make way for the cosmopolitan
community of free rational beings. Because of its tendency to implicate society
in the pathologies of power politics, the (absolutist) state rather had to keep out
of education, which it would merely exploit in order to train the future cogs and
wheels of its machine. As he noted with satisfaction in an unpublished lecture of
the Some lectures series, ‘wisdom, science and talent have ceased to be of value
exclusively under the seal of the state, to be only useful as a tool of its drive to
oppression’ (Fichte, 1971, p. 358).
Fichte’s 1807 plan for a university in Berlin

When Fichte drafted his Deduzierter Plan einer zu Berlin zu errichtenden höhern
Lehranstalt (Deduced plan of a higher institute of education to be erected in Berlin)
in 1807 he had significantly altered his view of the state and its relation to
education.2 In line with the redirection of his thinking about the relation
between morality and right in his Foundations of natural right (1796), Fichte
had redefined the state as a Zwangs-Anstalt (compulsory institution) exerting
legitimate force on its citizens (Fichte, 1991, p. 307). The aim was not just
internal peace and the state’s self-preservation but the promotion of culture and
the education of its citizens to serve the progress of mankind. While the highest
degrees of human culture, religion, science, and virtue could not become
purposes of the state, it nevertheless had the responsibility to facilitate them
through education, even if their progress would lead to the state’s alienation
from an ever more specialised science (Fichte, 1991, pp. 310–311 and 325–326).
Fichte’s plan was written in response to a request by Karl Friedrich Beyme
(1765–1838), the Prussian chef du cabinet (Lenz, 1910, pp. 71–132), who
sought the expertise of scholars concerning the government’s plan to found a
new university in Berlin after Prussia’s crushing defeat at the hands of Napoleonic
France at Jena in October 1806, and the resulting loss of half of its territory
including Halle, its finest university. The fiscal and moral crisis of the Prussian
state after the Peace of Tilsit in 1807 led the administration to implement a
comprehensive reform programme working on all levels of society (Nolte,
1990). Its aim was to enable Prussia to recover from its losses and prepare for a
future confrontation with France. Founding a new university might seem to be
a surprising move, for it was expensive and Prussia still had two. But it must be
seen in the light of this policy. In 1807, in response to the first proposal for a
transfer of the university at Halle to Berlin, King Frederick William III allegedly
said that Prussia now had to compensate in the field of intellect what it had lost
in terms of political power (Lenz, 1910, p. 78). Reformers like Freiherr vom
Stein believed that Prussia had to become the cultural and intellectual
powerhouse of the German nation in order to marshal its resources and gain
wider support in a future struggle with Napoleon. Saxon-born Fichte, who like
Stein viewed Prussia as a mere instrument for the recovery of the German
nation and Europe from the military imperialism of Napoleon, was sympathetic
to such plans. In 1805/6 he had already proposed to the Prussian government
that the recently acquired university at Erlangen could be turned into a new
intellectual and moral focal point for German youth in the spirit of ancient
Athens (Fichte, 1993).
In his Deduced plan, drawn up immediately before the famous Addresses to the
German nation, Fichte pursued a less obviously patriotic agenda. Characteristically,
he could not resist proposing a radical overhaul of the current university. His
point of departure was the problem of the type of competence to be procured at
university. Should the university be the final stage of school education, inculcat-
ing the student with the specialist knowledge immediately relevant to a civil
occupation? Fichte clearly rejected any such notion. The attempt to fix erratic
knowledge through exams, in particular, was eventually illusory. Instead, the
ultimate purpose of the university should be the acquisition of the art of using
knowledge. Students should cultivate their facility for self-directed learning,
enabling them creatively to appropriate and transform knowledge in infinite
ways. The proper title of such an institution would thus be ‘a school of the art
of the scientific use of reason’ (Fichte, 1998, §5, p. 87).
Fichte specified three conditions which were integral in achieving this purpose.
First, students had to receive a proper education at school level; second, they
had to entirely dedicate themselves to their studies; third, they had to be freed
from any kind of concerns regarding their livelihood (§10, pp. 91–96).
As in Fichte’s 1794 Jena lectures, his assertion of a philosophically-guided learn-
ing was connected to a certain social vision. The students should be separated
from the ordinary bourgeois life and its ‘dull joys’. The ‘regular’ students should
live in the autarky of a shared household like one family. They were to receive
only little pocket money for most of their needs (food, books, etc.) were
procured in kind by the university thus minimising their commercial exchange
with the rest of society. These regular students should also be distinguished from
civil persons by a uniform as their dress of honour (§ 33, p. 122).
These passages have frequently led scholars to deem Fichte’s proposal author-
itarian and to compare his university unfavourably with a monastery or a military
barracks (Crouter, 2005; Schelsky, 1971, p. 83). Fichte was eager to stress,
however, that he had drawn his practical inspiration from similar regulations at
Cambridge, Oxford, Tübingen, and the Saxon princely Gymnasia (Fürstenschulen)
like Schulpforta, of which he himself was a pupil (§ 57, pp. 152–153).3 What has
been overlooked in recent scholarship is that Fichte’s proposal was also a sequel
to his Closed commercial state of 1800. Here he had sought to address the
problem of how to regulate human needs through state intervention in order, to
put it broadly, to end international rivalry and minimise social conflict – an issue
that was already essential to his Some lectures (Nakhimovsky, 2011, pp. 151–154).
Following Rousseau, Fichte’s students were to become Émiles, carefully
prevented from being exposed prematurely to commercial society until they were
prepared to enter it. In a corollary of his Deduced plan, the parallels between the
Closed commercial state and Fichte’s vision of academe became even more
obvious. The Fichtean university was to become the kernel of a renewal of
human society both in the state and the international level (Fichte, 1998, § 67,
pp. 169–170). Future statesmen would, through their university socialisation,
learn to appreciate the organic order of an institution based on the republican
principles of equality, freedom, and a fraternal commitment to the common
good.4 The universities, whose relations Fichte wanted to organise through a
network of envoys, would foreshadow the peaceable and lawful order of republics
working free from mean jealousy towards one common rational goal.
The careful purging of student life from any trace of the utilitarian preoccupa-
tions of bourgeois life also reflected a moral concern that united Fichte with the
mainstream in German thought around 1800. Analogous to a Kantian concept
of morality and aesthetics, scholarly pursuit should not be motivated by
heteronomous motives. Even Schleiermacher stressed in his rather different
Occasional thoughts about universities in a German spirit that the students need
seclusion from society and ‘should not be drawn into the emptiness of the usual
mundane sociable intercourse’ (Schleiermacher, 1998, p. 76). As Fichte pointed
out in the Addresses to the German nation (1808), any proper (national) educa-
tion must make sure that the pupil would pursue something out of love for the
good and the joy he takes in self-directed action (Selbsttätigkeit) instead of stimu-
lating him with recourse to his selfish wellbeing (Fichte, 2005, pp. 119–122).
The strictures on student life were not least intended to ensure absolute
equality between the students. Here Fichte, the son of a humble weaver from
Saxony who had fought his way through the education system, again addressed
the relation between academe and social inequality. He wanted the university to
offer places according to intellectual merit only. The regular students had to be
kept in total ignorance of whether their fellow-students’ fees were paid by their
parents or whether they received free education. Only thus did he hope to form
a new meritocracy out of the corps of regular students (Regularien) who would
take the first places in the state (Fichte, 1998, § 51, pp. 145–148).
The harsh separation of the university from the whims of society was not
matched by an equally authoritarian ‘deductive’ climate within the university. On
the contrary, following the Jena lectures, the relation between student and
teacher was characterised by a constant and equal exchange. Examinations
should thus not be an interrogation but rather an ‘expressive Socratic dialogue’
which was only part of a permanent ‘invisible dialogue which characterises
academic life as a whole’ (§ 9, p. 90).5 Students also had to produce their own
self-directed written work. They were thus not only at the receiving end of
education but would, through intellectual exchange, also contribute to the
further advancement of the teacher.
Schleiermacher’s Occasional thoughts of 1808

It has become a standard interpretation that Schleiermacher’s public interven-
tion in the debate about the new university in Berlin ‘was meant to oppose the
views of Fichte’ (Crouter, 2005, p. 146). Indeed the deliberately relaxed title
(for a relatively lengthy tract), Occasional thoughts about universities in a German
spirit, sounds remarkably anti-Fichtean. Yet there is no direct evidence that
Schleiermacher, whose tract decisively influenced Humboldt’s foundation in
1809, had any knowledge of Fichte’s manuscript before its publication in 1817.
During the French occupation of large parts of Prussia (including Berlin),
Schleiermacher, Reformed pastor, classicist, philosopher, and professor of
theology at Halle, was moved by a rather different concern from merely refuting
the despised thought of Fichte. From early on, he was an outspoken opponent
of Napoleon’s military imperialism. As is clear from his extensive private
correspondence, Schleiermacher feared that the Empereur would seek to solidify
his military occupation of Northern Germany by crushing both Protestantism
and Kantian speculative philosophy, the alleged spiritual and intellectual residues
of German cultural autonomy (Wolfes, 2004, pp. 151–167). The temporary
closure of the university at Halle, one of main centres for the training of
Protestant pastors, by personal order of Napoleon on 20 October 1806, seemed
to confirm those very fears.
As Schleiermacher made clear in a letter to his friend, the Swedish diplomat
Karl Gustav von Brinckmann on 1 March 1808, the intention of Occasional
thoughts was to defend the ‘German university’ tradition and to reject the
adoption of the French technocratic model of special écoles (Müller, 1990,
p. 257). Their misguided German advocates, Schleiermacher wrote in Occasional
thoughts, were ‘infected by a pernicious un-German spirit’ (Schleiermacher,
1998, p. 46). In contrast to the cosmopolitan-patriotic vision of Fichte’s
Deduced plan, Schleiermacher’s tract was thus nationalist and in favour of a char-
acteristically Prussian ‘anti-modern modernisation’ (Schubring, 1991, p. 303) of
the university as a kernel of a regeneration of the German nation. And
Schleiermacher was not alone in his efforts to save the ‘German’ university. His
work was paralleled by an essay from the French Kantian and Germanophile
emigré Charles de Villers (1765–1815), who as part of an attempt to prevent the
closing down of such places as Göttingen and Halle in the recently-created
Napoleonic kingdom of Westphalia, pointed out the significance of the
Protestant university for German cultural progress (Villers, 1808).
Crucially with respect to the political fragmentation of Germany,
Schleiermacher’s point of departure was the relation between the (particular)
state and the university as a natural creation of the nation. He established his
concept of scholarly and scientific pursuit on the basis of man’s sociable drive to
communicate with others and to share knowledge (Schleiermacher, 1998, p. 22).
Taking up the Herderian and Romantic focus on national language, Schleiermacher
linked learning as a sociable activity to a national language, participating in and
enlivening it. In a rather cavalier treatment of the history of universities, he
claimed that scientific and scholarly communities had first developed indepen-
dently from the state. The state had only integrated and promoted them at a later
stage in order to profit from the knowledge they produced (Schleiermacher,
1998, pp. 22–24).
As in his various lectures on ethics, first delivered in 1804/05 at Halle and
later continued at Berlin, Schleiermacher distinguished between the different
spheres of society: family, state, church/religion, free sociability, and learning/
university. These spheres would follow their own respective rationalities with
respect to moral agency, and were characterised by antagonisms of various duties
and moral goods both on the internal level and with other spheres of social life
(Schleiermacher, 2002; cf. Pleger, 1988, pp. 53–57). To lessen these antagonisms
it would be vital to introduce certain intermediary elements, such as political
representation between the ruler and the ruled, as well as to respect the auton-
omy of each area as an equally valuable sphere of moral agency. Schleiermacher’s
ethics of goods not only sought to solve some of the problems he observed
in Kantian deontology with its conflicting duties, it also offered a federal
(nationalist) solution to the complexities of a politically and religiously
fragmented German nation.
Following Kant’s Quarrel of the faculties, Schleiermacher’s Occasional thoughts
observed a conflict between reason of state and the sociable origins of the univer-
sity, which ought to promote the pursuit of knowledge within a nation for its
own sake only (Schleiermacher, 1998, pp. 23–30 and 66–67; cf. Kant,
1798a/1917a, pp. 21–23). He warned of the effects that state competition and
protectionist policies would have on universities and the search for truth. For the
states would perceive academic institutions, first of all, as a mere accumulation of
skills and applicable knowledge – with the French special schools as the
quintessential incarnation of this rationale. The politically fragmented German
nation, whose cultural unity depended on the supra-regional character of the
universities, was most affected by these restrictions on intellectual freedom by
this jealousy of state. Against this, Schleiermacher contended, the ‘state should
leave the sciences to themselves’. Instead of exerting censorship on ideas, the
state should only care for the economic administration and the external discipline
of the universities (Schleiermacher, 1998, pp. 40–41; cf. Schleiermacher, 2002,
p. 75, § 112). Prussia would become a national model of free intellectual
exchange by giving up any attempts to protect the monopoly of its universities
through bans on the free movement of its native students. Thus every German
should have equal access to education offered by universities in free competition.
Schleiermacher had witnessed the French expulsion of Halle’s students in
October 1806 because a student drinking party had shouted pereat (he shall
perish) outside Napoleon’s window during his stay in the town. And it was with
respect to the regulation of student life that his Occasional thoughts made the
most striking claims. Against the consensus of the vast majority of authors writ-
ing about universities, Schleiermacher rejected any strong notions of either
restricting the number of university candidates or of regulating students’ life.
Instead, intellectual qualities should be allowed to develop and differentiate at
university level, before the able and less able were precipitately separated in life
after education (Schleiermacher, 1998, pp. 44–45). Furthermore, he claimed,
the essence of academic liberty consisted in students’ freedom to try out various
ways of life free from the conventions of society.
To live on the streets like the Ancients, to fill them with music and singing
like people from the Mediterranean, to feast like the rich, as long as money
lasts, and then to despise all comforts of life like ancient Cynics, complete-
ly to neglect one’s clothing or to dress up fashionably ... that is academic
Freedom.
(Schleiermacher, 1998, p. 73)
Only by this anarchic disregard of conventions would students become truly

able to choose their proper position in society. For Schleiermacher, the university
was not just a place of intellectual education but in an equally important sense a
laboratory of morals (Sitten) for the whole nation, even if this implied the (tacit)
acceptance of duels – a practice acutely abhorred by Fichte (see Sweet, 1993).
Morals had to be kept mouldable (bildsam), Schleiermacher believed, and
Germany was particularly fortunate that its moral education was not shaped
according to the model of the upper classes but in the free sphere of academic
life (Schleiermacher, 1998, p. 75). Only through this freedom could the German
nation hope to achieve an ethical life which was ‘the liberal expression of
particularity in a common form’ (Schleiermacher, 1998, p. 76). In a corollary to
this urban vision of higher education, Schleiermacher decisively opted for Berlin
and thus a great city as the future seat of the new university, rejecting other plans
to situate the university in the frugal and allegedly sober environment of a small
town (Schleiermacher, 1998, pp. 86–100; also Haase, 2005).
Conclusion
In many details, there could not be greater disagreement about the reform of
higher education than between Fichte’s and Schleiermacher’s proposals
(cf. Crouter, 2005). And yet there is a striking accord between them and, one
might add, Wilhelm von Humboldt, in their emphasis on education as a self-
directed pursuit in a constant exchange within a community of equals. Only
through this, they believed, the student could develop the capability to embrace
and to judge knowledge. Higher education had to defy a utilitarian notion of
knowledge that was mainly concerned with practical application. Combined with
emancipation from the constraints of class and the concerns of commercial
society, this would allow students to form a moral character.
With a different emphasis, Fichte’s and Schleiermacher’s notion of individual
self-formation was thereby informed by a reformulated concept of natural
sociability. According to this notion, both our selves and society as a whole are
the product of an interplay between man’s receptive and communicative disposi-
tions. In Fichte’s and Schleiermacher’s respective visions of the linkage between
individual and collective education, the university was to become the principal
laboratory of the education of mankind (Fichte) and the nation (Fichte and
Schleiermacher). Their claim that the state had to accept the autonomy of higher
education was thereby defended with a paradox: only by defying the state’s
narrow utilitarian and moral (religious) demands could the university, in the end,
serve the requirements and the true purpose of the state better, promoting the
(moral) education of its citizens and the progress of mankind.
Today there might be thought to be good reasons to dismiss these ideas of the
reform of higher education as outdated, illusory, and ill-suited to the challenges
of a global knowledge society. Given the intellectual poverty of current reform
programmes, such as the Bologna process, however, we might nevertheless take
some courage from the grandeur and daring of Fichte’s and Schleiermacher’s
visions of academia.
Acknowledgements
The first version of this chapter was written during a fellowship at the Centre for
Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (Cambridge) in spring
2012. The author is grateful to David James, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Chris Newfield
and James Vigus, as well as to the editors of this volume, for their many helpful
suggestions.
Notes
1 Among the vast literature on the debate about Bildung around 1800, see Bollenbeck,
1994; Geuss, 1996; Reitz, 2003.
2 See König, 1935; Turnbull, 1937; Hahn, 1969; Reiß, 2006, pp. 84–102.
3 Johannes von Müller, Prussian court historiographer and later to be the secretary for
education in the kingdom of Westphalia, leaked to his friend Böttiger in Dresden in
October 1807 that, according to Fichte’s plan, the future university in Berlin would
resemble a college of the Oxford or other English type (Fuchs, 1987, p. 60).
4 It is important to note here against a reading of Fichte as a theorist of an authoritarian
national state, which is associated with Isaiah Berlin, that the role of the state is not
defined as compelling virtue but as controlling the social interference that prevents the
internal capacity for culture and morality from operating. See Berlin, 2000, pp. 191 and
195–197.
5 For a differing interpretation see Crouter, 2005, p. 149.
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12 Education and utopia
Robert Owen and Charles Fourier
David Leopold
Introduction
The aims of education, and the appropriate means of realising those aims, have
been a persistent, if not universal, concern of utopian authors (Massõ, 1927;
Fisher, 1963; Ozmon, 1969). Thomas More (1478–1535) might be thought to
bear much of the responsibility here, since education plays an indispensable role
in the commonwealth of ‘Utopia’ (whose citizens are said to be so well educated
that they need few laws). However, whilst More named he did not invent the
utopian tradition, and this preoccupation with education certainly predates him.
Plato (429–347 BCE) would be an obvious example; the central role of education
is made clear in Book Four of the Republic, a work plausibly considered the first
great political utopia. (I use the term ‘utopia’ here to refer to a detailed
description of an ideal society, whether or not that description takes the narrative
form typical of what we might call a literary utopia proper – in which a traveller
from the world of the author visits a superior society in a chronologically or
geographically distant location.)
It is tempting to contrast this longstanding and characteristic preoccupation
with educational questions on the part of utopian authors with a lack of
equivalent interest in utopia on the part of educationalists. That contrast looks
real enough, but should not be overdrawn. Not least, the relation is a shifting
one. In the nineteenth century, for instance, when educationalists were perhaps
more engaged with wider issues of social reform, their links with certain kinds of
utopia were stronger. Moreover, the lack of utopian enthusiasms on the part of
modern educationalists is not universal. There are recent signs, for example, of a
minority interest in what are sometimes (predictably) labelled ‘Edutopias’
(Halpern, 2003; Peters & Freeman-Moir, 2006).
My ambition here, however, is not to unpack the many and complex connec-
tions between education and utopia, but to give a taste of what two nineteenth-
century utopian writers thought about education. Robert Owen (1771–1858)
and Charles Fourier (1772–1837) are usually characterised as ‘utopian socialists’
(a somewhat problematic label popularised by Karl Marx (1818–1883)). Both
authors placed human nature at the centre of their educational views, and they
both saw their educational views as forming an important and integral part of
Education and utopia 179
their wider project of radically transforming the social and political world.
However, they developed their educational and other views independently of
one another, and they conceptualised the fundamental importance of human
nature in very different ways. (Their direct engagement was largely limited to a
brief and unproductive correspondence, and a few passing and unsympathetic
comments on the myriad errors of the other.)
Robert Owen
Born in Newtown in central Wales, Robert Owen left home at the age of ten.
He worked first as a draper’s assistant, before moving – with considerable
entrepreneurial success – into the expanding cotton industry in Manchester. As
manager and part-owner of the New Lanark Mill in Scotland, he sought to
implement his already-formed views about human character and the environ-
ment: improving working (and living) conditions, moderating child labour, and
providing infant education. Those views and that social experiment were
promoted in A new view of society (1813–1814). Owen subsequently sought a
larger public role, initially as an authoritative voice on factory legislation, and
then as a radical critic of contemporary society. In increasingly millenarian
language, he prophesied the imminent collapse of the old order and the
emergence of a new moral world. He now recommended small communitarian
settlements, initially as an alternative to poor relief, and then as an alternative
form of society. Owen lost most of his personal fortune on a communal experi-
ment at New Harmony, in Indiana (1825–1827), but subsequently pursued
another settlement at Harmony, in Hampshire (1839–1845). Between these two
transatlantic communal experiments came the brief period when (parts of) the
growing Owenite movement coalesced with two mass working-class movements:
the first wave of the cooperative movement (when Owenite ‘labour exchanges’
issued labour notes as currency); and a period of dramatic growth in trade union-
ism (culminating in the short-lived Grand National Consolidated Trades Union).
The Owenite movement subsequently retreated into its so-called ‘sectarian’
phase, with Owen promoting his ‘new religion’ through The book of the new
moral world (1842–1844) and lectures to the Rational Society. His last years
were marked by a conversion to Spiritualism, to the embarrassment of some of
his subsequent admirers. (Happily, following a spiritual communication from the
former Duke of Kent, Owen was able to confirm the absence of titles in the
afterlife.)
Owen’s central claim about human nature (repeated endlessly in his writings)
has two (equally contestable) component parts. First, he insists that individuals
do not form their own character, rather their character is wholly formed for them
by circumstances. Second, he insists that individuals are consequently not
accountable for their own sentiments and habits; to imagine that they merit
rewards for some actions and punishments for others is a fundamental mistake.
Owen maintains that with the application of the right means any ‘general
character’ from the ‘best’ to the ‘worst’ can be created in a community. In A new
180 David Leopold
view of society, the contrast here is broadly between a ‘good’ character that is
intelligent, rational, and happy, and a ‘bad’ character that is ignorant, irrational,
and miserable. (An elaborated version has ‘manly’, ‘just’, ‘generous’, ‘temper-
ate’, ‘active’, ‘kind’, and ‘benevolent’ traits, being contrasted with ‘effeminate’,
‘deceitful’, ‘ignorantly selfish’, ‘intemperate’, ‘revengeful’, and even ‘murderous’
ones (Owen, 1993a, p. 62).) It is not that human nature provides no constraints
whatsoever on what can be created, but rather that human nature is sufficiently
plastic that, with the appropriate means, it can be formed into either the best or
the worst of characters.
The appropriate means of forming human nature consist of education in what
we might call broad and narrow senses. In a broad sense, education is synony-
mous with the social environment in which all individuals are circumstanced. In
a narrow sense, education is concerned with the training of the young, typically
in specialised institutions. The right direction of these means requires their being
controlled by a minority with an understanding of, and authority in, human
affairs. (Even in his most radical moments, Owen subscribed to a variety of
socialism ‘from above’, a socialism that viewed ‘self-emancipation’ and democratic
control with mistrust.)
Initially, Owen wrote as a ‘manufacturer for pecuniary profit’, advising his
peers to take as much care of their ‘vital machines’ as they did of their ‘inanimate
machines’, ensuring that both were kept neat, clean, kindly treated, and well-
supplied (Owen, 1993a, p. 28). The workers of New Lanark before his own
arrival are portrayed (perhaps exaggeratedly) as sunk in vice: they lived ‘in
idleness, in poverty, in almost every kind of crime; consequently, in debt, out of
health, and in misery’, all this overlain, in Scotland, by religious sectarianism
(Owen, 1993a, p. 45). However, with a few judicious changes Owen claimed to
have transformed their sorry condition. Circumstances were instituted which
quickly and effectively formed habits of order, regularity, health, temperance,
industry, and faithfulness to employers. Some changes were of general applica-
tion. For example, housing conditions were improved, roads were maintained,
and a company shop providing necessities at low prices was established. Other
changes were more closely linked to specific kinds of behaviour. For example, to
reduce alcohol abuse, public houses were closed, alternative recreation was
provided (gardening and walking are identified as economical and innocent
pleasures which individuals can be trained to enjoy), and the health benefits of
temperance were explained to workers (when they were most receptive – whilst
suffering from hangovers).
Owen was keen to appeal to New Lanark as experimental proof of the veracity
of his claims about the formation of character. He presented himself as a success-
ful practical man (not yet another speculative theorist), whose thorough study of
human nature was reflected in a combination of self-evident propositions and
empirically proven recommendations.
Having succeeded locally, Owen sought to work on a national scale to form
character and ameliorate the ‘lower classes’. He initially urged the British
government to institute a series of measures – said to follow from abandoning
the absurd and damaging notion that individuals form their own characters –
including: restricting the sale and consumption of alcohol; ending the state
lottery; removing religious tests; reforming the poor law (providing a modest
system of public works); and introducing a system of education along the lines
established at New Lanark (see below).
Owen insisted that these changes could be made without social upheaval and
injury to any part of society. Existing social arrangements are said to be held
together, not by class interests, but by an ignorance that the light of (Owenite)
truth was already beginning to dispel. Class struggle is ‘irrational’ because it pre-
supposes what is – on the Owenite account – false, namely that the ‘higher
classes’ are responsible for the misery of the ‘lower classes’. And it is ‘useless’
because it encourages (misplaced but nonetheless real) resistance to change on
the part of the ‘higher classes’. Rich and poor, Owen avers, have but one interest,
and the latter ought to view the former not as class enemies but as potential
friends and active collaborators.
Owen always retained both this foundational assumption about the formation
of character, and this innocence about the nature of political power. What
changes is that he subsequently adopted more radical views about the problems
besetting modern society and the measures required to solve them.
Contemporaries were outraged by Owen’s increasingly critical pronounce-
ments on contemporary religion and marriage. He attacked all of the religions
of the world (as currently taught) for their sectarian and superstitious attitudes,
and for being based on ideas (about character formation) destructive of human
well-being and happiness. And he attacked existing marriage arrangements for
compelling men and women who did not love each other to live together
(thereby generating selfishness, cunning, deception, prostitution, and crime).
However, it was his evolving economic and communitarian ideas which were
ultimately a more influential part of his growing radicalism.
Owen criticised the contemporary economic system – which was based on
competition and the idea of buying cheap and selling dear – on various grounds:
for being inefficient and wasteful; for creating unhealthy and unpleasant employ-
ment; for overproducing commodities with little or no intrinsic utility or worth;
and for encouraging injurious inequalities. Its central failing, however, was
predictably its effect on character, since competition encourages the ‘most
inferior feelings, the meanest faculties, the worse passions, and the most injurious
vices’ (Owen, 1991, p. 358).
Owen increasingly identified small communal settlements as both the means
to, and the final institutional form of, the rational and humane future. The
triumph of communitarian socialism would take a gradualist and non-
confrontational form; spreading by example from community to community,
country to continent, until the whole world is organised according to coopera-
tive principles. He enthused about the many advantages of communal life,
including the avoidance of domestic duplication; for example, better food would
be prepared at a fraction of the effort and cost of individual family arrangements.
He found it much harder to imagine any potential disadvantages of communal
182 David Leopold
living. Indeed, the only practical worry he raises concerns the dangers of people
living under the old order rushing precipitately into the new settlements.
A consistent picture of the ideal Owenite community emerges despite some
variation in the detail. Communities should be small, not falling below 500 or
rising above 2,500 persons. Agriculture (adopting a specific kind of spade culti-
vation) should predominate over manufacture; machinery could be used – for
example, to reduce harmful and laborious tasks – but must always be subordi-
nated to human interests. Each settlement should be built in a closed ‘parallelo-
gram’, with living quarters on each side, and school, church, and dining hall in
the middle. Property arrangements are a little less certain. Owen’s conviction
that labour was the source of all wealth, and that competition bred an undesir-
able kind of character, encouraged him to endorse common rather than private
property. However, his views on this issue are not always clear or consistent, and
he remained cautious about the speed with which divisions between rich and
poor might be overcome.
The place of politics and government in these communities is also uncertain.
Owen’s resistance to democratic control was constant, and he always personally
sought paternalistic authority over both communal experiments and the wider
Owenite movement. In later formulations of his communal plan, he settled on a
kind of gerontocracy as the ideal arrangement. In one version, he divides the
population of each settlement into eight age cohorts, the seventh and eighth of
which would control ‘domestic affairs’ (preserving communal harmony and
affection) and ‘foreign affairs’ (managing communications between communi-
ties), respectively. It seems that the artificial and irrational distinctions of class
and status are gradually to be replaced by natural and rational divisions based on
age and experience.
Turning from the broad to the narrow sense of education, Owen maintains
that the right kind of schooling is both crucial – the best-governed state is the
one with the best system of education – and seemingly relatively easy to accom-
plish. At least, forming the character of children is said to be much less difficult
than reforming the character of adults. Adults resist the need to unlearn and
abandon long acquired (bad) habits, whereas children are without exception
‘passive and wonderfully contrived compounds’. A rightly directed environment,
of which a rational system of schooling is a crucial part, might easily mould
this ‘plastic’ into an appropriate bundle of rational wishes and desires (Owen,
1993a, p. 41).
Discussion of Owen’s educational views typically focus on the schooling in
New Lanark and in the New Harmony settlement (Harrison, 1968). However,
it was William Maclure (1763–1840) rather than Owen who was the predomi-
nant influence on the latter project. It was Maclure who brought in European
teachers – part of the famous ‘boatload of knowledge’ – who had trained with
the Swiss reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), who initiated the
School of Industry providing ‘useful’ rather than ‘ornamental’ education, and
who subsequently established the school as a separate entity under his direct
control (see Bestor, 1950, pp. 133–159, 190–201). Consequently, I concentrate
here on New Lanark as the most extended and successful practical educational
experiment in which Owen was the predominant influence. Whilst the social
context of education alters radically in his later writings – schooling is now
organised within a global network of cooperative communities rather than the
towns and villages of a competition-ridden nation state – Owen’s narrowly
educational views are relatively unchanged. New Lanark appears to give us as
accurate a picture of the narrowly educational content of the future as we are
likely to get this side of the Millennium (Owen, 1993d, p. 166).
The ‘Institution for the Formation of Character’ at New Lanark (which
opened in 1816) admitted children from eighteen months (when they could
walk unaided) until ten when they could work in the factory (or occasionally, as
Owen would have preferred, until twelve). It occupied a two-storey building
with a playground. The upper storey was divided into two, and consisted of a
classroom for the older children – with the furniture arranged after the monito-
rial system associated with Andrew Bell (1753–1832) and Joseph Lancaster
(1778–1838), with desks against the walls and a free space in the centre of the
room – and a lecture room, complete with history time-lines, globes, models,
and specimens (Silver, 1996, pp. 49–52). The lower storey was divided into three
rooms for the younger children. The older children were taught for some five
hours daily, the infants for half of that (with supervised play for the rest of the
day). Younger children were taught in mixed-sex classes, whilst older children
were taught separately (although mixed for lectures). There was a school
uniform (improbably combining the shape of a Roman tunic with tartan mate-
rial). Parents were charged a small amount for the schooling of the older chil-
dren, much less than the full cost but thereby avoiding the stigma of a pauper
school. (Educational subsidies are easily justified, Owen maintains, by the wider
benefits to the community.)
Owen did not neglect education before and after these ages. The earliest
periods of a child’s life were particularly important on his account, since a great
deal of good or evil could be taught in the first twelve months. He sought to
influence this period before school indirectly, for example, by providing lectures
on parenting to workers, with a focus on forming children into valuable members
of the community. There were also evening classes for young persons (between
ten and twenty years old) who wanted to continue their education outside of
work. (Universities are not mentioned in A new view of society, but are later
portrayed as irrational and distorting ‘moulds’ for forming character that will
disappear with the triumph of communitarian socialism.)
The content of the Owenite curriculum might look broadly familiar, but
contains some innovations. The core curriculum consisted of reading (using
books which are practical and relevant to the young), writing (encouraging a
legible business hand useful in later life), and arithmetic (latterly adopting the
‘tables’ of Pestalozzi). The older children were also taught natural history, geog-
raphy, and history. Perhaps more striking, in terms of content, was the attempt
to balance physical and mental instruction. Owen viewed singing and dancing as
powerful means to forming a rational and happy character (appearance, bearing,
184 David Leopold
and health were all thereby improved), and they constituted a regular part of the
curriculum (charming many visitors but provoking the disapproval of his Quaker
business partners). Both sexes were to have equal opportunities to acquire useful
knowledge, although Owen presumes that the useful knowledge in question
would vary according to sex. Girls were taught to sew and make useful garments,
to prepare appetising food economically, and to keep a neat and ordered house.
Boys were instructed in the art of war – there were drill exercises in the
playground, training in the use of firearms, and some introduction to military
tactics. Owen enthuses about the individual and collective advantages of such
training: it encourages ‘attention, celerity, and order’, and provides for the self-
defence that would be necessary as long as irrational beings still remained in the
world (Owen, 1993a, p. 72).
The place of religious instruction at New Lanark was always controversial, and
the issue contributed to Owen’s eventual resignation from the school manage-
ment. Owen was a deist – believing in the existence of natural moral laws and a
supreme being – and he would have preferred to teach (only) the foundational
part of ‘pure and undefiled’ religion (the lesson that one should seek to promote
the interests of others). However, since neither his co-owners nor the parents
concerned shared these views, Owen was compelled to ensure that Christian
scriptures were read and the catechism taught.
Perhaps more remarkable than the curriculum are the teaching methods and
aims that Owen advocated.
The means of instruction were designed to make learning a pleasure and
delight to children. Reflecting Owen’s controversial views on responsibility,
there was to be no scolding or punishment (or rewards) of children; teachers
were required rather to show affection and ‘unceasing kindness’ to all their
charges (Owen, 1993d, p. 287). Children were not to be irritated or bored by
books, and every effort was made to use ‘sensible signs’ in lessons and lectures
(that is, models, diagrams, and specimens of the things themselves). Conversation
with teachers was to be the norm, and children were encouraged to ask questions
and seek clarification. Lessons might be held indoors or outdoors, and there
were occasional trips (to learn about agriculture and natural history).
The aim of Owenite instruction was to develop both character and reasoning.
The ‘New Institution’ was fundamentally a place of safety where children would
acquire the best habits. From their first admission, they were instructed that they
must never injure one of their ‘playfellows’, but must rather strive to make them
happy. This central precept was repeatedly emphasised until it became ‘easy and
familiar’ (and therefore ‘natural’) to them (Owen, 1993a, p. 57). Having
internalised this lesson in their behaviour, they were then taught the Owenite
theory of character formation that lay behind it. For example, they might learn
that if they had grown up in such and such a country, then they would have been
‘cannibals or Hindoos’ themselves (Owen, 1969, p. 158). Such a discovery
would: first, encourage interest in, and sympathy with, a wide sphere of human-
ity; and second, demonstrate the central Owenite claim that our characters are
formed for us, and that ‘consequently’ notions of individual praise and blame are
misguided. As well as being formed with the best of characters, children would
be taught to reason for themselves. For example, when learning to read, the
content of books was to be discussed (not learnt by rote). If children could be
taught to think and reason correctly, Owen insists, they would discover how to
distinguish truth from falsehood for themselves.
This focus on character and reasoning was central to Owen’s criticism of
contemporary educational theory and practice. He did not doubt that the Bell
and Lancaster schemes, for example, constituted an improvement on what went
before, and contained much of pedagogic value at the level of detail. However,
both approaches, he noted, could produce individuals who – whilst undoubtedly
able to ‘read, write, account, and sew’ – had the worst of habits and characters.
Similarly, he maintains that so-called ‘national’ schools encouraged rote learning
at the expense of understanding. A visitor to these institutions, he recounts,
would be shown pupils able to reproduce the most precise answers to the most
insoluble theological questions, without those children having understood a
word of what they had memorised (Owen, 1993a, p. 87).
Owen thought that the results of his proposed transformation in the aims and
methods of education were liable to be underestimated (since contemporaries
were usually familiar only with the results of poor and erroneous instruction).
With the right direction, and the appropriate communitarian changes to the
wider society in place, he confidently predicted that children would soon outstrip
the learned of previous generations. In due course, the second of his eight age
cohorts (at least by the age of ten) would emerge as well-trained, rational beings,
whilst those of the fourth group (aged fifteen to twenty) would effectively be
men and women of ‘a new race’ – physically, intellectually and morally far supe-
rior to any who have previously lived upon the earth (Owen, 1991, p. 349).
Charles Fourier
Fourier was born in Besançon, in the French province of Franche-Comté. His
childhood was dominated by the commercial background and religiosity of his
family, against which he subsequently rebelled. In adulthood, Fourier earned a
modest living from a variety of commercial jobs (mainly in the silk and textile
industry of Lyon), but increasingly devoted his energies to producing a torrent
of idiosyncratic brochures, multi-volume treatises, letters, and polemics.
Educational themes took up a large part of his Traité de I’association domestique-
agricole (1822), and early references to Fourier often describe him as a theorist
of education. His lesser publications also include a strange pamphlet
(the Mnémonique géographique), which sought to function as both a coded
introduction to his own system and a critique of contemporary geography teach-
ing (Beecher, 1986, pp. 378–380). Despite a deserved reputation for being a
difficult and suspicious person, Fourier gradually accumulated a small school of
followers, complete with its own journals (Le Phalanstère and La Phalange). He
lived in Paris for the last fifteen years of his life, obsessed with the threat of plagia-
rism and the need to find a patron (to fund a trial community).
186 David Leopold
Fourier’s systematic and often extraordinary worldview includes: an account
of the origin and development of the universe; a philosophy of history (including
a 32-stage narrative of infancy, ascent, descent, and decrepitude); a critique of
‘Civilisation’ (a term used with ironical intent to refer to contemporary society);
and a vision of an ideal future (which, simplifying somewhat, we can identify with
the historical stage called ‘Harmony’). I will focus here on the social and educa-
tional arrangements of Harmony, but begin with Fourier’s views on Providence
and human nature.
Fourier shared Owen’s concern with human nature, but with a crucial
difference: he saw character as God-given and liable to discovery, rather than
plastic and open to creation. Given His own nature, it was impossible that God
had not provided for the terrestrial happiness of humankind. The role of the
social theorist was consequently to discover the key which would make that
earthly paradise achievable. Fourier acknowledges that he appears an unlikely
prophet, but maintains that God had once before chosen the most obscure man
to deliver the most important message to the world. The key in question involves
a divinely underwritten model of human nature, according to which individuals
are born with different innate dispositions and propensities. The problem with
all hitherto existing societies was that they had (unintentionally) constrained and
misdirected that nature. What was needed instead were social arrangements that
would facilitate the free development and deployment of these basic human
characteristics.
These opening assumptions about Providence and the liberation of a
God-given human nature may not seem so remarkable. The same cannot be said
of the ways in which Fourier elaborates these foundational ideas.
Fourier’s complex account of human nature identifies twelve basic drives or
‘passions’: five ‘luxurious’ passions corresponding to the senses (taste, smell,
hearing, sight, and touch); four ‘affective’ passions corresponding to the need for
other people (friendship, love, ambition, and ‘familism’); and three ‘distributive’
passions which govern the gratification of the others (the ‘Cabalist’ passion for
intrigue; the ‘Butterfly’ passion for variety; and the ‘Composite’ passion requir-
ing both spiritual and physical gratification). These twelve ‘passions’ were
combined in various ways to generate a ‘scale’ of some 810 basic personality
types (Fourier, 1972, p. 220). (Fourier often uses musical and mathematical
language to elaborate his ideas.)
Fourier illustrates this account with confident identifications of the character
types of various historical figures, and brief descriptions of the ways in which
social arrangements failed to discern and liberate the drives and propensities in
question. The Emperor Nero (37 BCE–68 CE) can provide both a representative
example and an introduction to Fourier’s educational views (Fourier, 1972,
pp. 303–307). Nero is identified as a relatively unusual character type; a ‘tetra-
tone’ dominated by four passions (cabalist, composite, ambition, and love). He
had been born with blood-thirsty inclinations, which his teacher Seneca
(3 BCE–65 CE) – mistakenly believing his nature to be corrupt – had foolishly
sought to deny and constrain. The result was that Nero’s natural dispositions
subsequently reappeared in distorted and dangerous form, as he gave vent to the
inclinations repressed in childhood. For Fourier, it was not Nero who was
corrupt, but rather the society which had failed to utilise his natural inclinations
constructively. In a rational and humane world, Nero’s blood-thirsty penchants
would have drawn him at an early age to one of the work groups involved with
the preparation of meat for consumption, and by the age of twenty he would
have been an accomplished butcher happily serving the community.
Harmony is based on this account of liberating natural drives. All its basic
institutions are designed to facilitate rather than restrict human nature, and can
be seen as contributing to education in the broad sense. However, education in
the narrow sense is radically transformed, since there are no specialised institu-
tions for the training of the young (see below).
Perhaps the most obvious feature of Harmonian society is its communal
organisation. The ideal society would be organised into Phalanxes – intentional
communities of roughly two thousand individuals. (The ideal Phalanx would
have 1620 members, twice the complete ‘scale’ of basic personality types.) There
are few details of communal life that Fourier can resist describing, but its archi-
tecture is a particular obsession. He was especially enthusiastic about the covered
walkways (cooled in summer and heated in winter) encircling the Phalanstery –
the grand central building of the community, combining public and private
spaces – and connecting it to surrounding buildings.
The most striking social feature of the community is that it has class divisions
but no class antagonisms. There would be classes in that disparities of income
would coalesce to form three groups with slightly distinct lifestyles (the rich
would include wealthy shareholders helping to finance the community, and
drawing an income from their investment). There would be no class antago-
nisms, however, because their primary cause – poverty – would be absent.
Fourier insists that it is not inequality per se that causes class antagonisms;
disparities in wealth only provoke conflict in the absence of provision for our
essential needs. And Harmony would eradicate poverty by instituting what
would now be called a universal basic income; that is, an income paid to
individuals, irrespective of their income from other sources, and without requir-
ing the performance of any work. In Harmony, this income would be set at a
subsistence level (covering basic needs). Class antagonisms would also be
removed by Harmony’s property arrangements (in which labour, talent, and
capital all share an annual dividend), by rich and poor working together in small
groups, and by a unified system of education (establishing a commonality of
language and manners).
The political arrangements of the Phalanx are less clear. Initially, it appears that
the coercive and coordinating tasks undertaken by states in Civilisation would
either be unnecessary, or occur in a decentralised or informal manner. Closer
inspection, however, reveals a rather shadowy central body – the ‘Areopagus’
(made up of elders, large shareholders, and representatives from various work
groups) – that issues infrequent advice not backed by coercion (for example,
recommending the day on which to start the harvest). In addition, there is some
188 David Leopold
similarly shadowy use of something like punishment. At least, Fourier recognises
that circumstances might arise in which an individual would be excluded by their
peers from a workgroup, or even – although this seems almost unimaginable to
him – banished from a community as a whole (Beecher, 1986, p. 256).
It will already be apparent that productive activity plays a central role in
Harmonian life. Fourier rejects the familiar view of work as a necessary evil, as
something both unpleasant and which we are compelled to undertake. He sees
work rather as potentially creative and fulfilling, and identifies self-realisation in
work as a central part of the good life.
The adoption of a universal basic income (set at a substantive level) together
with the absence of coercion, raises the question of whether, and why,
Harmonians would engage in productive activity. Fourier’s answer is ‘attractive
work’; individuals would freely engage in productive activity as one of the central
ways in which to self-realise, to develop and deploy their essential human charac-
teristics. To facilitate this self-realisation, work in Harmony is organised ‘serially’.
That is, productive tasks are carried out by small groups (typically some fifteen
people) which are voluntary, hierarchical, socially diverse, and united by a passion
for the activity in question. A typical work session might last only an hour, but
there could be as many as ten sessions in a day (Fourier, 2001a, p. 193).
Education, in both senses, plays an important role in Fourier’s vision (Zeldin
1969). All social arrangements in Harmony are broadly educative, aimed at
liberating human nature and enabling individuals to discover and deploy their
own particular combination of human characteristics. Education in the narrow
sense plays this role at a vital early stage, revealing the various (plural) vocations
of each individual.
Fourier criticises the educational arrangements of contemporary Civilisation as
unnatural and incoherent. They are ‘unnatural’ in seeking to constrain the
passions, and in treating children as unproductive. They are ‘incoherent’ in that
what children are taught in schools not only varies according to sex and class, but
also conflicts with, and is undermined by, what they are taught by their peers and
family. Fourier had some limited knowledge of contemporary educationalist
ideas – he had certainly read about Pestalozzi and the ‘Lancastrians’ (Andrew
Bell and Joseph Lancaster) – although he was characteristically dismissive of the
opinions of others.
The most striking institutional feature of Harmonian education is that it takes
place without schools and without teachers. First, education occurs not in
schools, nor in the family, but in the wider community. It is the Phalanx that
collectively raises and educates Harmonian children. Fourier is usually said to
‘abolish’ the family, but that description is surely misleading. The modern family
certainly disappears, and there are communal arrangements for child rearing.
However, mothers breastfeed their children, biological parents often have close
relationships with their offspring, and the familial passion is identified as one
requiring expression. Second, there is no longer a class of professional educators.
Harmony would, of course, contain people who teach others, but they would do
so as one of many different activities as they go about their daily lives.
Up to the age of four and a half, although they might be visited by their
biological parents, children would be brought up by adults working serially as
nurses (the latter drawn from the minority of adults attracted by nature to child
care). These nurses would introduce their charges to the world of work, but
thereafter (from the age of four or so) children would become free and
independent members of the Phalanx, contributing to production from the start.
Work is central to life in Harmony, and voluntary engagement in productive
activity is the context in which education usually occurs.
Fourier loved detailed typologies, although – to the frustration of commenta-
tors – these often vary without explanation between texts. One account has
children progressing through a series of eight ‘choirs’, corresponding approxi-
mately to age ranges. Progression through these choirs is governed by a satisfac-
tory performance in various practical tests. (Fourier does not worry quite as
much as we might like about the fate of those unable to progress; there is some
unclear talk of ‘half-character’ choirs, and of ‘late developers’ being able to catch
up.) For example, an ‘urchin’ of four and a half, hoping to enter the choir of
‘cherubs’, might have to perform the following tasks: participating in the choir
and corps de ballet at the opera; washing 120 plates in half an hour; peeling a
quantity of apples within a given time; and lighting (and extinguishing) a fire
promptly. Their success at these tasks would be judged by slightly older children,
who would prove much more reliable critics than the parents of Civilisation
(all too quick to praise the mistakes of their own offspring).
Those various tasks illustrate a number of features of Fourier’s views on
education, including the developmental importance of voluntary participation in
cooking and opera. He saw children as nascent gourmands, drawn instinctively
to the kitchen by smell and taste. Harmony would encourage participation in the
culinary arts, thereby developing the child’s manual dexterity and control, intro-
ducing them to the world of work, and engendering a practical interest in the
sciences of agronomy, biology, and chemistry. Similarly, opera would attract
children through sight and sounds, and develop their physicality. (Harmonian
opera is a superior art form unifying music, song, poetry, dance, gymnastics,
design, and gesture.) Every Phalanx would have an opera house in which
ordinary Harmonians combined to produce performances superior to those of
the largest cities in Civilisation.
One of the interesting formal features of Fourier’s writings is his use of narra-
tive and quasi-narrative, episodes alongside more conventional theoretical
passages. The following two examples – involving the shelling of peas and the
cleaning of sewers – illustrate both the importance of work and the changing
focus of education depending on the age of the child. Until the age of nine,
education focuses on physical faculties and senses; after nine, it focuses on moral
and emotional development. These episodes also convey Fourier’s love of
ceremony, and his interest in the ways in which decorations and ranks might
motivate a contribution to production.
In Harmony, the shelling and grading of green peas will be done by children
as young as two to four years old. We are asked to imagine a group of such
190 David Leopold
children sitting at a sloping table, with a number of slots in it, ranked from the
oldest at the top to the youngest at the bottom. Those at the top would shell
and handle the smallest of peas, those in the middle would collect the medium
peas, and the youngest would simply gather up the remaining large peas in a
basket and return the occasionally rogue medium pea up the table to the older
children. A new volunteer for the series – a candidate member of the green pea
shellers – would perform the latter role. Their task was the simplest, but they
would, if successful, feel that they had contributed as much as anyone, and be
rewarded with a decoration for their hat or collar. (A succession of such decora-
tions would, in due course, mark their ascent through the work group.) In
this way, social arrangements which encourage natural proclivities are used to
initiate children into the world of work. Fourier identifies the five dominant
tastes of children as: a desire to ‘ape’ or imitate; an eagerness to follow (slightly)
older children; a fondness for small things; the enjoyment of rummaging about;
and the love of making noise. The tableau of the little peas shows the first two
of these instincts, in particular, being used to constructive ends within the
Phalanx (Fourier, 1972, pp. 307–310).
Notoriously, Fourier also offers a solution to the problem of certain (literally)
‘dirty jobs’ in Harmony (cleaning the sewers, tending the communal dungheap,
and washing out slaughterhouses are all mentioned). He estimates that two-
thirds of boys, and one-third of girls, aged between nine and fifteen, enjoy
getting dirty (and, more generally, being fearless and creating havoc). Whereas
Civilisation sought to repress these proclivities, Harmony would encourage and
utilise them. These children would choose to enrol in the work group known as
‘the Little Hordes’, who dauntlessly perform certain tasks that ordinary workers
would find debasing. Marx would later charge Fourier with confusing work and
play, mistakenly imagining that sewer cleaning could become a game played by
children. Closer examination, however, shows that the Little Hordes are not
simply having fun, but are rather motivated by a concern for the community at
large, and for the honour of their own corporation. This is an age when selfless
devotion is at its strongest, and corporate pride is here directed towards the
common good. These moral motivations are accompanied, and reinforced, by a
bewildering range of ceremonial ranks and titles, which are highly sought after
by members who yield to no one in loyalty to their own intermediate association
(Fourier, 1972, pp. 317–318).
Two surprising absences in Fourier’s account of education (narrowly under-
stood) might be noted. First, despite Fourier’s deserved reputation as holding
extravagant and (to some) shocking views on love and sexuality, there is no place
for sex education. Adolescence arrives late in Harmony, and up until the age of
fifteen children have no interest in, or exposure to, sexual activity. Second, there
does not appear to be much room for ‘book learning’ narrowly understood. This
is surprising because elsewhere we are told that Harmony will have a huge
number of brilliant scholars and great authors (all well-remunerated and appro-
priately honoured). It seems that any engagement in narrowly intellectual
pursuits will have been largely self-motivated, and come later in life.
Some concluding remarks

It might be helpful to rehearse some of the more specifically educational threads
in the work of these two utopian authors.
Owen sees education, first, as properly aimed at creating character (moulding
children into valuable members of the community) and developing the faculty of
reason (teaching children to understand). Second, he stresses the importance
and efficacy of early schooling, and acknowledges the correspondingly greater
difficulty in (re)forming characters once they have been established. Third, his
views about the delivery of education emphasise the importance of kindness on
the part of teachers, and the use of ‘sensible signs’ in the classroom. Fourth, he
maintains that the sexes should have equal opportunities to acquire useful knowl-
edge, albeit that utility here might reflect a somewhat traditional sexual division
of labour. Fifth, although his views about institutional arrangements and curric-
ulum are broadly progressive, they look rather less radical than his developing
ideas about the social context within which education takes place. Sixth, he sees
education as having an extraordinary constructive potential; the rationally
moulded inhabitants of the new moral world will effectively be a ‘new race’, far
superior to the products of poor and erroneous instruction with which we are
familiar.
Fourier sees education, first, as properly aimed at liberating character,
developing and deploying (not repressing and misdirecting) our God-given
essential passions. Second, education for Fourier is always closely connected with
the world of work, engaging in productive activity is the main way in which we
discover and express who we are. Third, he endorses a striking institutional
integration of education into the community; there are no schools and no teach-
ers, only a variety of social spaces in which we might learn, and lots of different
people who might teach us something. Fourth, he maintains that education
should start early and initially focus on physical development and dexterity (only
later turning to concentrate on moral and emotional development). Fifth,
freedom is at the heart of Harmonian education; children seemingly profit from
instruction only when, and insofar as, they have themselves solicited it. Sixth, his
enthusiasm for social differences and competition between work groups does not
stop him endorsing educational arrangements that are broadly egalitarian, in that
all classes, and both sexes, would enjoy the same opportunities.
Picking out these (narrow) educational threads in this way risks treating the
work of Owen and Fourier in a fashion that they would have resisted. They both
emphasised the systematic character of their theories, and portrayed the meaning
and value of their educational views as dependent on the broader social and
political transformation to which their writings were a contribution. And yet
their practical impact on the world typically took what we might call a ‘cannibal-
ised’ form. Particular policies were isolated from the systematic radical vision,
modified, and then adopted in contexts very different to those intended by
their authors. The appearance of certain Fourierist themes – including the focus
on production, and the use of ceremony and decorations – in the pedagogic
192 David Leopold
experiments of Anton Makarenko (1888–1939) in the Soviet Union might serve
as a particularly stark example.
It might surprise some readers to learn that Owen and (perhaps especially)
Fourier left any mark on the wider world (given the wilder shores of some of
their work). In that context, I close with two observations.
First, although their practical impact fell short of their own ambitions (namely,
the radical transformation of the existing social and political world), their educa-
tional views did have some (albeit limited and often indirect) influence. In the
nineteenth century, that influence was carried by two conduits, in particular:
communitarian socialism, and the movement for popular education.
Communitarian experiments flourished in the first half of the century, especially
in the United States (one recent study identifies some 22 Owenite and 31
Fourierist examples) (Pitzer, 1997, pp. 481–482). Historians once dismissed
these often short-lived settlements as failures (heroic or otherwise), but increas-
ingly recognise not only that ‘success’ might be more complex than longevity
but also that these communities had some influence upon the larger societies of
which they formed a part. Education looks to be an important part of that
complicated and still-emerging story. (Examples might include the involvement
of ex-Owenites in the ‘state guardianship’ plan proposed in New York elections
in 1829, and the Fourierist adoption of ‘industrial education’ in 1840s
Wisconsin.) In addition, these utopian ideas formed one of the intellectual
sources of the, somewhat better documented, movement for popular education,
especially in Britain and France. (For example, the influence of Owen was felt by
Samuel Wilderspin (1792–1866) of the Infant School Society, amongst others;
whilst Jean Macé (1815–1894) and the founders of the école maternelle both
owed some debt to the educational views of Fourier.)
Second, and finally, it is important not to think of utopias as only having a
‘constructive’ function; as if their sole purpose, and the only possible benchmark
by which they might be assessed, is their practical and reforming impact. Detailed
descriptions of an ideal society, of the kind that Owen and Fourier provide, can
have a number of additional functions. These utopian designs can, for instance,
play a critical role, providing a vantage point from which to evaluate less than
ideal societies. They can also reflect their historical context, telling us something
about the world in which they were written. They can also help to clarify
particular (conceptual and normative) issues, acting as thought experiments
which help us understand something better. They can also console, acting as a
diversion from the harsh realities of the existing world. And they can also, of
course, cheer, entertain, and otherwise amuse their readers. I do not mean to
suggest that all of these potential functions – the list is not intended to be
exhaustive – will necessarily be of interest to educationalists (qua educational-
ists). However, the existence of these other functions does show that the
constructive weakness (real or imagined) of these ideal commonwealths is not
enough to make them worthless to that audience. The interest of utopian
writings can sometimes lie elsewhere.
References
Beecher, J. (1986) Charles Fourier: the visionary and his world (Berkeley, University of
California Press).
Bestor, A. E. (1950) Backwoods utopias. The sectarian and Owenite phases of communitar-
ian socialism in America 1663–1829 (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press).
Fisher, R. T. (1963) Classical utopian theories of education (New Haven, College &
University Press).
Fourier, C. (1972) The utopian vision of Charles Fourier (eds J. Beecher & R. Bienvenu)
(London, Jonathan Cape).
Fourier, C. (2001a, 1st edn. 1822) Théorie de l’unité universelle, vol. 1 (Paris, Presses du
réel).
Fourier, C. (2001b, 1st edn. 1822) Théorie de l’unité universelle, vol. 2 (Paris, Presses du
réel).
Fourier, C. (1996, 1st edn. 1808) Theory of the four movements (eds G. Stedman Jones &
I. Patterson) (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
Halpern, D. (2003) Hope and education. The role of the utopian imagination (London,
Routledge).
Harrison, J. F. C. (1968) Utopianism and education. Robert Owen and the Owenites
(New York, Teachers College Press).
Massó, G. (1927) Education in utopias (New Haven, College & University Press).
Owen, R. (1969) Robert Owen on education (ed. H. Silver) (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press).
Owen, R. (1991) A new view of society and other writings (ed. G. Claeys) (London,
Penguin).
Owen, R. (1993a, 1st edn. 1813–1844) vol. 1 of G. Claeys (ed.) The selected works of
Robert Owen (London, Pickering & Chatto).
Owen, R. (1993b, 1st edn. 1803–1822) The development of socialism, vol. 2 of G. Claeys
(ed.) The selected works of Robert Owen (London, Pickering & Chatto).
Owen, R. (1993c, 1st edn. 1825–1848) The heyday of Owenism, vol. 3 of G. Claeys (ed.)
The selected works of Robert Owen (London, Pickering & Chatto).
Owen, R. (1993d, 1st edn. 1857) The autobiography of Robert Owen, vol. 4 of G. Claeys
(ed.) The selected works of Robert Owen (London, Pickering & Chatto).
Ozmon, H. (1969) Utopias and education (Minneapolis, Burgess).
Peters, M. A. & Freeman-Moir, J. (2006) Edutopias. New Utopian thinking in education
(Rotterdam, Sense).
Pitzer, D. E. (ed.) (1997) America’s communal utopias (Chapel Hill, University of North
Carolina Press).
Silver, H. (1966) The concept of popular education: a study of ideas and social movements in
the early 19th century (London, Routledge).
Zeldin, D. (1969) The educational ideas of Charles Fourier (London, Routledge).
13 Harriet Martineau
and the Unitarian
tradition in education
Ruth Watts
Introduction
Harriet Martineau is a very apposite figure to choose for a collection which
examines the interrelationships of education, political and personal life, and
power. Throughout her life (1802–1877)1 she concerned herself with a wide
variety of political, economic, social, and cultural issues but both her voluminous
writings and her actions were underpinned by a fervent desire to educate the
public, unfailingly optimistic that if everyone was correctly educated necessary
social change would take place. Eager to publish the knowledge she gained
through extensive reading, travel, and active engagement in many intellectual
and social debates, her constant questioning of cherished assumptions and desire
for scientific answers, even in religion, made her both a celebrated and a contro-
versial figure. Her concerns and approach, especially her belief in certain educa-
tional principles, owed much to her Unitarian upbringing.
The Unitarian ‘tradition’ in education

Modern Unitarianism emerged from eighteenth-century ‘Rational Dissent’.
Denying both the Trinity and original sin, Rational Dissenters fervently upheld
the right of all individuals to free enquiry in religion, the application of reason to
all things and a search for moral order and perfection. Naturally comprising a
range of thinking, by the 1790s Unitarianism was becoming their most dominant
form. Chiefly attractive to men and women of the middle and artisan ranks in
urban, commercial, and industrial areas, some of their chapels became citadels of
‘enlightened’ liberal thought, although Unitarians were never large in number.
Generally, they held an optimistic belief in the goodness and potential possibili-
ties of humanity while their hope of unravelling the laws of nature by reason,
experience, and experiment led them to an eager search for scientific explanation
and methods in all matters including education (Watts, 2010, pp. 13–14).
Rational Dissent and then Unitarianism emerged, indeed, largely from the
dissenting academies – those institutions established to educate Dissenting
Protestant males denied Oxbridge degrees because they would not subscribe to
the 39 Articles of the Church of England. The most radical – Warrington
Harriet Martineau and the Unitarian tradition in education 195
(1757–1786), followed by Hackney (1786–1793) and Manchester (1786–
1803)2 – not only educated both future ministers and male laity in the modern
curriculum emerging from Dissenting education, but also in a fervent love of
liberty and civil reform (Watts, 1991). A particularly dynamic tutor at Warrington
from 1761 to 1767 was Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), fast becoming a
renowned scientist, an explosive, radical political and religious activist, and an
innovative educationalist.
Priestley’s educational philosophy was deeply influenced by the full associa-
tionist psychology of David Hartley (1705–1757). He reissued Hartley’s
Observations on man (1749) in a condensed edition. This omitted Hartley’s
hypothesis that body and soul were bound together, although Priestley’s accept-
ance that all capacities were reducible to external impressions led him to believe
that everything was part of a chain of cause and effect traceable to a first cause
or God, a philosophy termed necessarianism. Not all Unitarians accepted
necessarianism, but Hartley’s philosophy much influenced both them and other
progressive educationalists (Priestley, 1782a, pp. 221–249; 1782b, pp. 454–535;
Watts, 1995, pp. 344–345). It taught that environment and circumstance rather
than innate character or divine intervention formed children, and promised that
with the right, carefully interrelated intellectual, physical, and moral education
from birth, people would find the way to unbounded knowledge, happiness, love
of God, and perfect virtue. Thus everyone needed such, both for their own moral
development and to educate others. The crucial significance of associationist
psychology meant that neither women nor anyone else could be assumed to be
inferior in mental capacity, although Dissenters’ fear of state control of education
limited demands for national education before the nineteenth century (Priestley,
1771, pp. 40–54; 1780, pp. 137–138; 1790).
Freedom of inquiry, thinking for oneself, learning from experiment and
experience – all underpinned by Hartleian psychology – were at the heart of the
education for liberal, humane, active, ‘enlightened’ citizens which Priestley
promoted. So were modern subjects – Priestley pioneered modern history,
taught from the sources themselves, and promoted science as a liberalising,
humanising part of education, stimulating improvements in everything. In all
subjects, including English, he offered innovative, active, experiential scientific
methods of learning and teaching. Such an education was to help both males and
females to understand better the times and society in which they lived, the
importance of freedom of speech, the advantages of democracy, the miseries
caused by superstition and slavery, and the improvements accruing from science
and trade (Priestley, 1761 & 1798; 1762; 1767, pp. 341–345; 1780; 1803).
Other Rational Dissenters contributed to the main ethos in different ways.
Richard Price (1723–1791), especially, depicted a benevolent God who gave all
human beings the chance to achieve true wisdom and reform of society through
use of their reason (Fitzpatrick, 1985, pp. 87–88). Despite bitter hostility from
most orthodox Christians, including other Dissenters, to their religious views,
such educational ideas were developed in practice and in print. Importantly, this
helped generally to educate women far above the norm. Priestley was not alone
196 Ruth Watts
in believing that any culture or country could be judged truly civilised quite
simply by ‘the treatment of women among them’ (Priestley, 1803, p. 346).
Certainly, female Unitarians were part of an enterprising, energetic community,
at its best brimming with intellectual vitality. This did not change their expected
roles in life or employment opportunities much, but some took advantage of
their better education (Watts, 2010).
One such woman was Priestley’s younger friend Anna Barbauld (1743–1825).
Firstly renowned as a poet, she subsequently became a celebrated essayist and
educationalist. She and her brother, Dr John Aikin, wrote educational books for
children which interwove the principles of association with poetry, literature,
science, technology, and their lifelong engagement with liberal and humane
ideals. Stimulating observation and experiment, they stressed humanity’s
dependence on the useful and practical arts of life. Their joint venture Evenings
at home encouraged whole families to enjoy learning together (Aikin & Barbauld,
1793). This much-published work influenced generations of children in Britain
and America including the young Harriet Martineau (Martineau, 1983b, I,
pp. 302–303). Equally influential was Barbauld’s pioneering of reputable and
suitable writing for infants, particularly through her very innovative Lessons for
children (Barbauld, 1844). At the same time, Barbauld, whose own home was
always a cultural and educative centre, became famous or infamous for treatises
on religious freedom and civil liberties which gave her a political platform in the
vanguard of Rational Dissent (Watts, 2010, pp. 16, 17, 19, 21–24, 26).
Unitarian educational philosophy, indeed, was closely bound to what they
perceived as the interests and civil rights of the rising industrial and commercial
middle class – the ‘true sources of wealth, power and happiness in a nation’
(Priestley, 1780, pp. 185–187, 193–196) – to which most of them belonged.
Priestley, for example, warned that the ‘gunpowder’ that Dissenters were ‘assidu-
ously laying grain by grain under the old building of error and superstition’ was
not of chemicals but ‘of arguments’ which could only be met by proper debate.
He likened the universities to ‘pools of stagnant water, secured by dams and
mounds, and offensive to the neighbourhood’, unlike Dissenting academies
which, giving a ‘truly liberal education’, ‘like rivers ... taking their natural course,
fertilize a whole country (Priestley, 1787, p. 128). Thus civic and religious ideas
and education were tightly bound. Priestley, Richard Price (1723–1791), and
other Rational Dissenters fought against the Test and Corporation Acts, argued
for constitutional reform, and vociferously supported the American and French
Revolutions (Watts, 1991, 1998). Their educational ideas also inspired argu-
ments for women’s rights. Both Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) and Mary
Hays (1759–1843), in particular, built upon Price’s philosophy to argue that
women must have liberty, civil, and political rights and knowledge in order to
exercise their conscience and acquire virtue (Wollstonecraft, 1975; Watts, 2010,
pp. 15–16, 26–27). But Price’s famous sermon ‘A discourse on the love of our
country’ delivered to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great
Britain in November 1789,3 glorying in the French Revolution, provoked
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the revolution in France. The subsequent
reaction against both apparent political extremism and the growth of Unitarianism
resulted in Rational Dissenters suffering persecution, loss of property, imprison-
ment, or exile. The demise of Hackney Academy, for instance, seen as the
epitome of religious, political, and educational unorthodoxy, was likened to
the fall of Babylon by the Gentleman’s Magazine (Watts, 1991).
Nevertheless, Unitarian educational ethos and philosophy continued into the
nineteenth century, despite Unitarianism itself undergoing changes, though
mostly without changing Unitarians’ commitment to moral evolution within an
open-ended religion (Watts, 1998, pp. 101–103; 2000, p. 40). Their educational
activities were unceasing, mostly desiring education on Hartleian principles
including experiment and questioning, healthy physical education, no corporal
punishment and, if possible, the same education for females as males (see, for
example, Beard, 1859). This led them to play a part out of proportion to their
numbers in progressive schooling, university reform, mechanics institutes,
working-class education, all levels of education for girls, as well as in political and
social reform, local government, urban culture, science, and publication. They
were influenced by others such as Johann Pestalozzi (1746–1827) and Friedrich
Froebel (1782–1852) and worked with others such as the Utilitarians with
whose ideas on political economy many Unitarians agreed. This was to the
detriment of their reputation with the working-class, who perceived they were
teaching the economic selfishness of one class as scientific law (Watts, 1998). At
the same time their commitment to liberal reforms led some of them like William
Johnson Fox (1786–1864) into more radical politics (Gleadle, 1995).
One Unitarian educationalist particularly influential on Harriet Martineau was
Lant Carpenter (1780–1840), a leading exponent of Priestley’s ideas as
evidenced in his Principles of education (1820) especially. His own school in
Bristol, which Martineau knew well, exemplified the best in Unitarian education
with a curriculum including classics, mathematics, physical sciences, natural
history, geography, English literature, French and Italian, ethics, and mental
philosophy, especially the work of Hartley. Carpenter involved his pupils in
science and the social and political issues of his day which interested him so
deeply. From his and other Unitarian schools, and homes, came a disproportion-
ate number of public figures and reformers, industrialists, scientists, professional
and business men, and those at the forefront of educational reform and the fight
for national education. This included women, not least those striving for better
education and rights for women. Carpenter’s daughter Mary (1807–1877),
indeed, became a better-known educationalist than he was (Watts, 1998, pp. 42,
134–135, passim; 2000).
Harriet Martineau and the Unitarian

tradition in education
Born in 1802, Martineau was the sixth of eight children in a liberal Unitarian
family in Norwich. Apart from two happy years from the age of eleven in a mixed
school4 and another 15 months, 1818–1819, at school in Bristol, she was
198 Ruth Watts
educated at home to the best of her parents’ means, although in her late teens
she added to her prodigious learning as inconspicuously as possible since, even
in her highly articulate household, this ‘was not thought proper for young
ladies ... especially with pen in hand’ (Martineau, 1983b, I, p. 100). Deeply
influenced by the educational and philosophical ideas of Priestley and Carpenter,
she retained a deep admiration of Priestley, although later she thought Carpenter
‘narrow in his conceptions’. Becoming ‘a sort of walking Concordance of Milton
and Shakespere [sic]’, she also became ‘a political economist without knowing it’
through reading the Globe (1969, I, pp. 175–198; 1983b, I, pp. 70–72, passim).
She remained an omnivorous reader, learning also from much travel, including
lengthy visits to the USA, Egypt, and the Near East (1983b, I & II).
Unitarianism powerfully influenced Martineau. She enjoyed its questioning
approach and rational morality (1983b, I, pp. 35–41). From Dr Carpenter she
learnt to love Priestley’s edition of Hartley, a ‘philosophically ... elevating’ book
which, despite some faults, became ‘perhaps the most important book in the
world to me, except the Bible’, stimulating ‘self-discipline, and devotion to duty’
and emphasising ‘fact and ... action’ rather than the ‘dreaming’ ‘spiritual philos-
ophy’ beginning to influence some American and English Unitarians (1983b, I,
pp. 104–105). She studied other philosophers but found lifelong happiness and
peace of mind in accepting the doctrine of Necessity with its certainty that ‘every
department of the universe’ was governed by ‘eternal and irreversible laws’ which
could not be broken. From this and her surety that a good environment, ‘good
influences and good habits’, rather than constant spiritual anxiety, engendered
moral advancement, she drew her vigour, courage and a ‘steady growth’ in
‘integrity and disinterestedness’ (1983b, I, pp. 108–116), even though, by the
1850s, she was less certain that everything was accounted for by people’s
capacity for pain and pleasure and the principle of association (Roberts, 2002,
pp. 174–176). Believing in the interrelationship of mind and body, however,
helped her later appreciate the physiognomical system of Gall and Spurzheim,
albeit she and Henry Atkinson critiqued George Combe’s popular version of
phrenology, advancing a more egalitarian interpretation affected by environmen-
talism (Martineau, 1870, pp. 265–271; Roberts, 2002, pp. 107–186, 193–196).
The powerful effect of her own education was reflected in Martineau’s
thoughtful assessment of the aims and processes of education in Household
education (1849). Seeing that education was responsible for most of the
differences between people, yet many cultures excluded from education large
numbers – ‘women, the poor, the infirm’ – without knowing exactly what each
individual was capable of, she argued that the only ‘absolutely safe and wise’
course was ‘to bring out and strengthen and exercise all the powers given to
every human being’ (Martineau, 1849, pp. 11–20). Although good schools were
best for thorough ‘book-learning’, she stressed that, as things were, home was
the place where the majority of people received their real education, preferably
as a family cooperating together in lifelong and useful learning. Her over-riding
aim always moral, she carefully and engagingly delineated how parents could
help their children and themselves grow intellectually, physically, and morally in
a loving, sympathetic atmosphere where each had space and assistance to follow
their own path and learn naturally by being given and taught the materials and
skills appropriate for their age and ability (1849, passim).5
Having learned to think for herself and then educate others, provided she had
evidence for her arguments, Martineau often turned her own experiences – not
only her travels but also her serious illness and seeming cure through mesmerism
in the 1840s and her growing loss of faith – into educative treatises. Despite this
later rejection of Unitarianism, her writings testify to her lifelong commitment
to freedom of individual, reasoned inquiry and questioning, and her optimism
about human progress, especially if all people were educated aright. Her earliest
publications demonstrated that she had imbibed well Unitarian teachings
on contextual biblical criticism, the crucial significance of circumstances on
individual development, and the way to strip contemporary assumptions of
absurdities and accretions (Martineau, 1831, 1832a, 1983b, I, pp. 150–159). In
the 1820s and 1830s she wrote many articles for The Monthly Repository, a
Unitarian journal. Here, for example, she argued for women to have equal
education (MR, 1823, XVIII, 77–101) and made clear her indebtedness to
Hartley, by teaching those who had never studied, nor were likely to study, the
works of great thinkers how to learn habits of accurate thought, a development
she thought could end half the evils which affect humanity. She traced the
process of forming habits of accurate thought and observation through under-
standing how to classify, arrange, and relate facts and perceive the multiple causes
of ideas and then to develop ideas further, ultimately deducing and applying
general principles from observed facts. Such an ‘enlightened intellect’, she said,
could invigorate the moral sense, although learning itself was ‘not wisdom’ (MR,
1829, 29, pp. 521–526, 599–606, 707–712, 745–757, 817–821). Martineau
learnt much herself through working with the editor of the Monthly Repository,
the radical Unitarian minister William Johnson Fox – ‘unquestionably ... in great
measure the cause, of the greatest intellectual progress I ever made before the
age of thirty’ (Martineau, 1983b, 1, pp. 140, 147).
From 1829, her family having lost their money, Martineau was able to become
an independent, professional writer, her comments always clear, pointed and
peppered with telling anecdotes. Her first series of books, Illustrations of political
economy, 25 novelettes published monthly between 1832 and 1834, was born of
her determined conviction that she must reveal the ‘truths’ (as she then saw
them) of political economy to all readers, since few understood much about
them yet nothing touched everyone more than ‘the way in which the necessaries
and comforts of life may be best procured and enjoyed by all’. Seeing it as a
moral ‘science’, she deliberately developed Jane Marcet’s example of using
fictional methods to make political economy accessible, in her case demonstrat-
ing its principles as they naturally worked in social life, working up from domes-
tic economy and summarising, at the end of each story, the economic principles
illustrated (Martineau, 1832b, pp. iii–xiii; 1983b, I, pp. 138–139; II,
pp. 244–245).6 Her enormous success, at home and abroad, brought her imme-
diate fame with politicians, civil servants, and society people queuing up to seek
200 Ruth Watts
her advice and support on political, economic and social matters (Martineau,
1983b, I, pp. 178–268; Logan, 2004, I, p. xxv), thus truly emulating Priestley’s
vision of liberal education as part of active, civil life. Financially secure, she
moved to London.
Martineau was praised for her depictions of poverty and working-class life,
although her decided views against such things as strike action and fencing
machinery, plus her support of the New Poor Law, militated against winning
working-class favour. She aimed to teach people how to live together in
cooperative communities where all could attain a fair living and an education
which could develop their whole being. For instance, in Briery Creek, she
portrayed a settlement in America where the humane Dr Sneyd (modelled on
Priestley) and his family provided facilities which could be used for employment,
education, and leisure at different times, in particular using the schoolhouse as a
museum, library, and place for both women and men of the community to share
warmth and light in the evening and enjoy various activities including music and
dancing, thus dispelling vice, loneliness, and misery with properly organised
‘social mirth’ (Martineau, 1834a).
Similarly, in The scholars of Arneside in the ensuing Tales of taxation, Martineau
demonstrated the iniquities of indirect taxation, especially the Stamp Act, by
showing how the illiterate people of Arneside were deprived of useful, liberal,
rational knowledge, a situation which prevented the illiterate and rich alike from
progressing in moral and intellectual development and led them to make bad,
even evil choices in life. Martineau particularly fulminated against the privileged
who wanted to keep knowledge to themselves: God ‘did not make his beautiful
world that one might walk abroad on it, while a thousand are shut into a dark
dungeon ... Does the sun shine more brightly when a man thinks he has it all to
himself?’ She thought that Mechanics Institutes, with all their deficiencies, did
more for most people than the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge
(Martineau, 1834b, pp. 110–113, 129, passim). A well governed, happy state
needed everyone to have access to knowledge provided it was the ‘right’ type of
knowledge.
Reviews varied: some lauded her for making ‘abstruse’ political economy a
popular ‘entertaining and instructive’ subject – albeit expressing dismay at her
restricting charity ‘to the enlightenment of the mind’ (Empson, 1833, pp. 1–9;
Quarterly Journal, 1833, pp. 142, 150–153), but others thought she trivialised
a serious study, or, although administering ‘rank poison’ [sic] agreeably, was
heretical and unfeminine (Christian Rembrancer, 1841, pp. 178–184). Daring to
articulate her own views on ‘masculine’ topics, her Malthusian over-population
themes particularly scandalised some, especially the Quarterly Review, but
Martineau was undaunted by their ribaldry (1983b, I, pp. 199–211).
Martineau’s story Demerara, which cleverly opposed slavery as economically
wasteful and unproductive, corrupting both slaves and their owners alike, also
upset some middle-class readers (Martineau, 1833). In her long American tour
she risked attack for her abolitionist views and her subsequent books judged the
USA by how far social reality matched the Declaration of Independence and
found it wanting with regard both to slavery and to the treatment of women
(Martineau, 1837, 1969). Her later historical novel on Toussaint L’Ouverture,
the slave who expelled colonial rule from Haiti, portrayed a black man as hero,
able to become an enlightened ruler because he had the fortune to be allowed
to read, learning from classical works to admire the liberty he had never encoun-
tered and from others how to conduct troops and battles (Martineau, 1841,
pp. 68, 90, 120–121, 123). The plot might be didactic and overdrawn, although
Martineau backed it with much evidence (1841, III, pp. 247–304), but her
point was that black people, even slaves, could overcome their brutal upbringing
and show themselves naturally as intelligent, virtuous, humane, and loving as
Europeans could be, if given the right education and opportunities. Equally,
Europeans could be corrupted by living in an unjust, brutal society as a slave
state necessarily was.
Martineau was not alone, of course, in either her anti-slavery or in her assump-
tions of ‘superior’ western culture, although her writings on empire demon-
strated understanding of different cultures and the double standards of the
colonials and she pioneered how to observe and study a society (Martineau,
1837; Hoecker-Drysdale, 1992, pp. 50–52; Logan, 2004; Goodlad, 2010,
pp. 197–213). Catherine Hall has linked her History of the peace, where she
insisted on including literary, biographical, industrial, scientific, and educational
developments, to this (Martineau, 1864; Logan, 2005, I, pp. xv–xxv), saying
‘she was the nation’s governess and she would teach her readers their history, the
history of the present ... Her readers should learn from her not only the distinc-
tively modern character of their own nation, patterned by class, gender and
ethnicity, but also of the weighty responsibilities this leading nation carried for
less “civilized sites across its Empire” ’ (Hall, 2010, p. 238).
Martineau was equally sure of the social progress for all to be derived from
technological invention and scientific discoveries and enthusiastically promoted a
wide conception of science. Her novel Deerbrook depicted the struggles the grow-
ing number of professional medical practitioners faced from an ill-informed popu-
lace and the need for scientific knowledge and public hygiene to prevent epidemics.
She became, indeed, Florence Nightingale’s chosen populariser of sanitary reform
and nursing. Promoting drainage in Tynemouth and good housing for workers in
Ambleside, she educated by personal practice, but she also advanced these and
other reforms through her regular contributions to leading journals and as a lead-
ers writer for the Daily News for fourteen years7 (Martineau, 1983a, 1983b, I, pp.
356–358, 371; II, pp. 306–308; Sanders, 1990, pp. 166–167, 182–183; Logan,
2005, VI, pp. vii–xv, 125, 161–202, 241–242, 258–305, 418; II, pp. 180–181,
451–454, 693–694). After her move to Ambleside, despite initial local distrust of
her religious views, she began what became annual lectures on sanitary matters,
intemperance, history, and other subjects to the local workmen and their families,
a task which afforded her ‘more vivid and unmixed pleasure than any, except
authorship, that I ever undertook’ (Martineau, 1983b, II, pp. 301–310). She
educated her own servants, regularly spending time with them and giving them a
library in the kitchen (Logan, 2004, I, p. xix).
202 Ruth Watts
A tireless supporter of education for all, Martineau consistently argued for
national education, fulminating alike against early nineteenth-century govern-
ments who preferred an ‘ignorant, dependent, and wretched’ to an ‘enlightened’
populace and the ‘miserable pretence of learning’ monitorial schools and others
offered. She despaired of the rivalry between Dissenters and the Church which
prevented the growth of a proper fully-fledged system of national education for
everyone, welcomed Robert Lowe’s Revised Code of 1861 which tied grants to
examination results, and desired manual training, education in physiology for
health, and education for democracy. Admiring Cobbett, whose books enabled
labourers to read and debate parliamentary reform, she berated the Society for
the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge for failing to do the same, albeit acknowledg-
ing its help in providing affordable and suitable books (Logan, 2005, I,
pp. 358–359, II, pp. 58, 89–92, 252–254, III, pp. 171–173, 183, 193,
284–285, 386–387, IV, pp. 58–62, V, pp. 61, 100–102, 127–178). In her mind
these should include matter which would convince working people of the
rightness of political economy beliefs, particularly the need for ‘free’ labour.
Martineau’s long-held stridency against trade unionism as tyrannically
preventing individuals negotiating their own terms of employment (for example,
see Logan, 2005, I passim), was shown again in 1859 when the activities of new
trade unionism and demands for extension of the franchise to include sections of
the working class combined. Martineau favoured the extension of the suffrage,
but not for those she believed were self-interested men who, seducing the more
ignorant workers by false economic arguments, forced the most ‘intelligent’ and
‘independent’ working men whom she was certain opposed strikes, into union
action. Amassing masses of evidence, including from her relatives in Birmingham,
she published ‘Secret organisation of Trade Unions’ in the Edinburgh Review of
October 1859 in which, in exposing the extent of trade unionism and their
powers over individual members, she hoped to set ‘free’ the most intelligent
workers whom she wanted enfranchised. Her article did gain her a brief author-
itative standing on labour matters of the kind she had enjoyed in the 1830s, with
politicians and many contributors to the question using her arguments and
evidence as their point of reference. The reaction of others, however, especially
the unionist Thomas Dunning and the National Association for the Promotion
of Social Science (NAPSS), an organisation she approved of, undermined her
arguments and indeed helped persuade many, including Gladstone, to realise
that the trade unionists were sufficiently intelligent, moderate, respectable, and
independent thinking to be worthy of the franchise. Martineau was thus very
rapidly displaced as an authority on the labour question (Curthoys, 2010,
140–150; MSS 3/i HM on strikes 1859 HM 1321–1337).
Martineau did want all the population to have access to educative resources
which would open their minds, however. She welcomed John Pyke Hullah’s
(1812–1884) stimulus to good music as a popular pursuit; she argued that
foreign immigration improved popular taste; she celebrated the ‘virtual
education’ of museums, art galleries and exhibitions in large towns, greater
humanity in education, and Mechanics Institutes. Martineau also advocated
professional training for both elementary school-teachers and governesses – the
latter particularly being in need of ‘honour and independence’ (Sanders, 1990,
pp. 75–76, 80, 148, 200, 227, 243, 255, 259; Logan, 2005, I, pp. 316–318).
It had to be worthwhile education, however, which is why Martineau (like
many Unitarians) praised the ideas on natural and timely development of
children’s faculties stimulated by Pestalozzi, provided his system was not abused;
and accordingly she disliked corporal punishment and rote learning. She believed
ardently that education had to be interesting and enjoyable, demanding, after
her visit to the Hanwell Lunatic Asylum in 1834, proper public institutions for
all lunatics so that they could enjoy liberty, fresh air, sunshine, and amusement
(1834b; Logan, 2005, III, pp. 191–192).
Martineau particularly wanted women of all classes to receive the best
education conceived, castigating the ‘nonsense’ talked about restricting female
education. She ridiculed the fact that females were forbidden classical languages
because they would not enter those professions which required them, while it
was chiefly reasoned that boys needed these subjects ‘to improve the quality of
their minds’. Similarly, she cited good evidence to prove that females were
capable of abstract thought. Always glad her early education saved her ‘from
being a literary lady who could not sew’ (Martineau, 1983b, 1, p. 27), she
argued convincingly that men did
not attend the less [to their daily work] for having their minds enlarged and
enriched and their faculties strengthened by sound and various knowledge; ...
the most ignorant women I have known have been the worst housekeepers; ...
the most learned women ... have been among the best (provided they had)
been early taught and trained to household business (as?) every woman
ought to be. (Martineau, 1849, pp. 221–222)
Her example for this was Mary Somerville (1780–1872) whom she knew and
admired for her scientific prowess, her ‘womanly’ bearing and the ‘order and
beauty’ of her home (Martineau, 1983b, I, pp. 356–358, 1849, pp. 223–224).8
The argument that well-educated women were the best housekeepers, wives,
mothers, and teachers of the young, was significant. Although Martineau recog-
nised the father’s responsibilities in family education, she put mothers at the
centre of domestic economy – the basis of political economy (Martineau, 1849).
Aware that many women had now to support themselves, she welcomed devel-
opments that enabled them to leave ‘overstocked’ female industries and gain
access to wider, more skilled employment (Martineau, 1849, pp. 224–226,
283–287). Always deeply conscious of the importance of hygiene and of educa-
tion in it, she enthusiastically promoted Nightingale’s nursing reforms and the
scientific, practical, and moral education and training girls and women needed to
become professional nurses rather than ‘floating saints and virgins’ or ‘grovelling
mercenaries’. Equally she campaigned for women doctors and their education
(Logan, 2005, VI, pp. 161–202, 241–242, 258–291, 301–305 ff.; III,
pp. 162–163; V, pp. 105–106).
204 Ruth Watts
Supporting the early campaign for higher education for women, Martineau
ironically dismissed those who thought the whole purpose of such was merely to
fit women to be ‘companions to men’ and ‘mothers of heroes’. She had little
room for ‘female pedants’, preferring scholars who were useful to society such as
the Unitarian educational philanthropist Lady Byron (Martineau, 1870,
pp. 316–325, 386–392; Yates, 1985, pp. 74–78, 101–102). Above all women,
she praised Anna Barbauld, whom she knew as a child, for her ‘exquisite
writings’, moral character, and ‘womanly grace’ – a prime illustration of how a
well-educated, intellectual, rational woman could still be a virtuous and moral
role model, unlike the Mary Wollstonecrafts of this world (Yates, 1985, p. 103).9
A lifelong feminist, Martineau’s support of women’s rights permeated her
writings and actions. She signed the women’s petition for the vote in 1866,
championed ground-breaking Acts of Parliament which slowly gave more rights
to women, and was an ardent campaigner against the Contagious Diseases Acts
of the 1860s. She welcomed the Women’s Movement of the 1850s and ’60s and
their use of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science to
promote their struggles for reform of women’s education, legal rights, and other
causes. This was the type of educative association that she liked, diffusing greater
knowledge about social issues and thus stimulating important legislation (Yates,
1985, pp. 51–83, 216–224, 239–267, passim; Hoecker-Drysdale, 1992,
pp. 135–137).
Conclusion
Harriet Martineau became an influential, well-known woman, speaking to
generations on political, economic, social and educational questions of the day.
A lifelong public educator who published over seventy volumes, dozens of articles
and nearly 2,000 newspaper leaders and letters (Hoecker-Drysdale, 1992, p. 2),
she was committed to social change and to representative democracy and both
campaigned for such and sought to educate potential new participants as liberal,
humane, and active citizens so that they could create a better world. She clarified
what she saw as muddled thinking and saw herself as a national educator, taking
significant ideas of the day to as many people as possible, often forging new
methods to do this. She was not afraid to challenge assumptions such as women
being fulfilled in patriarchal systems (Roberts, 2002, pp. 96–104, passim). She
tried to educate people in new ideas which had caught her interest; for example,
she was a significant figure in social science and the translator and purveyor of
Comte’s ideas to Britain and then back to France (Daily News, 1875).
Martineau was controversial but also successful and influential in her time, a
role model for younger women. On political economy, the abolition of slavery,
and women’s rights, for instance, her support was constantly requested. Her
subsequent neglect by historians has much to do with the not uncommon
difficulty before the late twentieth century of women being properly recognised
for their achievements. This has been complicated by factors such as her involve-
ment in and writing on so many issues. She also became unfashionable in the
twentieth century for her economic liberalism. She was a pioneer on many issues
such as women’s rights, but her fame has been eclipsed by the struggles and
achievements of the generations who followed her.
In the very issues she became interested in, the way she sought to publish on
them and educate others, Martineau indicated her Unitarian heritage as she did in
thinking for herself, speaking freely, and, above all, upholding an environmentalist
form of education as underpinning all reform and progress. This has been recog-
nised both now (e.g. James, 2010) and in the nineteenth century. For example,
her old enemy the Quarterly Review traced her ‘uniformly condemned’ philoso-
phy to Hartley and Priestley (Heywood, 1877, pp. 484–503). Often helped by her
Unitarian networks, she was an active educationalist who surmounted both gender
and religious animosity to fulfil that which she termed her duty. Studying her writ-
ings and role as public educator gives us greater understanding of the struggles for
education in the nineteenth century and the part women could play in them.
Notes
1 Principal biographies are by R. K. Webb and Deborah Logan; Ella Dzelzainis and Cora
Kaplan’s edited book on Harriet Martineau has much useful recent analysis of her life.
2 It reopened in York 1803–1840, moved back to Manchester until 1853 when it moved
to London affiliated to University College, finally moving to Oxford in 1889. It is now
Harris Manchester College, Oxford.
3 The Revolution commemorated by this Society is the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688.
4 The school of Rev Isaac Perry who lost his pulpit and most of his boys’ school when
he changed from orthodox dissent to Unitarianism. Martineau thoroughly enjoyed the
rigorous teaching of Latin and French, writing composition, and doing arithmetic.
5 Martineau was writing this at a time when there was no national system of education
and the government involvement which did exist, although increasing, was only in
elementary education for the working classes. Martineau wished the latter to increase
until education was provided for all children but this was long before it was considered
that middle-class education would be part of a national system.
6 Jane Marcet’s Conversations on political economy of 1816 became an immensely popular
and successful book as did other of her works on political economy and science.
7 The Daily News was established in 1846 as a Liberal counterpoise to The Times. It
became successful from the 1850s (Webb, 1960, pp. 314–315 and ff., to 358).
8 Mary Somerville gained European fame for her insightful and wider ranging scientific
works from 1831. She also became part of the Unitarian networks in which Martineau
still moved.
9 After Wollstonecraft’s death, shortly after the birth of her daughter Mary, her husband
William Godwin published a memoir of his wife (Godwin, 1798) in which he told the
story of her life including her sexual relationships. In the atmosphere of conservative
political reaction against the French Revolution in the early 19th century, which was
accompanied by more general social conservatism, Wollstonecraft’s name was maligned
and she became a by-word for immorality.
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208 Ruth Watts
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Bibliographies Online at http://www.oxfordbibliographiesonline.com.
14 J. S. Mill on education
Alan Ryan
The omnipresence of education in Mill’s work

To write about Mill is to write about education. In the opening paragraph of his
Autobiography Mill explains:
I have thought that in an age in which education, and its improvement, are
the subject of more, if not of profounder study than at any former period of
English history, it may be useful that there should be some record of an
education which was unusual and remarkable, and which, whatever else it
may have done, has proved how much more than is commonly supposed
may be taught, and well taught, in those early years which, in the common
modes of what is called instruction, are little better than wasted. (Mill,
1874a, p. 25)
In middle age Mill himself became an educational institution. Disraeli sneered

‘here comes the finishing governess’ when Mill entered Parliament in 1865. But,
not only were Mill’s major works such as A system of logic and Principles of
political economy taught in the universities and colleges of Victorian and
Edwardian England, Mill and his publisher forewent their profits to sell them in
popular editions at low prices for working-class readers.1
Mill’s discussions of education display many of his characteristic rhetorical and
argumentative tropes. As in the passage quoted, his taste for antithesis is given
free rein. On the one hand, there is almost nothing that education cannot
achieve, whether full social and political equality for women, the intellectual and
moral elevation of the working class, or fitting India for independence. On the
other, contemporary education is ‘wretched’, endowments are squandered, and
almost everyone underestimates how much students of all ages might learn,
given ambition and energy. John Dewey was asked whether he was an optimist
or a pessimist, and replied that he was a tremendous optimist about things in
general, but a terrible pessimist about everything in particular. There is a good
deal of that in Mill: optimism about what mankind could achieve set against an
unsparing assessment of how far short we fall.
210 Alan Ryan
Mill wrote little about education in the ‘classroom’ sense – about schools,
universities, funding, staffing, or curricula. The volume of the Collected works
devoted to Law, equality, and education reprints only three essays on education.
One dates from 1834 and is notionally a review of a report on the Prussian
education system, though it largely consists of extracts from George Edward
Biber’s savaging of the National Schools.2 The second (1866) is Mill’s evidence
to the Taunton Commission on ‘middle-class’ schools. The third dates
from 1867. This is Mill’s ‘Inaugural Address’ as Rector of the University of
St Andrews. It is, in effect, Mill’s version of The idea of a university.3 Had
the editors of the Collected works included Mill’s 1833 essay ‘Corporation
and Church Property’, and the 1869 essay on ‘Endowments’, the sum total
would not be much greater.
The Collected works, though, produce a misleading effect. By education Mill
meant whatever helps to make the human being what he is or what he is not
(Mill, 1867, p. 217).4 Mill was everywhere and always alert to, obsessed by, the
impact of a society’s educational level on the functioning of its social, economic,
and political institutions, and equally obsessed by the educational impact of those
institutions on the people who lived under them. To take one obvious instance,
the doctrine that underlies Mill’s defence of representative government is that
the goodness of a form of government is to be assessed by the degree to which
it makes the most of the existing moral and intellectual capacities of the citizenry,
and promotes their further development (Mill, 1861, p. 392). This is not quite
a pedagogical view of the political process, but not far from it. It is matched by
his discussions of the justification of the avowedly ‘despotic’ rule of Britain over
her colonies. His argument was that ‘Despotism is a legitimate mode of govern-
ment in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the
means justified by actually effecting that end’ (Mill, 1859, p. 16). This is the
teacher’s defence of autocracy in the classroom.
Among Mill’s proposals for the improvement of the political process in
Victorian Britain, second only to his advocacy of votes for women in startling his
readers, was his argument for giving extra votes to the better educated. The case
for plural voting was in part based on the widely perceived need to offset the
dangers from the introduction of universal suffrage. That would give the vote to
an uneducated working class which would numerically swamp every other. The
means advocated by Mill to offset the simple weight of numbers were intended
to bring home to everyone the value of education. He agreed that suffrage should
be restricted to the literate, but his further idea that educational attainment
should be acknowledged by conferring additional votes on the better educated
was more surprising (Mill, 1861, pp. 470, 473–476). He did not have in mind
the kind of privilege that gave the holders of Oxford and Cambridge masters’ or
doctoral degrees a vote for their own, extra, Member of Parliament.5 Mill wanted
to encourage intellectual attainment in all social classes: ‘I consider it an absolutely
necessary part of the plurality scheme, that it be open to the poorest individual in
the community to claim its privileges, if he can prove that in spite of all difficulties
and obstacles, he is in point of intelligence, entitled to them’ (Mill, 1861, p. 476).
J. S. Mill on education 211
The same thought animated Mill’s submission to the Northcote-Trevelyan
Committee’s deliberations on the reform of the Home Civil Service.6 A typically
Millian note is struck at the end of his submission where he concedes that ‘It
would be absurd to subject a tide-waiter, a letter-carrier, or a simple copyist to
the same test as the confidential adviser to a Secretary of State’, but immediately
goes on to say that the tests for applicants for even humble occupations ought
not to be too narrow (Mill, 1855, p. 211). The greater part of his submission
was concerned with senior administrative positions. The reforming tide was
running against patronage appointments, and it was a common complaint that
government offices were misused as a system of outdoor relief for impecunious
but well-connected young men. Mill was strongly opposed to the continuation
of a system where aristocratic connections counted for more than competence.7
In his submission to the Northcote-Trevelyan Committee, Mill also deplores
the suggestion that members of the clergy should provide certificates of good
character for candidates for the civil service. In the Inaugural address and Liberty
he denies that religious instruction should play any role in the curriculum: the
study of the facts about religious belief and practice was unexceptionable;
the inculcation of the belief that one or other creed was uniquely right was the
business of the several churches, not of educational institutions.
Meritocracy and clerisy

Many years earlier, Mill had imbibed Coleridge’s concern for the existence of a
‘clerisy’ – a class of the spiritually, intellectually, and politically enlightened, who
might give coherence to an incoherent culture, and enlighten a public opinion
that was destined to become increasingly powerful in the new democratising era.
Mill concluded in the 1820s, and believed ever after, that public opinion would
rule the new mass society, no matter what the political institutions were through
which it ruled. If public opinion was destined to rule, the task of the liberal
intellectual was to do what he could to ensure that it was liberal and enlightened,
rather than reactionary and oppressive, or even merely dull and unambitious.
The old landed aristocracy should give way to an aristocracy of merit (Mill,
1831).8 What merit consisted of was not wholly stable; but this reflected the
utopian reach of Mill’s hopes for the new class rather than incoherence in the
ambition itself. Changes of emphasis also reflected changes in his perception of
what dangers needed to be addressed. In the 1820s and 1830s he thought the
public was morally lost, not knowing quite what to think and whom to believe,
whereas by the time he wrote Liberty, that danger was less salient than the danger
of dead-weight uniformity.
Minimally merit was understood as task-oriented competence. Mill unhesitat-
ingly defended the concours system of selection against the existing system of
patronage (Ryan, 1972, pp. 60–62). He went further, however, by distinguish-
ing the higher policy-making level of the civil service from the executive level,
where competence in following orders and implementing policies was the
primary requirement. The heads of the administrative grade of the civil service
212 Alan Ryan
should possess an authority that rested on their concern for the public interest
and their unimpeachable probity, as well as their intelligence and knowledge.
His respect for expertise appeared again when he insisted that it was not the job
of parliament to draft legislation; that required a dispassionate expertise that
‘political men’ did not possess (Mill, 1861, pp. 428–432). Elsewhere, especially
when younger, he displayed a hankering after the leadership of those possessed
of a poetic sensibility; poets were to be no longer the unacknowledged legislators
of mankind, but the articulate leaders of public sentiment and thought. He
never quite lost the concern with le pouvoir spirituel that he acquired from the
Saint-Simonian missionaries9 and from Comte.10 But the concern that educated
intelligence should be given the stamp of social approval by being a pre-
requisite for the exercise of administrative power in the Victorian state was
straightforward.
Ethology
Mill’s Autobiography – the record of an unusual education – displays some
internal tension. It is both a piece of scientific analysis, in which the author
adopts a third-person stance towards the boy and young man whose upbringing
he analyses, and a Goethean Bildungsroman, where the ‘crisis in my mental
history’ is the central episode. Mill’s account of his transition from being the
pupil of ‘men of the eighteenth century’ to becoming his own man mirrors the
political drama of the epoch of the French Revolution: collapse of the ancien
régime, followed by a period of upheaval, followed by a new stability. On any
reading, however, an interesting question about education is at the heart of the
story. Both teachers and pupils have been known to wonder how far a student’s
attainments are her or his own; ‘is everything I achieve really owed to those who
taught me?’ is a not unfamiliar question. For Mill it was particularly acute, both
because of the intensity of the education he had received from James Mill, and
because his mental crisis coincided with his friendship with disciples of Robert
Owen, who held a rigidly determinist theory of character.11 Knowing that he was
widely regarded as a ‘manufactured man’ who had been ‘made’ by his father and
Bentham, Mill was haunted by the fear that he was trapped in the character
they had fashioned for him. He described this as the spectre of Owenite
necessitarianism, the idea that the educator is omnipotent, and individuals
are entirely and unchangeably what they have been reared to be. Not only in the
Autobiography but in the Logic, it is the ‘Owenite’ threat to the freedom of
the will that he discusses (Mill, 1843, VI, ii, 3, pp. 839–842; 1874a,
pp. 134–135). In both works, he provides an answer that he thinks consistent
with universality of causation. In the Autobiography, he also suggests that his
anxiety was short-lived.
Readers who expect Mill’s education to conclude with his rejection of his
father and Bentham, the ‘men of the eighteenth century’, and a declaration of
spiritual independence might find it surprising that he emanicipated himself from
James Mill only to find a new teacher in Harriet Taylor. That one of the main
purposes of the Autobiography is to explain just this emerges on the first page.
Having noted that ‘in an age of transition of opinions’, his intellectual
development may be of some interest, he emphasises his
desire to make acknowledgment of the debts which my intellectual and

moral development owes to other persons; some of them of recognized
eminence, others less known than they deserve to be, and the one to whom
most of all is due, one whom the world had no opportunity of knowing.
(Mill, 1874a, pp. 25–26)
Mill never says that he was dependent on Mrs Taylor in the same way as he
unavoidably was on his father, and he plainly was not. There was a good deal of
difference between the teacher–pupil relationship of James and J. S. Mill, and the
marriage of two minds represented by the way he and she learned from each
other. Mill drew a distinction between education in the widest sense of all the
influences that make us who and what we are, and education in the narrower
sense of the instruction we receive in schools and universities, and in his case
from his father.
The wider sense is his main concern, and it is all of a piece with his concern
for the formation of character. Mill’s response to Owen’s insistence that a man’s
character was made ‘for him and not by him’ was that we can be agents in our
own remaking. Only a person who wants to refashion his character will actually
do so, and Mill acknowledges like any rational person that we need resources
with which to achieve the remaking. Encouraging and intelligent, but not
uncritical, interlocutors are very effective resources. How valuable a teacher and
critic Harriet Taylor really was is hard to decide. Her influence was enhanced by
the fact that she kept the world very much at bay. Mill’s oldest and closest friends
were among those who thought his praise of his wife was hyperbolic (Mineka
and Lindley, 1972, pp. xxiii–xxxiv).
Even if life is a continuous process of education and re-education, some
readers will wonder whether there is meant to be a time when we have finished
our education. Mill himself invites the question with his rousing peroration at the
end of The subjection of women (Mill, 1869, p. 39). There he insists that nobody
wants to have their affairs managed even by the most benevolent tutor or parent.
They want adult independence. This, of course, is the question at least indirectly
answered by the distinction, drawn by Mill himself at the beginning of his
Inaugural address between the broad, all-inclusive and the narrower senses of
education. Mill’s education in the narrower sense was more or less complete
when he was fourteen. One might hope that the education of any of us in the
broader sense would be a matter of lifelong learning. The broader sense of
‘education’ is coterminous with the subject matter of the discipline that the Logic
baptised as ‘ethology or the science of the formation of character’ (Mill, 1842,
p. 869). Whatever influences the intellectual, emotional, political, or moral devel-
opment of the individual is in this broad sense ‘educational’. Taylor’s impact on
Mill was, if the expression is permissible, ethological rather than instructional.
214 Alan Ryan
We should therefore attend to Mill’s concern with, and hopes for, the social
science of ‘ethology’. Mill hoped that ethology would provide a theoretical grasp
of the mechanisms of socialisation, enabling us to control the process more effec-
tively than by unaided intuition. It would thereby facilitate, first, one aspect of
ordinary political socialisation. In the Logic Mill quoted his earlier essay on
Coleridge in extenso about the necessary conditions of effective government –
one element is that the citizens should possess a common sense of national
identity (Mill, 1843, pp. 921–924). The issue is the need to reconcile a strong
sense of national identity with the diversity of outlook to which liberals were
committed. Mill took from Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of democratic
America the suggestion that under favourable conditions these two desiderata
could be jointly achieved. Tocqueville had linked the fundamental drives of
human nature as he and Mill understood them to the historical and social condi-
tions in which that human nature displayed itself in America. In Democracy
Tocqueville gestured towards the thought that this wholly new society needed a
new social science to analyse it; Mill gave the new science a name – ethology –
and a description in the Logic.
A related aspect of the role of ethology is that it may illuminate the cultural
conditions of economic and social progress. Mill’s concerns are wide-ranging:
how might Ireland be set on the path to rational self-government and prosperity?
How might the Indian sub-continent achieve the same thing? Might an already
highly developed society such as contemporary Great Britain embrace the station-
ary state so dreaded by most classical economists, and treat it as an opportunity
to measure well-being, not by tons of steel and coal produced and consumed, but
by intangibles such as the spread of industrial self-government, the minimisation
of environmental destruction, and the emancipation of women from the burdens
of excessive child-bearing (Mill, 1848, pp. 752–757)? The choices we might
make, within the constraints of physics and political economy could change
dramatically if we educated ourselves to value the right sort of well-being.
Mill regretted that he had been unable to make a greater contribution to the
development of ethology as a social science (Capaldi, 1972). It is difficult to
know what he had hoped for, and what hopes had been dashed. The ‘science of
the formation of character’ covers a lot of territory, and seems to embrace both
the formation of individual character, and therefore child-rearing and education
in all its aspects – moral, cultural, and intellectual, and the formation of ‘national
character’, a better understanding of which might provide a key to the sorts of
progress with which Mill was so concerned.
It is harder to know what Mill hoped ethology might achieve and what he had
failed to do, in light of his attraction to the historical speculations of the Saint-
Simonians and Comte. He dismissed Comte’s developed system as something
that could ‘only have been invented by a man who had never laughed’ (Mill,
1865, p. 343). Comte sets out a theory of the three stages of intellectual
development, and this, according to Mill, let in a flood of light on the study of
history. But as a good empiricist Mill could not think that history was governed
by laws sui generis that did not in the last resort rest on individual psychology.
For Mill any such holistic theory of the way in which social, economic, political,
and intellectual formations give way to their successors demands decomposition.
It must rest on an understanding of individual human nature and how that first
nature is transformed into a second nature by upbringing.
That introduces the third and most obvious aspect of the importance of
ethology as a science of socialisation. Utilitarians must be concerned with
education for two reasons. First, if the ultimate end of action is the happiness of
those affected by the action in question, simple effectiveness requires an accurate
understanding of the consequences of our actions, and that can only be acquired
by some sort of educative process. Simple trial and error will teach children a lot,
just as it does all animals. Nonetheless, this is a slow and expensive method of
learning, and formal education is a way to reduce the cost of acquiring the
knowledge necessary for prudent behaviour. The second is moral education.
Education is not only about inculcating in children a proper appreciation of the
causal environment in which they are to pursue the goals they already have, but
inducing them to pursue goals that will ensure both their own happiness and that
of everyone with whom they interact.
This is the point at which ethology intersects with utilitarian ethics, and with
Mill’s ambivalence about the utilitarianism in which he had been reared.
Utilitarianism presupposes that moral training can ensure that children come to
associate the pursuit of other people’s interests with their own happiness and to
associate failure to pursue other people’s interests with their own unhappiness.
This is the process of giving children a conscience by contriving that they
internalise the approval and disapproval of other people. Mill takes it for granted
that dependence on adults enables the child to acquire the idea that morality
depends on an acceptance that everyone’s interests should be counted equally,
with the perhaps unintended implication that if we were born with a baby’s utter
selfishness but the physical strength of an adult, life might be poor, solitary, nasty,
brutish, and short for all of us. Moral philosophy, as opposed to moral socialisa-
tion, has an educative role of a different kind. It can affect our conduct much
later in the day, when we reflect on the nature of morality, reconsider which of
the convictions we absorbed as infants we should continue to take seriously, and
from which we should try to free ourselves. Its role should not be under-
estimated, since Mill relied on the possibility of a clearer understanding of the
nature of morality both to assist us in making moral progress, and to help us to
draw the essential distinction between ‘mere likings and dislikings’ and the moral
judgments strictly speaking on which the argument of Liberty depends.
Education in the narrow sense

Mill drew the distinction between a wider and a narrower sense of ‘education’
on which we have been relying in his Inaugural address. Almost uniquely in his
works the Address is a discussion of the curriculum of an educational institution.
Before examining his ideas about university, we should explore Mill’s views on
the education of children. We are faced with a poverty of material on what
216 Alan Ryan
children should learn, but many obiter dicta on why and how they should learn
it. In the first place, however terrifying to many readers his account of what he
learned, and at what a pace he learned it, Mill is insistent in the Autobiography
that ‘it was not an education of cram’ (Mill, 1874a, p. 45). It was in essence
tutorial instruction adapted to a child who began his learning at three, and for
practical purposes stopped at fourteen (Mill, 1874a, p. 44). Since Mill insisted
that he was not especially talented, it is likely that he thought that many children
could have benefited from a similar education. It was not unusual in emphasising
classical languages and literature, mathematics, and a great deal of history. What
was more out of the way was the attention paid from Mill’s twelfth year to
subjects such as logic and political economy that would ordinarily be part of a
university education, if part of an education at all.
It is important that it was not an education of cram, since the background to
Mill’s education might lead us to fear that it was. Bentham, James Mill, and
Francis Place were very taken with the possibilities of mass public education that
seemed to be opened up by the so-called Bell-Lancaster monitorial system of
instruction. Andrew Bell devised the system in the late 1780s when he was
employed by the East India Company in Madras.12 It was very much a case of
necessity being the mother of invention; competent teachers were impossible to
find, and he hit on the idea that the brighter of his pupils could teach their
colleagues.
Bentham took a technical interest in the monitorial system. His Chrestomathia
spells out how to construct a school where one trained teacher could instruct as
many as 1,000 pupils in one vast hall, aided by monitors or teaching assistants
drawn from the pupils, who would themselves be encouraged in their efforts by
a system of payment by results (Bentham, 1817). The monitorial system was
advocated ‘for the instruction of the poor’, but Bentham and his allies were
inclined to think that it could provide members of any social class with a superior
education to any that they were likely to receive in the chaotic conditions of turn
of the century public schools (Leach, 1899, pp. 418–423). For its first inventors
the monitorial system promised cheapness by minimising the number of trained
teachers required, but also promised effectiveness, since the monitors were
themselves monitored by their superiors and their effectiveness as instructors was
tested by the performance of those they were instructing. Advocates of reform
in British and American school systems who emphasise varieties of payment by
results today sound very like their predecessors of two centuries ago. The system
seems to have fallen out of favour in the 1830s for reasons not very closely
connected with the monitorial system narrowly understood. At least some
schools established by the rival societies seem to have settled for getting the
children to memorise answers to simple questions and to have paid no attention
to whether the children understood what they had learned. Nothing could have
been further from what Bentham hoped for and James Mill practised.13
In the Mill household, one feature of the Bell-Lancaster system was all too
visible. The young Mill was made responsible for the education of his younger
siblings. It was in its way a good device for ensuring that he understood what he
had learned from his father, but since the test of whether he had done an
adequate instructional job was the ability of his sister Wilhelmina to answer
James Mill’s questions, it also meant that if she failed to give a proper account of
what she had learned, it was her brother who went to bed without his supper.
In that domestic context, it had another drawback that James Mill recognised
when he wrote to Francis Place that John could have got on a good deal faster
if he had not been held back by Willie.
Although Mill complains in one of the rejected leaves of the draft Autobiography
that he ‘grew up in the absence of love and the presence of fear’, he does not
complain about the content of what he learned as a boy, nor about his father’s
methods (Mill, 1874b, p. 612). Not his instructional methods, but his unreason-
ably high expectations, and his ‘asperity of temper’, were at fault. James Mill was
a deeply passionate man with a very short fuse, but the impression he gave his
son was that he thought strong emotions were a sort of madness. When Mill
subsequently reflected on his ‘mental crisis’ he decided that his education had
failed to cultivate the passive sensibilities that he now saw as an essential comple-
ment to the analytical skills that he never rejected. It is unclear just what James
Mill might have been able to do to provide the emotional education that his son
felt he had been deprived of. The catalogue of books that occupies so much of
the early pages of the Autobiography includes a great deal of poetry, history, and
drama. Mill observes that he was too young to get very much out of a good
many of the books he read, but it was not that he was fed a restricted diet. There
are some clues to what was missing, in Mill’s account of his own attempts at
dramatic and poetic composition in his early teens. His father encouraged him,
both because some things were better expressed in verse than in prose, and
because most people over-estimated the value of verse and being able to compose
poetry would impress them.
Let us turn, then, to Mill’s thoughts on education ‘narrowly conceived’. That
everyone should get an education he took for granted. In Liberty he explains in
a bare couple of sentences that parents who bring children into the world incur
as a minimum the duty to ensure that those children do not become a burden
on others, and therefore to see that they are adequately educated to be econom-
ically self-supporting. Anyone who neglects the education of their children
violates the rights of both the children and the rest of society. This doctrine is
enunciated in the Principles of political economy, too (Mill, 1859, pp. 118–119;
1848, pp. 947–950). Where the parents cannot pay, the state should subsidise
the cost; where the parents can, they should, as he more than once insists when
discussing the broad-gauge subsidies provided by educational endowments. The
state must not monopolise the provision of education, however; that would
threaten the variety and innovation that Mill was so anxious to protect. Some
continental countries forbade private citizens to set up schools; Mill was
emphatic that this was liberticide. The state’s role was to make parents do their
duty, and to exercise a supervisory role to ensure that schools and teachers are of
an adequate quality. In line with the general principle adumbrated in the
Principles of political economy that the state may do things that private individuals
218 Alan Ryan
may do, where its role is not coercive but educative, the state certainly may and
probably should establish model schools that others may emulate. The state may
also play a useful role in setting national examinations, but these must be tests of
factual knowledge. The principle for the management of public education is
familiar from everything Mill writes. There should be a centralisation of informa-
tion and ultimate authority, but as much decentralisation as is consistent with
probity and efficiency in provision. The insistence on variety rather than uniform-
ity was always at war with the belief that there is, or should be, one best solution;
one of Mill’s virtues was awareness of the fact.
The ‘centralising’ Mill is at his most uninhibited in his essay on Cousin’s
report to the French government on the Prussian system (Mill, 1834). He
emphasises the efficiency of the Prussian government, contrasting its ambition
with the feebleness of the British, which only ever reacted to external pressures.
The gulf between the effectiveness of public education in Prussia and the useless-
ness of what is provided in England is emphasised in an extract from his essay on
‘Corporation and Church Property’ (1833). Mill proposes, uncontroversially
enough, that the wishes of those who endow schools and ecclesiastical establish-
ments should be respected for a decent period, but that the state has every right
to intervene if the institutions affected depart from their original purpose.
Oxford and Cambridge feared that a view like Mill’s might animate the Royal
Commission of 1854 that remodelled the ancient universities. In Mill’s 1834
essay, however, the passage he quotes is an ad hominem jibe at the public schools
of the day. The second interesting part of the essay is a long extract from Biber’s
lectures on Christian education. The ‘Christian’ aspect is entirely absent from the
passages Mill quotes, although we may assume that Mill’s readers – Biber’s essay
appeared in the Monthly Repository, a Unitarian journal – knew very well what
arguments had gone on about religious instruction in the Bell and Lancasterian
schools. The extracts from Biber’s lectures defy summary; they consist of horror
stories that almost two centuries later still leave a reader torn between laughter
and rage. The children whose attainments are discussed parrot strings of
mathematical calculations, without having the least idea what they are about;
they display a facility in spelling long words, about whose meaning they have no
idea whatever. They can engage in complicated turn-taking, but what looks like
the cooperative solution of a mathematical problem is really the recitation of
nonsense syllables as far as the children are concerned.
Mill’s enthusiasm for Prussian solutions waned over the next three decades,
but when he gave evidence to the Taunton Commission in 1866, the concerns
so prominent in Liberty were almost invisible. Most endowed schools provided
a poor education; part of the reason was that schoolmasters were paid a
fixed stipend out of the endowment, and therefore had no interest in either
increasing the numbers of their pupils or teaching them better. Payment by
results was the only way to ensure good teaching. Mill acknowledged that there
was a shortage of available instruction in how as well as what to teach, but
his emphasis throughout is on the need for efficiency, for finding ways of
putting educational endowments to more effective use by amalgamating trusts,
establishing large schools, and assembling groups of schools to provide
instruction for all ages.14
Three years later, the essay on ‘Endowments’ strikes a very different note. It is
an example of another of Mill’s antithetical themes, in this case, the importance of
not reforming variety out of existence. Against the suggestion that endowments
should be made unlawful, Mill argues both for the need to protect variety and
novelty, and that the state must keep an eye on the application of endowments to
their proper purposes. He observes that parents generally had no real understand-
ing of what education their children needed, and brushes off the common view
that parents had a natural right to determine the content of their children’s teach-
ing. The uncultivated cannot be judges of cultivation; this is a variation on the
argument about education in the Principles of political economy (Mill, 1869, 1848).
His closing thought was that everything said about the need to educate boys
applied to girls.15 Mill does not make a big issue of this theme, either here, or in
Liberty or in the Inaugural address. The subjection of women, on the other hand,
is in large part a treatise on the role of a bad and misguided education in both
the wider and its narrower senses in persuading the enemies of female emancipa-
tion to believe that women are intellectually inferior to men, ‘naturally’ acquies-
cent in their dependent status, ‘naturally’ uninterested in politics, and unfitted to
economic independence. The remedy is an education of both the wider and the
narrower sort that does not rest on a conflation of customary or ‘second’ nature
with women’s true nature. His major target in Subjection was in practical terms
the exclusion of women from higher and professional education, but he ends his
essays on ‘Endowments’ with the broader principle as applicable to education at
all levels. The founders of Newnham College, Cambridge were as close to being
disciples of Mill as his fastidiousness and their own independence of mind would
allow them to be.16
Only in his Inaugural address as Rector of the University of St Andrew’s did
Mill spell out what he thought university students should study. Alexander Bain,
ordinarily devoted to Mill and subsequently his biographer, complained that the
address was far too long, and also that Mill’s programme for liberal education
was absurdly over-demanding. Two decades would hardly be long enough to get
a degree in Mill’s ideal university.17 Mill’s unrealism was to some extent a
reflection of his father’s success sixty years earlier in persuading his son that his
abilities were, if anything, below the average. It may also have reflected a simple
lack of acquaintance with students in their late teens and early twenties. Among
the things he did was to explain why students should read his System of logic:
students needed to understand not only and perhaps not primarily the factual
results of the natural and social sciences but above all the methodological prin-
ciples underlying all scientific inquiry. On the more narrowly pedagogical front,
Mill insisted on keeping the classics in the centre of a liberal education. This went
along with the view that teaching modern foreign languages was not a task a
university should engage in. Whether Mill really considered that the poetry of
Pushkin was no part of a liberal education or thought that any schoolboy could
teach himself Russian it is impossible to guess.
220 Alan Ryan
Many years before, he had complained that the treatment of Plato in the
ancient universities was excessively literary and insufficiently philosophical. When
he reprinted his earlier essays he acknowledged that much that he had said was
no longer true. Oxford and Cambridge had been reformed as they needed to be
by the Royal Commission of 1854.18 In particular, they took ancient philosophy
and political theory seriously. Mill, however, was looking at the future, and
arguing that it would be a mistake to give up the classics in an attempt to found
higher education on the natural sciences rather than the humanities. Mill tried
to preempt the argument between T. H. Huxley (for the sciences) and Matthew
Arnold (a defence of literature) with the question ‘why not both?’ No doubt the
response prompts Bain’s complaint that Mill’s curriculum needed two decades,
not four years.
There is more to it than that, though. Mill’s argument for the classics had a
slightly shaky foundation, but a clear purpose. The shakiness of the foundation
was that Mill wanted to argue both that the classics offer us a chance to see
ourselves in a different context and that they confront us with the real otherness
of our predecessors. In the background was Mill’s passion for Athenian democ-
racy. He was unusual in much preferring Athens to Rome, and in lining up the
argument as the politics of autonomous self-governing citizens versus the
carefully managed, legalistic oligarchy of the Romans (Urbinati, 2002).
Mill’s fear that his own education had been lacking in the cultivation of
the passive sensibilities is perhaps heard in his insistence that in addition to the
sciences and the humanities, space must be found for the fine arts. It is not an
area in which Mill showed to advantage on a public platform – his problem,
perhaps, is an excess of earnestness. Instead of doing as either Arnold or Newman
would have done and offering a few persuasive examples of fiction, drama, poetry,
or painting for lack of an encounter with which a student’s life would be thinner
or duller, he falls back on the obvious but not very relevant fact that many songs
have had an impact on politics and history. Those who have never had to address
a Scottish university in the role of Rector should perhaps say nothing about the
choice of ‘Scots wha hae’ as a telling example. Mill, of course, knew very well
what he could have said, but it may be that the man who could not read Shelley
aloud, because of the emotions aroused, thought himself obliged to rein in his
deeper feelings about the importance of an aesthetic education. The same is
perhaps true of his unexceptionable but predictable views on moral education;
the familiar insistence that no sect could use the university to instil an orthodoxy
does not lead on to any suggestions about the positive moral training a university
might do. One must not complain; the upsurge of the desire to cross class
barriers and do something directly for the disadvantaged which led to such
ventures as the University Settlements in the East End of London was a dozen
years in the future.
Wrenching Mill’s Address out of its historical context is not fruitful. The
twenty-first-century reader may be amused by the certainty with which Mill
insists that it is no part of a university’s task to provide professional education.
But the nineteenth-century notion of what constituted a member of a profession,
and what doctors, lawyers and clergy needed to know then, is dramatically far
from the understanding of such a reader. Take the example of Harvard: what
Mill would have recognised as a university is the College of Arts and Sciences
which enrols about 6,000 undergraduates and half as many graduates. But
beyond that, graduate programmes in public health, medicine, nursing, educa-
tion, divinity, law, and business bring the total to around 20,000 enrolled
students; beyond them there are students in continuing education. The
University Mill addressed had around 150 students, all undergraduates, and a
dozen professors. If this essay has occasionally seemed to complain that Mill said
too little about ‘narrow education’, that is to say what and how students are to
be taught in schools and universities, it seems right to redress the balance in a
last sentence. Mill was a great philosopher and political theorist, a liberal, a femi-
nist, and a reformer; not only did he write a great deal about education in its
broader sense, reading him today is as important an educational experience as a
century and a half ago (Skorupski, 2008).
Notes
1 Mill’s Principles were taught in Oxford until 1919, when Alfred Marshall’s Principles
of economics became the basis of economics teaching in most universities; System of logic
was in use in the University of London and elsewhere into the 1930s; although Mill’s
broader philosophical views were attacked by Idealists of all stripes during his lifetime
and afterwards it was a sign of his centrality to intellectual life that he could not be
ignored.
2 Review of Sarah Austin’s translation of Victor Cousin’s report on Prussian education.
George Edward Biber (1801–1874) wrote prolifically on educational theory, Christian
education and the history of the Church of England.
3 Compare with John Henry Newman (1801–1890) central in the Oxford Movement
of the 1840s, converted to Catholicism, created Cardinal in 1879, beatified in 2010;
The idea of a university (1852 and 1858) consists of lectures delivered as Rector of the
newly established Catholic University of Ireland; it remains the most often-quoted
discussion of the principles of a liberal education.
4 Collini, 1984, p. xlviii re the editing of Mill on education in the Complete works.
5 Two members of the House of Commons for each of the ancient universities dated to
a Royal Charter of 1603; all holders of the MA or Doctorate could vote; after 1918,
elections were conducted by the Single Transferable Vote system; abolished by the
Representation of the People Act of 1948, effected with the General Election of 1950;
London University returned one member from 1868 to 1950.
6 Set up in 1855; see Hart, 1972, pp. 63–81.
7 Mill set economics exams for Haileybury College, established 1806, the training
college for the East India Company whose administrators Mill considered to be meri-
torious and well trained.
8 Mill first articulated these ideas in The spirit of the age written in instalments for The
examiner spring and summer of 1831; left unfinished as the public agenda moved to
parliamentary reform.
9 Mill made friends with Gustave d’Eichthal (1804–1886) in 1829, though he was more
sceptical by 1831 when Saint-Simonians arrived in England.
10 Auguste Comte (1798–1857), founder of ‘Positivism’, coined the word ‘sociology’;
although he was influenced by Comte and sympathetic, Mill’s Auguste Comte and
positivism (1865) is unsparingly critical.
222 Alan Ryan
11 Robert Owen (1771–1858), Utopian Socialist, held that actions flow from character
which is made for not by us. In the 1820s, Mill debated with Owenites.
12 Andrew Bell (1757–1832), Anglican clergyman, spent ten years in Madras where he
devised the monitorial system (hence, ‘Madras schools’); Joseph Lancaster (1778–
1838) independently invented the monitorial system in South London; schools based
on the system were established in the United States and Canada; under the label ‘peer
supported learning’ it still has a place in American higher education; Coleridge was an
enthusiastic supporter although no friend to utilitarianism.
13 F. R. Leavis’s association of James Mill’s education of his son with Dickens’ Gradgrind
in Hard Times is a misidentification attributable to Leavis’s loathing for ‘Benthamism’;
it is unlikely that Dickens had read Bentham, who was anyway opposed to rote learning
(Fielding, 1956).
14 Mill was advised by Edwin Chadwick (1800–1890), Benthamite, responsible with
Nassau Senior (1790–1864), for the report on poverty that led to the Poor Law of
1834.
15 Mill mentions Christ’s Hospital established 1552 to co-educate, which in 1869 had
1129 boys and 28 girls. (The present author was Almoner of Christ’s Hospital in
the late 1990s when concerted effort was made to achieve equal numbers.) Mill may
have seized on Christ’s Hospital because he was a friend of Henry Cole (1808–1882),
former pupil there.
16 Henry Sidgwick and Millicent Garret Fawcett (1847–1929), sister of Elizabeth Garret,
campaigner for the right of women to practise medicine, supporter of women’s rights;
her husband Henry Fawcett (1833–1884), MP and economist, was an ally of Mill’s in
the campaign for female suffrage. In contrast to the USA where Oberlin was founded
as co-educational in 1833, even progressive, non-sectarian University College London
admitted women students only in 1878.
17 Alexander Bain (1818–1903) Professor of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen, first bi-
ographer of both James Mill and J. S. Mill. Mill’s delivery must have been deliberate –
the address is hardly longer than Isaiah Berlin’s inaugural, Two concepts of liberty.
18 The ancient universities were still governed by the Test Acts, repealed 1872; Mill
deplored the remaining Anglican monopoly (although when Henry Sidgwick asked
whether Mill thought he should resign his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge
because he no longer believed the Thirty-Nine Articles, Mill did not encourage him
to throw away his livelihood for a principle; in fact, Trinity behaved decently, and
kept Sidgwick as a lecturer until repeal allowed the college to elect him to a fellowship
once more).
References
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Oxford University Press).
Burston, W. H. (ed.) (1969) James Mill on education (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press).
Capaldi, N. (1972) Mill’s forgotten science of ethology, Social Theory and Practice,
409–420.
Collini, S. (1984) Introduction, Collected works, vol. XXI, Essays on equality, law, and
education (Toronto, University of Toronto Press).
Fielding, K. J. (1956) Mill and Gradgrind, Nineteenth century fiction, 148–151.
Hart, J. (1972) The genesis of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report, in: G. Sutherland (ed.)
Studies in the growth of nineteenth-century government (London, Routledge).
Leach, A. F. (1899) A history of Winchester College (New York, Scribner’s Sons).
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writings (Toronto, University of Toronto Press), 227–234, 238–245, 252–258,
278–282, 289–295, 304–307, 312–316.
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Essays on economics and society (Toronto, University of Toronto Press), 193–222.
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equality, law, and education (Toronto, University of Toronto Press), 61–74.
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vols VII–VIII (Toronto, University of Toronto Press).
Mill, J. S. (1848) [1965] Principles of political economy, in: Collected works, vols II–III
Mill, J. S. (1855) [1977] Reform of the Civil Service, in: Collected works, vol. XVIII, Essays
on politics and society (Toronto, University of Toronto Press), 205–211.
Mill, J. S. (1859) [2006] On liberty and the subjection of women (ed. A. Ryan)
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works, vol. XIX, Essays on politics and society (Toronto, University of Toronto Press),
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Mill, J. S. (1865) [1969] Auguste Comte and positivism, in: Collected works, vol. X, Essays
on ethics, religion and society (Toronto, University of Toronto Press), 261–368.
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15 Feminist thinking
on education in
Victorian England
Laura Schwartz
Introduction: Feminism and the movement

for women’s education: an uneasy relationship?
Definitions of ‘Victorian feminism’ continue to be the subject of historical
debate. The nineteenth-century movement for women’s emancipation was so
diverse and continually developing that historians have urged caution with
regards to overly unitary terminology (Offen, 1988, p. 131). Women who
declined to see themselves as women’s rights advocates often worked to further
the interests of their sex alongside others who proudly laid claim to such a
political identity; while individuals not necessarily motivated by specifically femi-
nist aims may still have contributed or been important to a feminist tradition
(Caine, 1997, p. 3). Feminist ideas did not derive from any one key text or
thinker, nor did the English women’s movement as a whole acknowledge an
official leader or produce official propaganda. It is not possible, therefore, to
‘measure’ its development solely according to criteria or patterns of growth aris-
ing from studies of predominantly male social movements or political organisa-
tions (Levine, 1987, p. 20; Caine, 1997, p. 6).
Such problems of definition are particularly pertinent to analyses of the
campaign for women’s education. Education was a central concern for those
struggling against female oppression well before the formation of an organised
women’s movement in the second half of the nineteenth century (Wright, 1831,
p. 38; Sharples, 1832, p. 17; Wollstonecraft, 1989, ch. 4). Post-1850 activists
such as Elizabeth Wolstenholme (1833–1918) and Josephine Butler (1828–
1906) drew on an older feminist tradition that directly equated freedom with the
acquisition of knowledge. Wolstenholme campaigned on a wide range of
women’s rights issues, including sex education and the suffrage, and was also a
member of the North of England Council for the Higher Education of Women.
Echoing earlier feminist writings, her tract on girls’ schooling ended with a cry
to slay the ‘cruel tyrant’ of enforced ignorance, calling on her sisters to ‘Set free
the women who sigh in the dark prison-houses, the captives of ignorance and
folly’ (Wolstenholme, 1869, p. 328). Butler, a fellow member of NECHEW who
went on to lead a national campaign against the exploitation and legal oppression
of prostitutes, similarly declared that, for women, ‘[w]orse than bodily privations
Feminist thinking on education in Victorian England 225
or pains ... are these aches and pangs of ignorance’ (Butler, 1868, p. 7).
Education became a central campaigning issue for the English Woman’s Journal
(1858–1864), one of the first periodicals to campaign on a cross section of
women’s rights including suffrage and the legal position of married women.
Calls to improve standards in girls’ schools and to set up women’s higher educa-
tion establishments thus came to be closely bound up with broader feminist
concerns. Because, as Butler put it, ‘The desire for education which is widely felt
by English women ... springs ... from the conviction that for many women to get
knowledge is the only way to get bread’, calls for education led on especially to
the wider question of women’s right to work (Butler, 1868, pp. 7–8).
Yet the relationship between feminism and women’s education was by no
means straightforward. The foundation of girls’ schools and women’s colleges
also involved men and women who did not necessarily identify with a broader
set of feminist politics. After the Taunton Commission of 1870 revealed the
inadequacy of existing provision, it was the government, rather than feminist
campaigners, who went on to establish the majority of girls’ secondary schools
(Fletcher, 1980). The drive for improved standards in schools and the founda-
tion of women’s colleges must also be seen as part of broader educational
reform, led by a liberal elite keen both to secure their socio-economic ascendancy
and promote more professional and competitive values within education as a
whole (Pederson, 1987; Sutherland, 1987). Historians have also questioned the
extent to which the new schools and colleges for women really did challenge
traditional gender roles, pointing to strict disciplinary codes which formally
endorsed conservative models of femininity (Dyhouse, 1981; Delamont, 1989).
The pioneers of women’s higher education were renowned for the cautious
manner in which they pursued their aims – ‘Degrees by Degrees’ according to
one activist (Rogers, 1938). By the beginning of the twentieth century, this
approach was often at odds with the increasingly militant tone of large sections
of the women’s movement, especially those fighting for the vote. Even Emily
Davies (1830–1921), founder of the first residential women’s college and editor
of the English Woman’s Journal, was careful not to identify too closely the cause
of women’s education with the less respectable issue of suffrage, let alone the
campaigns around prostitution to which many Victorian feminists devoted them-
selves. Many Oxford-based educationalists, including Elizabeth Wordsworth
(Principal of Lady Margaret Hall and founder of St Hugh’s College), Lucy
Soulsby (Headmistress of Oxford High School for Girls, 1879–1889), and Mary
Ward (one of the founders of Somerville) not only sought to disassociate
themselves from the more militant elements of the women’s rights movement,
but also opposed female enfranchisement (Bush, 2005).1
However, to ask whether campaigns for women’s education were or were not
‘feminist’ is to pose the question in a manner which implies too rigid a concep-
tual framework, for neither one of these movements possessed a fixed or homo-
genous identity. A more fruitful approach traces a current of feminist thought
and practice running through the various educational initiatives of the period,
to which some individual reformers adhered more than others, and which
226 Laura Schwartz
intersected with particular projects at particular historical junctures. The term
‘feminism’ did not come into use in the English language until the 1890s, and
even then its meaning was contested (Offen, 1988, p. 129; Caine, 1997, p. 8;
Delap, 2005, p. 382). Yet those historians who argue for a more thoughtful and
precise application of the term have nevertheless sought working definitions ‘not
tied down to a specific historical time’ with which to indicate women’s recogni-
tion of their collective oppression and ‘positive identification with each other in
a context of political struggle’ (Cott, 1987, pp. 4–5; Levine, 1987, p. 14). Such
a definition is flexible enough to encompass those who remained committed to
the value of sexual difference and a special role for women distinct from that of
men (Offen, 1988, p. 141).
Even as we recognise the ambiguous relationship that many female educational
reformers had with the women’s movement, it is worth remembering that all
were fighting in the face of entrenched and widespread opposition to educating
women outside the home (Howarth & Curthoys, 1987, pp. 214–215). Their
schools and colleges were undoubtedly established as part of a more general
reform of education, but the very fact of their being for women rather than men
radically shifted the grounds upon which they sought legitimacy. Not only did
the pioneers of women’s education face far greater obstacles than reformers of
the boys’ public schools and ancient universities; for women to promote public
and professional values within their institutions represented a far greater chal-
lenge to dominant ideas of acceptable female conduct (Levine, 1990, p. 147).
The newly professionalised schools, often run by women with connections to
women’s rights networks, formed an important part of the improvement of girls’
secondary education (Glenday & Price, 1974; Levine, 1990, pp. 128, 136–137).
Examples include Frances Buss’s North London Collegiate School (est. 1850),
Dorothea Beale’s Cheltenham Ladies’ College (est. 1854), and the Girls’ Public
Day School Company established by Emily and Maria Sheriff in 1871. Women’s
rights advocates were also active in the Ladies’ Educational Associations set up
in most large towns throughout the 1860s and 70s, which pushed for girls to be
allowed to sit for Local Examinations and lobbied universities for access and
facilities (Dyhouse, 1995, p. 14). Queen’s College in London, the first higher
education establishment for women, was founded by Christian Socialists
F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley in 1848, followed by the Unitarian Elizabeth
Jesser Reid’s Bedford College in 1849 (Tuke, 1939; Sutherland, 1990). In 1878,
London became the first university to admit women to its degrees (excluding
medicine), and by 1897 the university at Manchester also permitted women to
read for degrees in all subjects bar engineering and medicine.
Resistance to women’s higher education was especially strong at Oxford and
Cambridge, where women were not admitted to read for degrees until 1920 and
1947, respectively. The ancient universities thus became the arena for some of
the most iconic battles in the struggle against male privilege, and will be focused
on in this chapter as places in which competing theories of women’s education
were particularly clearly articulated. Three overlapping networks of educational
reformers are identified – supporters of Girton College, Cambridge; Newnham
College, Cambridge; and the Oxford Anglican women’s colleges. This article
will examine the ways in which they addressed a number of key themes with
regards to education and women’s emancipation. The next section will discuss
how feminist arguments intersected with other social, political, and economic
factors leading to the emergence of the movement for women’s education. The
following section looks in more detail at the different ways in which women’s
right to education was justified in the face of strong opposition. The contested
nature of sexual difference was key to these debates, with all sides asking if men
and women had different intellectual capacities and whether educating women
stripped them of their femininity. Religious arguments were employed by almost
all feminists entering this debate, though varying conclusions were reached. The
final section looks at the more practical discussions and disagreements within the
Oxbridge women’s colleges over the kind of education best suited to women.
Education: for what and for whom?

First and foremost, feminists maintained that women needed to be educated in
order to improve society. This was an argument common to discussions of
women’s emancipation generally, whereby it was insisted that women needed to
be freed from the home and allowed into the public sphere so that they could ‘do
God’s work in the world’. ‘We hear cries that the world is going wrong for want
of women, that moral progress cannot be made without their help’, complained
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–1891), founder of the English Woman’s
Journal, and yet women were denied access to education and professions that
would enable them to carry out their saving mission (Bodichon, 1857, p. 6). The
notion of ‘woman’s mission’ had been appropriated by feminists in the Utopian
Socialist Owenite movement earlier in the century but also had a strong religious
dimension, deriving from the evangelical emphasis on women as the bearers of
moral and social transformation (Taylor, 1983, pp. 123–128). Feminists also
echoed evangelical sentiments when, discussing the lack of activities and profes-
sions open to middle-class women, they declared idleness to be the greatest sin of
all (Howarth, 1988, pp. ix–xvi). ‘Every human being should work’, wrote
Bodichon, ‘no one should owe bread to any but his or her parents ... it lowers the
dignity of women’ (Bodichon, 1857, p. 11). Such arguments were also imbued
with a language of productivity and efficiency. Elizabeth Wolstenholme lamented
the thousands of girls currently abandoned to ignorance and idleness, and
suggested that ‘it is worth considering how enormous a power for good all this
energy might become if economised and trained’ (Wolstenholme, 1869, p. 298)
Nor were feminists averse to invoking the ‘economic gain to the community’ that
a better educated female workforce could provide (Wolstenholme, 1869, p. 319).
Though feminist arguments utilised dominant nineteenth-century capitalist
discourses of hard work and moral improvement, they nevertheless presented
a serious challenge to the idealisation of the bourgeois family. Not only did
feminists condemn the enforced idleness of the middle-class wife, engaged
neither in household labour (which was now performed by servants) nor
228 Laura Schwartz
professional occupations (Cobbe, 1862, pp. 4–5; Davies, 1988, pp. 38, 44); they
also exposed the myth that all middle-class women could rely upon a male rela-
tive for financial support. Elizabeth Wolstenholme protested that ‘It is to the last
degree indecent that women should be dependent upon marriage for a profes-
sional maintenance’ (Wolstenholme, 1869, p. 318). This was not merely a ques-
tion of principle, but, for many women, a painful reality. Josephine Butler
pointed out in 1861 that at least two-fifths of women were unmarried, and
perhaps one-quarter of married women were compelled to perform some
labour to support themselves and their families (Butler, 1868, p. 4; Davies,
1988, pp. 75–76).
Without adequate training or employment, middle-class women were forced
into low-paid positions of ‘drudgery’ – most commonly as teachers or
governesses (Bodichon, 1857, p. 18). The lack of adequate training for govern-
esses was widely perceived to be an ‘evil’, not simply for the women themselves
but also for the children they were so ill-equipped to teach (Butler, 1869).
Queen’s College was initially set up to help such women acquire qualifications,
and was supported by the London Governesses’ Benevolent Institute. As well as
better training for female teachers, feminists proposed that women be educated
to enter a variety of professions. Emily Davies was perhaps the most ambitious in
insisting that women could work as doctors, managers of hospitals, workhouses,
prisons, and charitable institutions, and also go into farming or business (Davies,
1988, pp. 71, 76–78). As this list of professions suggests, feminist thinking on
education was unquestioningly geared towards the interests of middle-class
women. Education in the nineteenth century was stratified not in terms of age,
but of class, so that ‘elementary education’ meant working-class schooling
including provision for adults, such as the mechanics institutes. Feminists seldom
concerned themselves with elementary education and it was mainly at the
secondary and especially the tertiary level that their ideas were put into practice
(Sutherland, 1987, p. 94; Levine, 1990, p. 127).2
Women’s intellect and sexual difference

Cultural resistance to the idea of educating women remained strong throughout
the nineteenth century (Howarth & Curthoys, 1987, pp. 214–215), setting the
terms of the debate so that feminists were compelled to spend much energy
countering the arguments of their opponents. Opposition to women’s education
was based upon a strong assertion of sexual difference. In its most extreme mani-
festations, women’s intellects were seen as insightful and sensitive without the
ability to make rational evidence-based judgements; physiologically, they were
not equipped to deal with the rigours of university education which would
threaten their capacity to bear children; and because women’s vocation in life was
supposedly different from that of men, it was believed to be pointless and cruel
to educate her beyond her sphere as wife and mother. These supposedly inherent
obstacles to women acquiring an education meant that any woman who had
successfully done so was abhorred as an aberration – an unwomanly woman
for whom the acquisition of reason had destroyed her natural femininity
(Burstyn, 1980).
Supporters of female education varied in their willingness to challenge such
thinking on women’s intellectual capacities. Emily Davies insisted that ‘there is
between the sexes a deep and broad basis of likeness’ and she felt that only good
could come of enabling women to take a greater part in the intellectual and
public life of men. She preferred a method of training that sought to cultivate
the ‘common human element’, rather than one which began by ‘dividing
mankind into two great sections and forcing each into a mould’ (Davies, 1988,
pp. 163–165, 116–117). Although Davies claimed not to question the existence
of ‘distinctive man-hood and womanhood’, she asserted that while women
continued to be denied the opportunity to develop their intellectual powers, it
was not possible to say what was ‘naturally’ feminine and what was merely the
result of ‘convention’. She thus maintained that ‘until artificial appliances are
removed we cannot know anything about the native distinctions. As to the
future, who can say?’ (Davies, 1988, pp. 159–161). Elizabeth Wolstenholme also
insisted that all ‘artificial’ causes of differences between the sexes ought to be
eradicated, and that the ‘monopoly of sex’ in education and the professions
should be rejected in favour of a free market in which any ‘natural’ differences
would be free to assert themselves. She therefore reassured her readers that ‘men
need not for one moment fear that in any work in which they have special natural
advantages they will ever be driven out of the field by woman’ (Wolstenholme,
1869, p. 319). Such arguments had, of course, the advantage of appearing to
defer to a traditional belief in sexual difference, while in fact asserting that such
distinctions ought to have very little actual bearing on how society was organised.
Some feminists, however, placed more emphasis upon the importance and value
of distinctively ‘womanly’ characteristics. Josephine Butler, for example,
complained of certain (unnamed) advocates of women’s education who ‘speak of
women as if it were a compliment to them, or in any way true, to say that they are
like men’. The best kind of education would, in Butler’s view, actively encourage
‘every good quality, every virtue which we regard as feminine’ to ‘develop more
freely’ (Butler, 1868, pp. 17–18). The journalist and campaigner for women’s
rights, Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904), also argued that masculine and femi-
nine characteristics were so innate that it was ridiculous to suggest that educating
women would erase them. Education was about drawing out one’s powers, there-
fore, ‘[i]f we draw out a woman’s powers to the very uttermost, we shall only
educe her womanliness ... and so make her a perfect woman’ (Cobbe, 1862, p. 8).
Neither Butler nor Cobbe concluded from their belief in difference between the
sexes that women were in any way inferior to men. But upholding sexual differ-
ence continued to have rather more conservative implications elsewhere, even for
some women educationalists. Dorothea Beale (1831–1906) began her paper to
the Social Science Congress on the education of girls, by asserting that ‘I desire
to institute no comparison between the mental abilities of boys and girls, but
simply to say what means to be the right means of training, so that they [women]
may best perform that subordinate part in the world’ (Beale, 1865, p. 1).
230 Laura Schwartz
Religious arguments were extremely important to these debates since
differences between men and women were usually defined as ‘God given’. At the
same time, there existed, at least since Mary Wollstonecraft, a feminist tradition
of looking to Christianity to claim the ‘sexless soul’, and arguing that men and
women were one in the eyes of Christ (Taylor, 2005, p. 412). Earlier in the
century, radical Unitarians’ heterodox rejection of original sin, and a belief in the
perfectibility of both the male and female soul through virtuous education, led
them to argue forcefully for women’s right to knowledge (Gleadle, 1995; Watts,
1998).3 In her influential book The higher education of women (1866) Emily
Davies insisted, from an Anglican perspective, that Christianity preached only
‘one moral law’ for men and women, concluding that ‘The theory of education
of our English Church recognises no distinction of sex’ (Davies, 1988,
pp. 14–15). Josephine Butler, an Anglican like Davies, though of a more evan-
gelical bent, also insisted that the movement for women’s education was
supported by Christian teachings. She accused those who argued that educating
women would make them unfeminine of committing an ‘infidelity against God’,
of doubting the strength of His Creative power and the feminine virtues He had
bestowed upon women. Butler also concurred with Davies in proclaiming that
Christ favoured the equality of women in order that the sexes might attain
greater union (Butler, 1868, pp. 18–19).
The women associated with the foundation of Lady Margaret Hall (LMH, est.
1879), St Hugh’s (est. 1886), and St Hilda’s (est. 1893) in Oxford, however,
came from a more conservative Anglican tradition. Many leading High
Churchmen had been among the most outspoken opponents of women’s educa-
tion, advocating a traditional interpretation of Scripture that taught that God
had created Eve to serve Adam (Burgon, 1884; Burstyn, 1980). Elizabeth
Wordsworth (1840–1932), Principal of LMH, Annie Moberly (1846–1937),
Principal of St Hugh’s, and Dorothea Beale, founder of St Hilda’s, though of
varying outlooks, were all strongly influenced by a broad High Church tradition.
Wordsworth’s father the Bishop of Lincoln, for example, was the author of a
famous sermon on ‘Christian Womanhood’ which condemned any form of
education that encouraged women to compete as men’s equals (Wordsworth,
1884). His daughter, likewise, argued that women should never seek to emulate
men, but instead celebrate their womanly characteristics of self-sacrifice and
moral superiority (Wordsworth, 1894, pp. 8, 12). And yet her insistence on the
God-given nature of sexual difference also led her to argue, like Butler and
Cobbe, against those who claimed that education would create unwomanly
women: ‘Put women into whatever circumstances you will, they (happily for the
world) will always remain women’, she told her students.4 The question for
Wordsworth, then, was not whether women should be educated, but how.
An education best suited to women

Feminists were divided over what kinds of education were best suited to women
and these debates were rooted in wider philosophical and religious differences.
Yet they also reflected the political alignments and social networks of the various
groups of reformers. Emily Davies and Frances Power Cobbe, both active in
metropolitan women’s rights circles, were insistent that women receive an
identical education to that of men. This included sitting competitive examina-
tions, and Davies’ first campaign was for girls of secondary school age to be
allowed to sit for the Cambridge Local Examinations.5 Although such a position,
in Davies’s case, derived from the belief that women’s intellects were essentially
no different from men’s, thus enabling them to compete directly, it was also a
practical move – for Davies held that if women did not strive to achieve the same
standard as men, their qualifications would be disregarded (Cobbe, 1862, p. 15;
Davies, 1988, pp. 134–135).
In 1869 Emily Davies, with the support of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon,
established Girton College at Cambridge, where students were required to study
the same curriculum as men, sit for all the examinations, and complete the degree
in the same time allowed for male undergraduates (Bradbrook, 1969; McWilliams-
Tullberg, 1975; Strachey, 1978; Howarth, 1988). The majority of the North of
England Council for the Higher Education of Women, however, was against
such a move. Some members, including Josephine Butler’s husband George,
opposed it on the grounds of women’s different intellectual capacities and future
roles in life, though many others pointed to how outdated the existing university
curriculum was, and insisted that women should not seek to emulate this. One
of Josephine Butler’s correspondents advised her that ‘It seems to us that instead
of claiming equality with men, you would put yourselves into a most unworthy –
one might say – slavish position, if you adopted a bad examination, only because
it was one which now men passed’ (NECHEW, 1868). Members of NECHEW
supported instead the foundation of Newnham College, where students were
permitted to follow a self-guided course of study, and instead of Greek and Latin
for the degree examinations, they benefited from some of the new subjects then
being pioneered at Cambridge. Newnham was thus also a focus for university
reformers such as the Cambridge don Henry Sidgwick who helped to found
Newnham along with its first Principal and NECHEW member Anne Jemima
Clough (1820–1892) (Gardner, 1921; Hamilton, 1936; Phillips, 1979;
Sutherland, 1987; 2000).
The Oxford women’s colleges followed the same course as Newnham and did
not initially compel their students to read for degrees or sit examinations.
Although she supported those students who wished to take exams, Elizabeth
Wordsworth was especially keen to ensure that rather than have ‘facts ...
ruthlessly and unremittingly shovelled into her brain’, a girl’s poetic imagination
ought to be nourished. In her view, girls should also have a ‘Wanderjahr’
between school and college during which a more holistic education might be
pursued (Wordsworth, 1894, pp. 11, 13). She also regarded the religious aspect
of women’s education to be of equal weight to the intellectual. In her view, one
of the most important reasons for women to educate themselves was to enable
them to become religious teachers, and this applied equally whether they
intended to marry or to take on more professional roles within the Church.
232 Laura Schwartz
Women should have the requisite knowledge to read and interpret the Bible
accurately, and to defend the writings of the Church Fathers and Anglican
Divines against secularising forces (Battiscombe, 1978, pp. 174–175). Dorothea
Beale also condemned the idea that women’s education was simply about
academic success, and insisted that ‘we should ever remember that moral training
is the end, education the means’ (Beale, 1865, p. 13).
Their relationship to the Established Church was of great importance to the
identity of all the Oxbridge women’s colleges. In Oxford, the initial group of
reformers split over whether the women’s college they had come together to
found should be non-denominational or affiliated to the Church of England.
Those who favoured the former option established Somerville College, while
Lady Margaret Hall (followed by St Hugh’s and St Hilda’s) was founded on
a ‘definite Church basis’ (Rogers, 1938; Brittain, 1960; Griffin, 1986;
Adams, 1996). The Cambridge colleges, though not designated Church
institutions, were also concerned with the moral education of their students.
Newnham, dominated by the freethinking Clough family, was decidedly non-
denominational – though Anne Jemima Clough nevertheless encouraged her
students to attend some place of worship on Sundays (Sutherland, 2006, pp.
90–93). Girton was reportedly known as ‘that infidel place’ and was also
supported by a number of freethinkers including Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
(Hirsch, 2000). Yet, although no religious tests were instituted, Girton did hold
daily prayers and Sunday services and in 1902 it acquired its own Chapel
(Bradbrook, 1969, pp. 3, 62–63).
Unlike the University of London, the Oxbridge women’s colleges were
residential institutions – a development which had important ramifications for
thinking on female education. Residency at Oxbridge – for both male and female
undergraduates – was supported by a liberal vision of educating to improve char-
acter as well as intellect (Howarth, 1988). The college environment was consid-
ered almost, if not as, important as the content of the lectures and tutorials that
took place within it. Both Davies and Clough argued that women’s colleges
should provide their students with space to develop intellectually, free from the
domestic chores and social interruptions that distracted them at home
(Davies, 1878, pp. 11–12, 17; Sutherland, 2006, p. 98). Elizabeth Wordsworth,
however, was strongly against women’s colleges becoming mere professional
institutions, believing that they ought to be kept as small as possible so as to
allow for familial intimacy between staff and students. Although LMH and
St Hugh’s expanded rapidly in the years following their foundation, they contin-
ued to be modelled along the lines of the middle-class home. Annie Moberly, for
example, insisted that her college room be treated not as a study but a drawing
room, so that, rather than knocking on entering, her students would have to
stand around awkwardly, waiting to be noticed (Iremonger, 1956, p. 63). All of
the Oxbridge women’s colleges placed severe restrictions on their students’
dress, conduct, movements, and interaction with the opposite sex. Even those
reformers with explicitly feminist commitments failed to challenge the extent to
which their places of learning reproduced and re-created middle-class femininity.
Thus, although some of the most radical among them did favour co-education,
at least at a primary school level (Malleson, 1874; Wolstenholme, 1869,
pp. 325–327; Strachey, 1978, p. 130; Hirsch, 2000, pp. 87–91), most feminists
supported single sex education without question.
Conclusion
Theories of women’s education in the nineteenth century emerged out of wider
discussions on the ‘woman question’, and were shaped by feminists’ re-thinking
of gender roles, sexual difference, and the family. Arguments for and against
women’s education, and the kind of education they ought to receive, were
grounded in debates over sexual difference. While their opponents relied on
notions of women’s difference to argue against their receiving an education
outside the home, feminists were not united in asserting either women’s
intellectual equivalency or equality with men. Some, like Emily Davies and
Elizabeth Wolstenholme, did suggest that gendered characteristics were predom-
inantly socially constructed and they therefore championed access to education as
the means by which women might free themselves from the debilitating effects
of convention. Other feminists, however, such as Josephine Butler and Frances
Power Cobbe were more inclined to value ‘feminine’ virtues as the basis for the
transformation of society, which the education of women would make possible.
Different models of women’s education were thus put forward, and the main area
of contention was whether female students ought to compete directly with men
by pursuing a ‘male’ course of study, sitting examinations and reading for univer-
sity degrees. On this question, Girton and Newnham chose different approaches –
though the distinction ought not to be over-determined. Support for the first
two Cambridge women’s colleges was not mutually exclusive, and their advocates
frequently worked together as part of the same reforming networks.
Feminist thinking on education, like the Victorian women’s movement at
large, reflected and responded to many wider concerns and contemporary
political questions. It was imbued with a horror of idleness, and a belief in the
value of work, the dignity of economic independence, and individual self-
improvement. And it embraced a liberal vision of education which endorsed
institutional socialisation. It was fundamentally determined by the religious
controversies of the age and the religious outlooks of its practitioners. The more
conservative approach of many of the Oxford women, their ambivalence over
demanding women’s formal admission to the university, and their emphasis on
teaching ‘feminine’ values of self-sacrifice can therefore more fruitfully be under-
stood in the context of their High Church vision of women’s education. Even
the more radical of the educational reformers, however, believed that education
also entailed socialisation or a ‘moral’ element, and as a result the women’s
colleges both challenged and reproduced dominant ideas of middle-class
femininity – without ever rejecting such norms altogether.
The feminist campaign for women’s education was a case of ideas and institu-
tions developing in tandem. Though higher education colleges for women
234 Laura Schwartz
reflected the varying visions of their founders, such visions were often themselves
the result of pragmatism and compromise. Feminists were responding to the
pressing need for professional training and qualifications for middle-class women,
and such an imperative encouraged a degree of flexibility in their theorising and
a willingness to at least pay lip service to the concerns of their opponents. At the
same time, however, all practical efforts to improve the educational opportunities
of women had such important implications for their position in society more
generally, that more overtly political reverberations could not be avoided. The
movement for women’s education was implicated in feminist politics because
education during this period was so fundamentally identified with women’s
personal, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual emancipation.
Notes
1 By 1913 Wordsworth had come to accept that votes for women were inevitable, though
she remained unenthusiastic.
2 A handful of feminist women and radical men were interested in improving working-
class education, establishing the Working Women’s College in London in 1864 staffed
by Elizabeth Whitehead Malleson, Clementia Taylor, and Frances Martin, and assisted
by John, the husband of women’s rights advocate and London School Board member
Alice Westlake; see Levine, 1990; Purvis, 1991.
3 For Non-conformist contributions to secondary education, see Binfield, 1981.
4 E. Wordsworth, Isaiah I–XII (1907–08), Sermon manuscripts, Oxford, St Hugh’s
College Archive, XIII.3.
5 Girls were permitted to take these examinations for the first time in 1863.
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16 Idealism and education
Andrew Vincent
Introduction
Idealist philosophers wrote comparatively little directly on education. Despite
this, Idealism, as a more general philosophical movement, including the British,
American, German, and Italian kinds, featured a strong interest in education.
The comparative paucity of direct reflection can be explained by the fact that the
Idealists’ interest in education was integral to their whole philosophy. If one
takes a slightly more oblique perspective on education, one can argue that
between 1870 and the 1920s (in Britain in particular) there were notable
examples of sophisticated educational reflection, as well as, in some cases, direct
engagement with educational practices. This article will briefly elucidate the
meaning of idealism, then move to a consideration of Idealists’ educational
philosophy and their involvement with educational practice.
What is Idealism?
The first question is: what is Idealism? There are a number of commonplace
senses of the term. It can be thought of as corresponding to the conventional
sense of ideal, as in perfectionism or utopianism. This sense of idealism might
thus be opposed to an ordinary language sense of realism. But the use of idealism
in this essay has nothing to do with that sense. It is not referring to ideals or to
utopias, but to ideas, and specifically to human consciousness. This is
philosophical idealism. Versions of this sense of philosophical idealism are found
in ancient Greece, particularly in the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle; but in
its current form it was initially influenced largely by the writings of Bishop
Berkeley (1685–1753). Berkeley’s subjective idealism also ran alongside some
different and much richer variants of idealism, generated in Germany in the
writings of, for example, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) J. G. Fichte (1762–
1814), Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). In
Britain (including both Wales and Scotland – we aren’t talking just about Oxford
Idealism), it dominated philosophical thinking from the 1870s up to the 1920s.
Its key philosophical proponents were figures such as T. H. Green (1836–1882),
Edward Caird (1835–1908), Henry Jones (1852–1922), R. B. Haldane
238 Andrew Vincent
(1856–1928), F. H. Bradley (1846–1924), and Bernard Bosanquet (1848–
1923) (Boucher and Vincent 2011). From the 1920s and 1930s – when to a
degree it was being abandoned, but by no means refuted, in the academy –
Idealism still included such immensely significant figures as R. G. Collingwood
(1889–1943) and Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990).
It is important to note that Idealism was not one singular movement in
Europe or North America. It embodied a wide range of philosophical tenden-
cies, although space does not allow detailed analysis of them to form a substantial
part of this essay. There were subtle philosophical divisions between various
factions of Idealism, for example, personal idealism and absolute idealism. But if
there is one guiding principle of Idealism, in general, it is that reality, all that is
and appears, is for and in human consciousness. Thus, the known world cannot
be considered independent of a knower. There is no reality, as such, which is
antecedent to human consciousness. A natural or material cause could not there-
fore be antecedent to consciousness. If something is known in any way, it is
human consciousness which knows it. There could therefore be no pure natural
history of mind. There could be an ‘idea’ that mind has a natural history, but
such an idea could not logically be antecedent to the knowing consciousness. To
suggest that there is anything, therefore, absolutely outside of consciousness is
meaningless verbiage for Idealism.
Idealist philosophical background to education

The Idealist conception of education is linked directly to a philosophy of mind.
One way to elucidate this is to focus briefly on Hegel. For Hegel, originality and
uniqueness in thought do not arise from an intellectual vacuum. The substance
of thought has to be assimilated from the past and made one’s own through a
process of thoughtful re-enactment. Hegel argued that one could consequently
trace in outline the basic thought structures through which the world has actu-
ally been configured over human history. The particular individual can therefore
progress via the various stages of humanity’s self-apprehension, that is passing in
microcosm through the macrocosm of human history and the knowledge that
humanity has accrued. Such knowledge becomes, as it were, transparent as it is
recapitulated by each generation, particularly via education.
According to the British Idealist R. B. Haldane, for example, many misunder-
stand Hegel, thinking that his work begins with a highly abstract logic and only
then moves to human experience. In Haldane’s view Hegel, to the contrary,
treats ‘human experience as the source of his quest after what is ultimately real’.
Nothing lies outside conscious experience. Consciousness will only perplex us ‘if
we insist on making reality stop short at something below consciousness’
(Haldane, 1904, vol I, p. 284). There is no leap from judgement to reality. We
should therefore simply refuse to begin from the opposition between conscious-
ness and experience. Reality is the epiphany of consciousness. In this sense one
can never escape the circle of thought. Philosophy is, as Haldane put it, quite
simply the ‘self-comprehension of mind’ (Haldane, 1904, vol II, p. 148).
Idealism and education 239
Following from this argument, the purpose of the philosophy for Idealism is
the same as the purpose of education, namely, making the human mind its own
object. The educated individual is one who has assimilated the world conceptu-
ally and realises his or her own identity with the most general sense of Mind –
that is humanity’s self-apprehension considered as the general structure of
human thought. Such an educated individual is at home in the world. It followed
for Hegel, for example, that the content of any educational curriculum should
be derived from the way the human mind has formed itself over the history of
human development through various civilisations. The stages through which
Mind has passed provide the formal content of the curriculum. As Hegel
comments in the Phenomenology of Spirit:
Thus as far as factual information is concerned, we find that what in former

ages engaged the attention of men of mature minds, has been reduced to
the level of facts, exercises and even games for children; and, in the child’s
progress through the school, we shall recognize the history of the cultural
development of the world traced, as it were, in a silhouette.
(Hegel, 1979, p. 16)
Such assimilation is not simply passive, it entails rather an active engagement

by the student. Thus, in his second Nuremberg school address, Hegel comments,
[I]f learning limited itself to mere receiving, the effect would not be much
better that if we wrote sentences of water; for it is not the receiving but the
self-activity of comprehension and the power to use it again, that first makes
knowledge our possession.
(Hegel, 1909, p. 167)
In Hegel’s terms knowledge can only come about through a rounded grasp of
the sciences of humanity. To think through the detailed material of the various
sciences in class re-enacts the active principle of thought itself. A teacher must
therefore possess the knowledge themselves thoroughly (within a particular
domain) and think it through in front of the class; the pupils must then
themselves take on the ‘work of thought’ in order to possess the knowledge as
their own. In this process, the rich content of thought can then be assimilated.
Hegel’s idea was that his early Philosophical propaedeutic and later Encyclopaedia
of the philosophical sciences were premised on the generic formative structures of
Mind. The school or early university classes for Hegel are not, though, the place
for the singular advancement of knowledge; any such advancement lies farther
up the ladder of scholarly learning. The school and university are rather a place
to review internally and fully engage with the rich history of human thought.
This entails the individual understanding who they are, and developing a sense
of at-homeness in the world.
A parallel argument can be observed in, for example, T. H. Green’s
Prolegomena to ethics. For Green, knowledge of the world and nature does not
240 Andrew Vincent
explain the nature of knowledge. The producer precedes the product. Knowledge
of the world, including time and space, exists for the self-conscious human
subject, since the concepts of space and time presuppose this subject.
Psychological introspection will not tell us about the nature of knowledge,
because it also presupposes the conscious subject. There can, therefore, be no
experience of the world antecedent to consciousness. Thus, Green maintains that
pure sensationalism would be speechless. There may well be an external world,
but it could not be external to the conscious subject. Knowledge, as such, in any
shape is always mind apprehending itself (Green, 1907). For Green this argument
underlined the enormous significance of education in terms of the intellectual
and moral development of human beings.
These arguments can be illustrated finally in the work of the twentieth century
Italian Idealist Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) – although this expresses a subtly
different sense of Idealism. Gentile wrote a number of works on education up to
the 1920s, for example, The Reform of education (1923). As Benedetto Croce
(1866–1952) noted, it is clear that Gentile saw a close connection between his
philosophical writings, such as The theory of mind as pure act, and his understand-
ing of education. Put at its simplest, education was viewed as the process of
thought itself, which (as indicated above) is the core of reality for Idealism. Mind
is its own creation. All roads converge here for Gentile; nothing is real save
mind’s self-creation. Gentile referred to this basic principle as ‘thoughtful think-
ing’ (pensiero pensante – see Gentile, 1920, pp. 18–19). Nothing therefore has
value unless it is resolved within the act of thinking. In this sense there is nothing
literally outside of thought. Every act of knowing, speaking or thinking about
something apparently external to us, for Gentile, becomes real in the very act of
thought. Strictly speaking an outside exists, but only insofar as we think it.
Through the activity of thinking and knowing we overcome every form of
externality. Gentile’s Idealism is more extreme than Hegel’s, in terms of its stress
upon the active role of thought.
As Croce comments:
As far back as 1900 he [Gentile] published a monograph ... in which he

showed that pedagogy in so far as it is philosophical resolves itself without
residuum into the philosophy of spirit; for the science of the spirit’s educa-
tion cannot but be the science of the spirit’s development, - of its dialectics,
of its necessity.
(Croce, 1923, p. ix)
Gentile’s Reform of Education book basically focuses on teachers (in fact it was
delivered as a series of lectures to trainee teachers in Trieste). He casts the whole
debate about education quite directly onto his philosophic concerns. This has no
direct bearing though upon formal training in philosophy; yet, at the same time,
it is tied intimately to the philosophical impulse. As Gentile comments, ‘special
philosophical training can be effectual only if all education, from its very begin-
ning, wherever that may be, has been philosophic’ (Gentile, 1923, p. 240).
In essence, he contends that all the great philosophical disputes underpin ordi-
nary pedagogic concerns. Consequently all teachers should minimally become
aware of, for example, the philosophical implications of naturalism and realism,
over and against idealism. Realism makes ‘all reality consist of an external exist-
ence’. Naturalism asserts, variously, that ‘nature alone exists’ (Gentile, 1923,
p. 73). Idealism asserts, on the contrary, that ‘we discover the impossibility of
conceiving a reality which is not the reality of thought itself’ (Gentile, 1923,
p. 73). Gentile stresses that all teachers should be aware minimally that reality is
‘this very thought itself by which we think all things’ (Gentile, 1923, p. 74).
The self and education

In considering the way education and philosophy share a fundamental common-
ality, it is important to grasp that Idealists saw the formation of the human self
as integral to both. One key idea arises here, namely, self-realization. It is by the
critical assimilation of thought that the individual realises herself. Much of
Hegel’s argument here is embodied in the German idea of Bildung. Bildung
refers to the development of the person from a child (governed by a more
instinctive life) towards a rational and ethical stance. The student must gradually
sacrifice immediate interests and idiosyncrasies to the systematic demands of
social practices and critical thought. The guidance of the individual – particularly
towards intellectual concerns – is described by Hegel as a ‘second birth’ (Hegel,
1971, addition p. 126). Each subject in the school and university curriculum
expresses consciousness in a certain systematic intellectual shape. These shapes
must be critically assimilated and ultimately transcended dialectically. Bildung
also indicated for Hegel the growth of the capacity for autonomy within each
human being. As Hegel comments, ‘the final purpose of education ... is libera-
tion and the struggle for higher liberation still; education is the absolute transi-
tion from an ethical substantiality which is immediate and natural to one which
is intellectual and so both infinitely subjective and lofty enough to have attained
universality of form’ (Hegel, 1971, p. 125). Individuality is not idiosyncrasy. As
Hegel argues, ‘This reshaping of the soul alone is what education means. The
more educated a man is, the less is there apparent in his behaviour anything
peculiar only to him, anything that is merely contingent’ (Hegel, 1971, addition
p. 52). Rational thought becomes habitual and overcomes capriciousness. The
final result is the citizen of a civil and ethically sensitive state.
There is a broad philosophical theory at work here which relates to the work
of both Rousseau and Kant, as well as to Hegel. It can also be observed in the
core arguments of British Idealism. Basically all human action is by definition
self-realisation. In acting we realise the object we desire. The object is posited by
the self as something which will satisfy the desire. The object as such is called a
good. The good is located in the realisation of the potentialities of the self. Thus,
any action to realise a good, however incomplete that good may be, is a form of
self-realisation. ‘Good’ is distinguished by Idealists from ‘true good’ or the ‘real
will’. The ‘true good’ is that object which provides the more complete
242 Andrew Vincent
satisfaction. The true good is understood as the realisation of the full potentialities
of the self. What we ultimately desire in this context is the self as a more
comprehensive universal ethical whole. It follows that the true good can be
described as the most complete form of self-realization. For T. H. Green, for
example, this true good is equivalent to the common good and this in turn has
deep social and political implications. Moral self-realisation is thus willing an
object which truly satisfies the self in the most comprehensive ethical manner.
The will and education

In the context of self-realization, the will becomes crucially important in both
education and philosophy. The will is literally, in Hegel’s terms, ‘thinking trans-
lating itself into existence, thinking is the urge to give itself existence’ (Hegel,
1971, p. 4, addition). F. H. Bradley formulates this idea in a similar way. Will is
‘the realization of itself by an idea, an idea ... with which the self here and now
is identified’ (Bradley, 1935, pp. 444–445). Bernard Bosanquet gives a crisp
rendering of this same idea in an essay entitled ‘The reality of the general will’.
For him the individual human mind should be considered as analogous to a
machine ‘of which the parts are ideas or groups of ideas, all tending to pass into
action’. The will can then be said to consist ‘of those ideas which are guiding
attention and action’ (Bosanquet, 1895, p. 322). For Bosanquet, though,
certain ideas had a logical and systematic power to govern and focus the contents
of the individual mind. Such ideas enabled the individual to grasp and solve a
range of problems. Success in coping with problems reinforced the credibility
and strength of such ideas and the forms of action which flowed from them.
Bosanquet thought that such formative ideas reflected the real necessities of
human life. He also maintained that such ideas were largely derived from the
tried and tested customary institutions of social and political life itself.
They formed ‘the inside which reflect the material action and real conditions that
form the outside’ (Bosanquet, 1895, p. 324). The good will, for Bosanquet,
was one in which reason and will were united within certain dominant fertile
ideas. These ideas ultimately formed the substance of the idea and practice of
the general will.
The logical sequence of this argument is that each individual will embodies a
dominant, reasoned idea. This idea ‘marshals’ and ‘focuses’ the contents of the
mind and structures both will and thus actions in concrete ways. Some ideas have
a more comprehensive rational capacity to unify the mind. Such ideas are derived
ultimately from existing institutional structures of everyday social existence. The
general will, in this sense, is analogous to the individual will. The general will
consequently embodies those generic creative and dominant ideas of the whole
society. In the same manner that the individual marshals the contents of their
own consciousness, so the general will represents the marshalling of all the
individual wills of civil society as a whole. As Bosanquet put it, the general
will is ‘the whole working system of dominant ideas which determines the places
and functions of its members’ (Bosanquet, 1895, p. 325). In this reading the
sovereignty of the general will embodies the sovereignty of certain dominant
reasonable ideas. Such dominant ideas also figured as the crucial dimension of
the good will of each individual. This corresponds again directly to the Idealist
theory of citizenship. The good citizen is one who has internalised certain
comprehensive dominant ideas – derived from society – within their own self.
The good state is the organised body within which such a comprehensive will
functions.
The above theory also bears very fundamentally on the way individuals act in
the world. This in turn has powerful educational implications. Thus, each mode
of human experience is wholly dependent on implicit dominant ideas. All human
experience bears witness to these organising dominant ideas. Human experience
is therefore always through these modes – each implicitly embodying a series of
key organising ideas. Such ideas make the experience coherent and functional in
the world. Many of these organising ideas often remain inchoate and habitual to
those that function within that mode. The education curriculum basically tries to
grasp and to communicate the dominant ideas which make the diverse modes of
experience cohere in themselves. If the ideas are grasped clearly, and the implicit
does becomes explicit, then the individual working in that mode can think and
act more effectively and rationally in the world.
The educational inference from this argument – broadly – is that all human
actions are forms of self-realization and all actions are structured through willing.
Willing is dependent upon certain dominant ideas – which assemble the contents
of consciousness. It follows that to educate the will by attaining clarity with
regard to certain dominant ideas is not only to change the character of the will,
but is also to change the consequent actions of individuals. In turn such ideas
enunciate psychological and practical changes in the circumstances and everyday
life of the individual. The circumstances and environment of an individual are
determined by the actions and, as argued, actions are structured by will and thus
dominant ideas. Thus to change the will is to change the whole environment of
the individual. For Idealism this transformation of the will is perceived to be at
the heart of genuine education. Will, not force, is the basis of human development
and co-existence.
Modes of education
It is important to realise that in the Idealist understanding, education functions
at a number of levels. Experience, willing, action, cognition, and so forth are (as
indicated) all considered educative in terms of the way the person develops and
functions within a community. Idealist philosophy is thus as one with the idea of
education. We might though, more conventionally, tend to think of education as
more closely related to formal institutions such as schools and universities. Whilst
not denying this institutional dimension, the Idealists tended to consider it to be
multi-faceted. The philosophical background to this is that institutions are never
external. They are also, perfectly or imperfectly, the concrete manifestation of
ideas and will. To enter into the life of an institution is to become involved with
244 Andrew Vincent
the ideas present within it. Certain institutions, for Idealism, can carry the
individual forward, in an educative sense, by affecting will and action.
This can be illustrated, in a slightly formulaic manner, by Hegel’s writings.
He thinks, for example, of the institution of the family as having a primary educa-
tional function. At one level it ensures the mediation of adult sexual desires into
an ethical substance (the institution of the family itself) and consequently
educates and develops the cognition of young adults. The fact of individual
property becoming family property is part of this transformative process. The
family also, as importantly, provides a practical and moral basis for the child’s
education and ideally ensures that it develops skills necessary to earn its own
living. The child’s particular feelings are trained in the family, much of the
normative content being unconsciously assimilated via love, trust, and natural
feelings. The parent gives the child the matter of their own consciousness, yet
the child must begin progressively to take control autonomously of their own
life. Ultimately the consciousness of the maturing child supersedes the felt unity
of the family. In the school and potentially in the university, ideas and values are
more systematically inculcated. In the formal curriculum of the school, the
particular character of the child is superseded by the general rationality and rules
of the institution. As Hegel puts it ‘the immediacy of the child no longer counts;
here it is esteemed only according to its worth ... guided in accordance with
universal principles, moulded by instruction according to fixed rules, in general
subjected to a universal order’ (Hegel, 1971, p. 61, section 396, addition). For
Hegel, the school and university represent universality (in contrast to the
particularity of the family).
Only when the young adult has a sense of universality can she be free to follow
her own interests and seek satisfaction in the social realm – civil society. Civil
society looks, at first glance, like another realm of particularity. Initially it is a
realm for the satisfaction of individual wants – as in a classic market society.
However, the individual in civil society when faced with the arbitrary necessities
of making a living has to recast their desires as thought. This raises the individual,
at one level, to a formal sense of freedom. The world of necessity places demands
on the individual will; this entails rationally giving up youthful ideals. For Hegel,
‘the insight into the rationality of the world, liberates him from mourning over
the destruction of his ideals. What is true in these ideals is preserved in the
practical activity’ (Hegel, 1971, p. 62, 396, addition). The invisible hand (Adam
Smith’s understanding of the market) becomes in Hegel the underlying ‘cunning
of reason’ of the social and economic realm. In pursuing my own interests I am
forced by necessity to think rationally; I must restrain my interests and become
part of a chain of social connections. Ultimately in civil society the individual
gradually comes to recognize their dependence on fellow citizens. It is then
through participating thoughtfully in the complexity of public institutions that
the idea and practice of citizenship develops. This enunciates a more thoughtful
understanding of the state. These moments are all profoundly important for
Hegel for the all-round education of the human being. The school and the
university are just parts of this developmental process.
Brief biography of Idealist educational practice

The first Idealist to focus on education was Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Fichte’s
Addresses to the German nation makes a strong case for a national system of
German education for all citizens. For Fichte, distinctions of class or social status
were largely meaningless. Education should be popular, equal, and national. The
underlying aim of such education was moral. Education should aim to bring
about a moral transformation of society. The education he advocated would be
egalitarian and universal. In his own terms it would enable Germany to be
moulded into a single national entity and provide deep-rooted motivations to its
citizens. His ideas were widely admired by, amongst others, the Prussian minister
of Education Baron von Altenstein, who tried to put some of them into practice,
particularly the idea of a universalized system of education. Many of the practices
of Prussian education – influenced by his writings – became part of the model so
much admired over the nineteenth century by such British visitors as Matthew
Arnold (1822–1888). Arnold was involved in two Royal Commissions on educa-
tion in Britain and visited Germany several times for inspiration.
The point about Fichte, which was not carried far by Idealists in Britain, was
his nationalistic focus. For Fichte, only the Germans as a people can be totally
diligent concerning their mental culture. The philosophy of other nations
remained inadequate. To think philosophically or poetically in German was to be
transfigured and liberated, since one was in immediate contact with one’s nature.
Foreigners speaking compound neo-Latinate languages, such as French and
English, were cut off from their natures ‘because their life deviated from nature
originally and in a matter of the first importance’ (all quotations from Fichte,
1979, 4th Address, 55–84). Despite these nationalistic reflections, the Fichtean
model of educational practice – as well as its philosophic and moral underpinnings –
served as an inspiration for British Idealist educationalists. Fichte’s shorter works,
such as the Vocation of man and the Vocation of the scholar, were particularly
admired by British Idealists such as T. H. Green and R. B. Haldane. In summary
the important Fichtean ideas were that education should be focused on the all
round intellectual and moral development of all citizens. For Fichte this required
it to be a central public role of the modern state, that is, to provide universal and
equal educational opportunities, in terms of a ladder of learning, for all citizens
regardless of their social or financial status.
It is necessary, biographically, to correct the popular image of Hegel as the
heavy-weight Germanic Professor of Philosophy. From 1795 until 1801 Hegel
acted as a private tutor for two families in Berne and then Frankfurt. There was
a short spell as a privat-docent in Jena (when he completed his Phenomenology of
Spirit), and then the editorship of a Catholic newspaper, the Bamberger Zeitung
in 1807. In 1808 his friend Niethammer found him a secure post as Rector of a
Gymnasium (or classical school for boys) in Nuremberg. It was here that
he wrote his Science of logic (the larger logic). Hegel taught classes in the
Gymnasium to boys from the ages of 14 to 19, from 1808 until 1817, when he
finally obtained his first secure university post in philosophy at Heidelberg, then
246 Andrew Vincent
moved to Berlin University in 1818, where he worked till his death in 1831. He
was thus 45 when he acquired his first full-time salaried university post and he
had spent approximately fourteen years instructing children and young adults
outside of university. He also drafted his own school curriculum, in the form of
a Philosophical propaedeutic, for the Nuremberg Gymnasium. As argued earlier,
educational motifs saturate all of Hegel’s writings. Like Fichte he believed in the
crucial role of education in intellectually and morally transforming humanity. As
he states unequivocally in his Encyclopaedia of the philosophical sciences ‘The
Absolute is Mind (Spirit) – this is the supreme definition of the Absolute. To find
this definition and to grasp its meaning and burden was ... the ultimate purpose
of all education and all philosophy’ (Hegel, 1971, pp. 18–19, section 384).
The British Idealist interest in education can be initially illustrated in the ideas
and practice of T. H. Green. In 1864 Green was appointed an assistant-
commissioner in the Midlands to the Schools Inquiry Commission chaired by
Lord Taunton. His main responsibility, until 1866, was to inspect the endowed
schools of Warwickshire and Staffordshire and later Buckinghamshire,
Leicestershire, and Northamptonshire. The final report of the commission, with
Green’s contribution, was published in 1868. The Endowed Schools Act of
1869, however, nowhere lived up to Green’s vision for the Fichtean or Hegelian
reconstitution of society through national education (see essays in Green, 1888).
After his commission work, Green was elected as a teachers’ representative on the
governing body of King Edward’s School in Birmingham. Contrary to many
classical liberals, Green and the majority of British Idealists believed intensely in
making education universal and compulsory, through the state. Green argued
this latter point from the early 1870s and it was finally legislated on by the
Liberal government in 1880. Idealists such as Green argued that compulsion did
not entail any real encroachment on the liberties of parents. On the contrary, to
compel parents to educate their children removed an obstacle to the effective
growth of the capacity in the next generation to exercise their rights and
freedoms as good citizens. Insofar as compulsion was sensitive to the particular
ecclesiastical or other preferences of the parents, there was no interference with
the moral duty of the parent. Green argued for a systematic national approach to
education which would remove powers from the church and local school boards
and establish responsibilities at the level of county school boards, and ultimately
the state, for a national educational system. Green also deplored the elitism of
universities and their separation from local cities and communities. He
argued robustly for extending access to higher education to poorer students and
the working classes. With the support of Benjamin Jowett, Balliol Hall – an
annex to the main Oxford college – was provided for students with financial
difficulties. Green presided over the hall. Green was also a keen supporter
of the early University Extension Movement, which began in the 1870s, as well
as women’s university education. Green’s authoritative philosophical advocacy
had a powerful effect on a number of crucial public figures involved in the
structuring of British education in the early twentieth century, certainly up to the
1920s. Key civil servants such as Arthur Acland, R. B. Morant, M. T. Sadler, and
Hubert Llewellyn Smith, among others, were all deeply influenced by Green’s
arguments.
The most successful British Idealist exponent of education was R. B. Haldane.
His most conspicuous work lay in higher education policy (see Vincent, 2007).
His first foray was in the Universities in Scotland Bill and the University of
London Bill in the 1890s. Haldane, as a senior Liberal politician, became deeply
involved with Sidney Webb in the negotiations over the University of London
Act. This was to give the University both teaching and examining functions. He
was also closely engaged in the establishment of Birkbeck College (University of
London) in guiding it through to university status. He remained president
of Birkbeck College until his death in 1928. The passing of the University of
London Act was followed by a period of fruitful cooperative work with Sidney
Webb, and others, in setting up the London School of Economics and Political
Science. It is unlikely that it would have seen the light of day so soon without
Haldane’s detailed networking assistance (see Logan, 1960). He also became
obsessed – like many precursors in the nineteenth century – with the German
educational structures, particularly the Technische Hochshule system. This was
based upon his visits to one particularly famous institution in Germany in
Charlottenburg, and became a theme of many of his speeches. He regularly
campaigned on the need for a ‘London Charlottenburg for South Kensington’.
Although it did not come to fruition for a number of years, it eventually (again
with his direct assistance) was established as the Imperial College of Science and
Technology.
In the early 1900s, Haldane became deeply involved in the establishment of
civic universities across Britain. He engaged in direct advocacy before the Privy
Council in 1903 for the Royal Charters for Liverpool and Manchester. He
mediated between warring factions over a number of years in virtually all the
early key civic university debates of this period. Part of his authority and impact
was due to the fact that he chaired two key Royal Commissions, on University
and Higher Education development in London (1909–13) and in Wales (1916–
18). He was also a close friend of the deeply influential civil servant, R. B.
Morant, Permanent Secretary of the Board of Education. Apart from a wide
range of public speeches on this theme, a great deal of his influence was also
exercised subtly through behind the scenes manoeuvring, networking, and
sophisticated lobbying. As a result of his direct intervention, campaigning, and
advocacy, the civic Universities of Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol,
Nottingham, Southampton, and Sheffield were all established with their own
Charters – these were closely followed by the Welsh Universities and the
University of Reading. Haldane became, for a time, the first Vice Chancellor of
the new civic University of Bristol. After the First World War, he was again a
more restrained, but nonetheless influential, background figure behind the
1918 Fisher Education Act. Herbert Fisher himself was also a profound admirer
of the German system – as well as the work of T. H. Green. Haldane was also
directly involved in the creation of the British University Grants Committee
(UGC) which functioned until the 1980s – the initial idea for the UGC had been
248 Andrew Vincent
aired by a committee Haldane chaired in 1904. In sum, as one scholarly text
notes, Haldane’s achievement lay ‘in the foundations of our [the British] whole
system of education ... It was Haldane who, patiently over decades, created in
the public mind and among politicians a consciousness of the need for quality
and balance in education’ (Ashby & Anderson, 1974, p. 173).
Another example of such practice was the work of the British Idealist
philosopher Henry Jones (see Boucher & Vincent, 1993). Jones was one of the
key Commissioners on University Education in Wales, prior to the First World
War. He was instrumental in setting up the so-called ‘penny rate scheme’ for
Wales, that is, helping (in aim) to abolish university fees, such as to allow
ordinary working men and women to enter into university education. It was a
scheme subsequently adopted by many counties in England. University
education, however, had to be integrated (as Green and Haldane argued) into a
comprehensive national policy, making education at all levels free and available
universally for all. Jones was a passionate supporter of the federal principle in the
University of Wales, and when in Australia he campaigned for the establishment
of a new University in Brisbane. He was in harmony with the desire amongst
Australian Idealists, such as William Mitchell (1861–1962) in Adelaide and
Francis Anderson (1858–1941) in Sydney, to expand the educational system in a
similar manner to Britain. As with T. H. Green there was a general belief in the
capacity of education as the great social leveller in society, delivering equal oppor-
tunities, if not equal outcomes. That is, the role of education was part of the
more general ‘enabling role’ of the Idealist conception of the state. Jones, like
his mentor Edward Caird, as well as his friend Haldane, was also deeply involved
in extra-mural teaching as well as in the Workers’ Educational Association.
It is worth noting that virtually all the pre-1920 generation of British Idealists
(with the exception of F. H. Bradley) were eager to extend educational oppor-
tunities universally, supporting the University Extension Movement, ethical
societies, and later the Workers’ Educational Association. This educational belief
included a mix of both state and voluntary-based organisations (see Gordon &
White, 1979). Many of the Idealist writers, such as Haldane, also advocated the
raising of the school leaving age, the national development of secondary schools,
positive inducements for students to pass onto higher education or technical
institutions, and the extensive development of technical colleges. Many such
reforms did not come to fruition till later in the twentieth century. However
Haldane, like Green and others, viewed this whole process in terms of advancing
the cause of ethical citizenship.
The most controversial of the twentieth century Idealists is Giovanni Gentile.
The problem for many is that Gentile was Minister of Instruction in Mussolini’s
first government between 1922–23. He was not only, with Croce, one of the
foremost Italian philosophers at the time, but more significantly for posterity, he
was also a committed Fascist (assassinated at the closing stages of that regime).
However his ideas on education precede his involvement in Fascism, and relate
much more explicitly to his Idealist philosophy. In his official position he instituted
a broad-ranging reform of the Italian school system, which, in the words of one
recent commentator was ‘a reform that long remained, and in part still is, the foun-
dation of the Italian school system’ (Turi, 1998, p. 914). Even Croce remarked,
we owe it to Gentile that Italian pedagogy has attained in the present day a
simplicity and a depth of concepts unknown elsewhere. ... And this ... is due
pre-eminently to the work of Gentile. His authority therefore is powerfully
felt in schools of all grades.
(Croce, 1923, p. ix)
Gentile’s reputation was, though, clearly blighted by Fascism, despite the fact
that the core of his curriculum reforms survived into the late twentieth century.
British Idealism and education

For British Idealism it was clear that education was not isolated from the rest of
social policy. The purpose of both social existence and education in general was
to enable human capacities and provide opportunities for individual self-
realisation. In this sense, education permeated all aspects of society, and no
feature of it (from family to state) could absolve itself of the responsibility to
remove the obstacles to the equal cultivation of ethical citizenship.
The British Idealists’ idea of education was viewed as an intrinsic part of the
philosophical enterprise, linked with a more general understanding of human
nature and its potential for development. It was an egalitarian principle oriented
to equality of opportunity for all citizens, aiming to establish the groundwork for
ethical citizenship. The state had a crucial role to play here. Idealism was
impatient of individualistic liberal theories which tried to play down to the role
of the state in human affairs. Rather, it was the positive duty of the state to estab-
lish a national education system, from primary to university level, which, at many
points, would be legally compulsory. Although offering little immediate advice
on the technicalities of day-to-day teaching, it offered an overarching ethical
vision of education.
There were clearly, as indicated, a variety of linked senses of education at work.
First, it was premised on a collection of sciences which require communication
and instruction in schools and universities. Knowledge was embodied abstractly
in all the various disciplines, with the one proviso that in the final analysis all the
sciences found their unity and were resolved in a philosophical position. There
was, in other words, a systematic connection between all the various sciences or
disciplines, which formed a coherent systematic unity of mind. More substan-
tively, Idealists also believed that the whole process of formal education itself was
intrinsically philosophic, concerned with the act of thinking and thus the life of
mind. This philosophic process was linked to the overall ethical development of
the individual person; more significantly it was an essential prerequisite for the
advance of genuine citizenship of a modern state.
Overall, education was seen to facilitate the absorption of deep organising
ethical ideas, enabling individuals not only to take more effective control of their
250 Andrew Vincent
own lives, but also to find common ground with their fellow citizens. The
assimilation of civilising capacious ideas meant that individuals could also be
freed ‘from the depressing effect of circumstance for which they were not respon-
sible’ (Haldane, 1929, p. 301). For Haldane, higher education in particular, in
major civic centres, was viewed as generating a reflective unity of ideas within
major cities (see Haldane, 1929, p. 140). This is one intellectual – oft-forgotten –
root to the very idea of the ‘civic university’. Universities would not just be
centres of research and training, but also rational opinion-formers in local
communities, bringing the grand formative, if often implicit, ideas into everyday
civic practice. As Haldane argued, in an address to students, ‘nothing is so expan-
sive as the train of thought suggested by an idea that is really great’, in effect, it
‘transforms the whole outlook’. All significant higher level teaching should be
guiding individuals to this ‘large outlook’ (Haldane, 1910, pp. 13–14). He thus
described universities, in this context, as the brain and intelligence of the educa-
tional system, permeating ideas to all other educational institutions.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Idealism had taken deep root in British
society because it fulfilled a number of social purposes. The consequences of
rapid industrialisation and the expansion of world trade caused immense social
and personal dislocation and degradation for certain sectors of society. Idealism
was not merely a philosophical movement, but primarily a reforming force. It
counterbalanced the individualism of classical liberalism, offering a philosophy
that emphasised social cohesiveness, social justice, and equality of opportunity. It
was a philosophy that emphasised social responsibility through the greatest of all
social levellers, access to education for all.
Further it was an intensely moralistic philosophy. It condemned everything
which impeded self-realisation, that is, the realisation of what is potential in oneself
as a moral and reasonable being. The role of the state in all this was to ensure that
the obstacles to self-realisation were removed. While most were committed liber-
als, Idealists also advocated the ‘right’ kind of socialism, which eschewed class
antagonism and emphasised social responsibility. The criterion of the extension of
state activity always had to be the enabling of citizens to attain greater freedom.
Compulsory education did not diminish freedom of choice but actually enhanced
the capacity of individuals to develop their talents. British Idealism emphasised
both the responsibilities of individuals to seize the opportunities to make them-
selves more virtuous, and of the owners of private industry to act responsibly by
transforming their workshops from schools of vice into schools of virtue.
Idealism, in general, was a philosophy that conveyed optimism about human
capabilities. It acted as a profound interrogation, critique, and metaphysical coun-
terbalance to the doctrines such as market-based liberalism and utilitarianism. It
offered a philosophy that gave an emphasis to social cohesiveness and to the
closeness of the relation between individual and collective responsibility. Its high-
lighting particularly of the importance of active social citizenship subsequently
became an important theme in early twentieth-century welfare theory. In this
sense, Idealism was a ‘working educational philosophy’ which for a significant
moment in British cultural history set the course of moral and political thinking
and delivered a resounding, if nonetheless temporary, refutation of the individu-
alistic ethos.
References
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problem (London, Macmillan).
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Henry Jones (New York, St Martin’s Press).
Boucher, D., Vincent, A. (2011) British idealism: a guide for the perplexed (London &
New York, Continuum Press).
Bradley, F. H. (1935) Collected essays vol. 1 (Oxford, Clarendon Press).
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G. H. Turnbull) (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press).
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education, Educational Theory, 32, 131–141.
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philosophical sciences (trans. W. Wallace) (Oxford, Clarendon Press).
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Haldane in theory and practice, Journal of the History of Ideas, 68, 157–179.
17 ‘Affection in Education’
Edward Carpenter, John
Addington Symonds, and
the politics of Greek love
Josephine Crawley Quinn and
Christopher Brooke
In an essay on ‘Affection in Education’ published in the 1899 volume of the

International Journal of Ethics, Edward Carpenter defended the utility for
personal development of strong same-sex attachments that might ‘sometimes
take quite intense and romantic forms’, either between older boys and younger
boys in the same school, or between teachers and their pupils. Since ‘it is begin-
ning to be seen that the affections have an immense deal to say in the building
up of the brain and the body’, he declared, the ‘evolution and organization’ of
the affections was ‘probably going to become an important part of school
management’ (Carpenter, 1899, pp. 482–483). Such relationships between
schoolboys, Carpenter argued, were beneficial on both sides. ‘The younger boy
looks on the other as a hero’, ‘thrills with pleasure at his words of praise or kind-
ness’, and ‘contracts habits’ from him, while the ‘elder one, touched, becomes
protector and helper; the unselfish side of his nature is drawn out, and he devel-
ops a real affection and tenderness towards the younger’. Similarly affectionate
relationships between pupils and their teachers could also be valuable for the
former. Carpenter described the case of ‘rather a wild, “naughty” boy’ of eleven
or twelve who had ‘given his parents (working-class folk) a good deal of trouble’,
but who came to feel ‘the strongest affection’ for his teacher at ‘some sort of
night-school or evening class’, with ‘most favorable’ results for his development
(p. 484). The ‘unformed mind’, Carpenter remarked, ‘requires an ideal of itself,
as it were, to which it can cling or towards which it can grow’; and whether
things turned out well ‘depend immensely on the character of the elder one, on
the self-restraint and tenderness of which he is capable, and on the ideal of life
which he has in his mind’ (p. 485).
Having sketched the kinds of relationship he was keen to champion, Carpenter
then turned his attention to the actually-existing public schools (in the British
sense of that term) of his time. ‘So far from friendship being an institution whose
value is recognized and understood’, he wrote, ‘it is at best hardly acknowl-
edged, and is often actually discountenanced and misunderstood’. The ‘disease
of premature sexuality seems to have got possession of our centres of education’,
such that ‘wretched practices and habits abound’ that ‘cloud and degrade the
boys’ conception of what true love or friendship may be’ (p. 486). He described
‘Affection in Education’ 253
one ‘well-known school’ as ‘a stew of uncleanness’: ‘There was plenty of
incontinence, not much cruelty, no end of dirty conversation, and a great deal of
genuine affection, even to heroism, shown among the boys in their relations with
one another’. Yet ‘all these things were treated by masters and boys alike as more
or less unholy’, and a ‘kiss was by comparison as unclean as the act of fellatio,
and no one had any gauge or principle whatever on which to guide the
cravings of boyhood’ (pp. 486–487). In such an atmosphere, the ‘big boys in
such places become either coarse and licentious or hard and self-righteous’ the
‘small boys’ become the ‘odious little wretches, the favorites, the petted
boys, and the “spoons” of the school’, and with the passage of time, the
‘public opinion of the school ceases to believe in the possibility of a healthy
friendship; the masters begin to presume (and not without reason) that all
affection means sensual practices, and end by doing their best to discourage it’
(p. 487).
In the closing pages, Carpenter broached the question of what might be done
about such a state of affairs. ‘Masters wage war against incontinence, and are
right to do so’, for to ‘prolong the period of continence in a boy’s life is to
prolong the period of growth’. Their methods, however – above all ‘grim silence
and fury’ – were counter-productive (pp. 490, 487). There was some place for
‘rudimentary teaching on sex’ and ‘lessons of anatomy and physiology’ in the
schools, but the main vehicle for moral improvement would have to be the culti-
vation of ‘very close and tender confidences between the elder and the younger’.
The ‘need of attachment’ must ‘be met by full recognition of it, and the granting
of it expression within all reasonable limits; by the dissemination of a good ideal
of friendship and the enlistment of it on the side of manliness and temperance’.
The schools, he hoped, ‘will in time recognize comradeship as a regular
institution – considerably more important, say, than “fagging” – an institution
having its definite place in the school life’, such that it might ‘inspire its members
with the two qualities of heroism and tenderness, which together form the basis
of all great character’ (pp. 491–492). When the essay was republished in 1908
in his collection of essays called The intermediate sex, Carpenter here added the
thought that the public schools were too large to be suitably reformed, and were
in any case ‘hampered by powerful traditions which naturally make them
conservative’. Rather, he looked to smaller schools, ‘say of from 50 to 100 boys’,
in which the ‘personal influence of the headmaster will be a real force reaching
each boy’ (Carpenter, 1908a, pp. 95–96). In closing, he noted that although his
‘remarks in this paper have chiefly had reference to boys’ schools’, they neverthe-
less broadly applied to girls’ schools as well, ‘where much the same troubles
prevail’, the difference being that friendships ‘instead of being repressed are
rather encouraged by public opinion’, and the problem being that ‘they are for
the most part friendships of a weak and sentimental turn, and not very healthy
either in themselves or in the habits they lead to’. ‘Possibly’, Carpenter
concluded, ‘the co-education of boys and girls may be of use in making boys less
ashamed of their feelings, and girls more healthy in the expression of them’
(Carpenter, 1899, p. 493).
254 Josephine Crawley Quinn and Christopher Brooke
This would all appear to place Carpenter among the group of adherents to
what we might call ‘Socratic pederasty’, a model which is now well established in
the discourse of same-sex love in nineteenth-century England. In her 1994 book
Hellenism and homosexuality, for example, Linda Dowling – whose analytic
framework we employ throughout this paper, even as we call into question some
of her particular judgements and interpretations – described the role played by
Greek ideals of male friendship and affection in the Oxford University reform
movement of the 1850s and 1860s, establishing ‘the grounds on which, after its
shorter-term construction as a nineteenth-century sexual pathology (Krafft-
Ebing, Havelock Ellis), “homosexuality” would subsequently emerge as the
locus of sexual identity for which, today, such late-Victorian figures as Walter
Pater and Oscar Wilde are so often claimed as symbolic precursors’. Victorian
liberals saw Britain as in some senses historically equivalent to Classical Athens –
though they stressed its ideas of liberty and individualism rather than its love of
democracy. And, like Athenian democracy, Athenian pederasty – in the sense of
a widespread culture of sexual relationships between older and younger men –
was usually elided in the Victorian version. But, according to Dowling, Victorian
Hellenism turned out to be a kind of Trojan horse. In the wake of the work of
Benjamin Jowett and the other university reformers – who sought to ‘reintegrate
Oxford into the national life’, pursuing a vision of a more open university, less
socially and religiously exclusive, with higher intellectual standards among both
students and college fellows – ‘Pater and Wilde and the Uranian poets could not
be denied the means of developing out of this same Hellenism a homosexual
counterdiscourse able to justify male love in ideal or transcendental terms’
(Dowling, 1994, pp. xiii, 62–65).
The aesthetic conception of same-sex affection these writers disseminated, as
Dowling repeatedly observes, was based on Plato’s ‘Socratic eros’, the idea
proposed by Socrates – see especially Symposium 209a (Plato, 1999, p. 46) – that
men who love youths procreate not bodies but ideas, as the love of beauty and
virtue in an individual leads to the love of all beautiful and virtuous people and
things, and to an appreciation of the philosophical idea of the beautiful and the
good. This eros, for Socrates, originates in sexual desire but completely
transcends it, and the Victorian version of this position – at least the public
version – was summed up most famously by Oscar Wilde at his trial in 1895.
When asked what Lord Alfred Douglas had meant in his poem ‘Two Loves’ by
the phrase, ‘The Love that dare not speak its name’ (Douglas, 1894), in what
was a precarious legal situation for Wilde in which he faced strong incentives to
deny any sexual dimension to his own same-sex affections, he replied in these
stirring terms:
‘The Love that dare not speak its name’ in this country is such a great affection
of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such
as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the
sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection
that is as pure as it is perfect ... It is in this century misunderstood, so much
misunderstood that it may be described as the ‘Love that dare not speak its
name’, and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is
fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it.
It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man,
when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope
and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not un-
derstand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.
(Wilde, 1895)
Set against this backdrop, it could appear straightforward to classify

Carpenter’s ‘Affection in Education’ as a prime example of an essay defending
this kind of Hellenism and applying its insights to the specific question of school
reform. And, indeed, the relevant chronology might seem to support such a
reading. Although ‘Affection in Education’ was first published in 1899, it was
written a few years earlier (Rowbotham, 2009, p. 200), thus placing it squarely
in the company of the various essays on love and gender relations that
Carpenter had published in 1896 as Love’s coming of age (Carpenter, 1896). He
had also originally intended to include in that collection an additional
essay on Homogenic love, and its place in a free society, also written around the
same time as the others, but in the end this was not included precisely owing
to the public scandal surrounding the Wilde trial (Rowbotham, 2009,
pp. 194–195). Instead, Homogenic love was privately circulated in pamphlet
form and, over a decade later, included in an updated and somewhat censored
version in another collection of essays, The intermediate sex (Carpenter,
1894, 1908b).
The argument we seek to develop in this essay, however, is that to read
Carpenter chiefly as an exponent of Dowling’s ‘counterdiscourse’ within Oxford
Hellenism and as some kind of ally of Wilde would be a simplification that would
threaten a misunderstanding. Wilde’s ‘Love that dare not speak its name’ was
indeed a classic statement of the ideals of this Hellenism, articulating an
aristocratic, individualist, philosophical, idealist, and spiritual model of same-sex
love, one that rested on a Platonic ideal of chaste affection between an older and
a younger man with the goal of intellectual development. But, for its critics –
such as John Addington Symonds and, as we will contend, also Edward
Carpenter – this was a censored version of Socrates’ eros. It was not as censored
perhaps as Jowett’s, which saw marriage between a man and a woman as an
appropriate modern analogy (Dowling, 1994, p. 74), but it was still one which
did not confront the more explicitly sexual aspects of Platonic love, let alone the
historical ones of Greek love. It was also a deeply elitist construction of erotic
practice. This new elite concerned was very visible. In 1881 Gilbert and Sullivan’s
operetta Patience caricatured its distinctive lifestyle, views and sexuality, includ-
ing attachments a la Plato, as did W. H. Mallock’s 1877 satire on Oxford life,
The new republic (Gilbert, 1881; Mallock, 1882) – and these interventions from
more traditional elitists did not prevent Oxford undergraduates adopting the
aesthetic lifestyle with gusto, taking Mallock as their primer (Dowling, 1994,
pp. 111–112). But if it is true, as Dowling says, that Greek studies operated as a
‘homosexual code’ among late Victorian aesthetic liberals (p. xiii), we suggest
that it is also true that Greek love operated as an aristocratic code, as one way of
clinging on to cultural status and difference in a rapidly homogenising and
democratising time. What Carpenter called ‘homogenic love’, by contrast, was
principally inspired by John Addington Symonds’ sharp reaction against the
Oxford aesthetes, offering a more martial, democratic, physical, and communi-
tarian model of ‘comrade-love’ that would find expression in a sexual relation-
ship between equals and which aimed – at least in Carpenter’s version – at social
and political improvement. So, in what follows, we will consider first Symonds,
then Carpenter’s Homogenic love, and then we will turn our attention back to
‘Affection in Education’ once again towards the end.
John Addington Symonds was born in October 1840 in Bristol, the son of a
well-connected doctor, and educated unhappily at Harrow and then at Balliol
College, Oxford. As Phyllis Grosskurth says in her biography, he has usually been
remembered ‘as a late nineteenth-century aesthete, a minor Pater perhaps’
(Grosskurth, 1964, p. ix). He was a man of many letters, known for his bad
poetry and for his good essays. In 1873 he published his Studies of the Greek poets,
which included the first serious published discussion in English of homosexuality
either Greek or modern. Symonds’ chapter led to his enforced withdrawal
from the election for the Oxford Poetry Professorship of 1877, and Symonds
himself left England, to live principally thereafter in Switzerland and Venice.
Alongside his project on the Greek poets he had written a more extensive essay
on Greek homosexuality called ‘A Problem in Greek Ethics’, which he eventually
published anonymously in ten copies for private circulation in 1883 (Symonds,
1901, Preface). This work later formed the basis for a section of the work on
Sexual inversion that he co-wrote with Havelock Ellis, and which was published
after his death. In the meantime, in 1891, he published a second essay on homo-
sexuality, ‘A Problem in Modern Ethics’, this time summarising and criticising
more recent explanations and defences. Finally, in 1892, he published an essay on
‘The Dantesque and Platonic Ideals of Love’, a sceptical examination of repre-
sentations of chaste and idealistic love in Greek philosophy and Italian chivalry.
Dowling has claimed him wholeheartedly for her Oxford Hellenist counter-
discourse:
This is precisely the context in which such writers as Symonds and Pater
would come to assert, in all seriousness, that the Socratic eros was essential
to the survival of liberal England. For this erotic bond represented to them
a pure form of intellectual procreancy and regeneration, the two men insist-
ing on the truth and genuine Victorian relevance of Plato’s famous teaching
in Symposium 209 that at the highest level of masculine love, men who love
men are procreating ideas – generating the creative arts, philosophy, ‘wisdom
and all her sister virtues,’ especially that kind of wisdom ‘which governs the
ordering of society’.
(Dowling, 1994, p. 80)
But in making this claim she passes over his later, more nuanced and contrarian
work which outlined his disillusion with the ideal of Platonic affection in favour
of his earlier idealistic work, including even his undergraduate essays. She quotes
his famous recollection in his memoirs that he ‘stumbled upon’ the Phaedrus and
the Symposium in his final year at Harrow and therein ‘discovered the true liber
amoris at last, the revelation I had been waiting for ... It was just as though the
voice of my own soul spoke to me through Plato, as though in some antenatal
experience I had lived the life of [a] philosophical Greek lover’ (Grosskurth,
1984, p. 99; Dowling, 1994, p. 67). She notes that when he arrived in Oxford
John Conington, the Corpus Professor of Latin, gave him William Johnson’s
1858 collection of poetry Ionica, which contained, as she puts it, an ‘Arcadian
world of friendship and chaste affection’ and which, as Symonds recalled, ‘went
straight to my heart and inflamed my imagination’ (Dowling, 1994, pp. 86–87,
quoting Grosskurth, 1984, p. 109). This does indeed place him, as an under-
graduate, right at the heart of Oxford aestheticism and its love of Socratic lovers.
But, like most undergraduates, his views changed.
As far as the Greeks were concerned, Symonds moved far beyond the views of
Pater. He took a much broader and more historicised view of Greek sexuality
than their depiction of a pederastic ‘Socratic eros’. Instead of encouraging iden-
tification with the Greeks, or advocating the straightforward recreation of Greek
culture in Victorian England, he was well aware of the cultural specificity of
Greek love. In ‘A Problem in Greek Ethics’, Symonds explained that paiderastia
was unknown to Homer (Symonds, 1901, p. 28), but appeared among the
Greeks after the heroic age in two forms. In the first, ‘chivalrous and martial
form’ – and here Symonds’ description of institutionalised sexual relationships
between males in Dorian states, such as Sparta, drew substantially on Karl
Müller’s groundbreaking German study of the Dorians, which had been trans-
lated into English in 1830 but then politely ignored – an older ‘Inspirer’ handed
down heroic traditions to a younger ‘Hearer’, with whom his bond was essen-
tially educational and military rather than sensual or lustful, although it was
nonetheless physical – everything except ‘outrage’ (stuprum) was allowed
(Müller, 1830, vol. 2, pp. 306–313; Symonds, 1901, pp. 30, 13–14; Dowling,
1994, p. 79). There was then also a sensual and lustful form of ‘boy-love’ which
first appeared in Crete – an import perhaps from oriental Phoenicia, but if so,
one that quickly acquired Hellenic characteristics, received religious sanction,
and spread far and wide (Symonds, 1901, pp. 30, 17–20, 60, 5). Just as Achilles
and Patroclus had become – after Homer – the ideal-typical heroic lovers,
Ganymede became the focal point for this kind of boy-love (p. 6).
These two forms of masculine passion – the noble and the base, the spiritual
and the sensual – were the antecedents of ‘that mixed form of paiderastia upon
which the Greeks prided themselves’ (p. 8), which drew its ‘military and enthu-
siastic elements’ from the Dorian immigration into Greece, while its ‘refinements
of sensuality and sanctified impurity are referable to contact with Phoenician
civilization’, both aspects having been organised and moulded by the Hellenic
spirit (p. 18). This state of affairs arose, apparently, because ‘gymnastic exercises
tended to encourage and confirm the habit of paiderastia’ (pp. 40, 61–62) and
the martial mentality made the production of future soldiers the major reason for
marriage (pp. 62–63). Nonetheless, the majority of Greek men were still more
‘susceptible’ to women; boy-love ‘distinguished warriors, gymnasts, poets, and
philosophers from the common multitude’ (p. 67; see also Dowling, 1994,
pp. 29–31). One thing on which Symonds agreed with the other Oxford
aesthetes was that Greek love was pederastic, involving relationships between
older and younger men. Indeed, he pinpointed male adolescence as the crucial
and most attractive stage of life for the Greeks: ‘In the bloom of adolescence the
elements of feminine grace, suggested rather than expressed, are combined with
virility to produce a perfection which is lacking to the mature and adult excel-
lence of either sex’ (Symonds, 1901, pp. 68–69). Unlike the other Hellenists,
however, he contended that it was also physical, and he even contended that the
Dorian martial love of Achilles and Patroclus ‘by no means excluded the ordinary
sexual feelings’ (p. 3). Symonds, in short, was attempting to understand the
Greeks as they were historically, rather than as Plato portrayed them.
Not only did Symonds look to history rather than philosophy for his
Hellenism, he also came explicitly to reject the philosophical ideal of the Socratic
eros (Symonds, 1901, p. 48). He described it as an attempt by Socrates ‘to
reform and to ennoble paiderastia’ (Symonds, 1901, p. 50) by modifying the
practical educational function of the Dorian martial model into a philosophical
one, in which passionate friends sought ‘to advance in knowledge, self-restraint,
and intellectual illumination’ (p. 51; also Symonds, 1893, p. 69). But he decided
that Socrates failed, and that this transcendental conception, like that of chivalric
love, veiled a physical reality that, in the essay on the ‘Dantesque and Platonic
Ideals of Love’, he said included ‘social evils of the gravest kind’ (p. 78).
Furthermore, the ‘philosophical ideal of paiderastia ... met with little but
contempt ... Like his republic, his love existed only in heaven’ (Symonds, 1901,
p. 55) ‘There is’, he remarked in both of his treatments of this subject, ‘a deeply
rooted mysticism, an impenetrable Soofyism, in the Socratic doctrine of Erôs’
(Symonds, 1893, p. 71; 1901, p. 52).
Symonds’ stand against the Socratic eros was not only based on its implausibil-
ity and mysticism, but also on its political undesirability. On his account, this
version of Greek love could not ‘have anything to do with those connections
profitable to the State and useful to society, which involve the procreation and
rearing of children, domestic cares, and the commonplace of daily duties’
(Symonds, 1893, p. 76). The more historically realistic version of Greek love,
however, could provide such a positive social example: the Greeks gave us the
example ‘alone in history ... of a great and highly-developed race not only toler-
ating homosexual passions, but deeming them of spiritual value, and attempting
to utilise them for the benefit of society’ (Symonds, 1901, p. 1). In the laws and
customs governing ‘Dorian love’, ‘we discern the intention of promoting a
martial spirit in the population, securing a manly education for the young, and
binding the male members of the nation together by bonds of mutual affection’
(Symonds, 1893, p. 63). This had practical consequences: ‘Nearly every city had
some tale to tell of emancipation from tyranny, of prudent legislation, or of
heroic achievements in war, inspired by the erotic enthusiasm’ (p. 64). As
Dowling has noted, the resulting picture was, among other things, a stand
against a civic republican intellectual tradition which identified the health of the
state with virtue, virility and a warrior ideal, and had long identified love between
men with effeminacy and weakness (Dowling, 1994, p. xv). Symonds turned the
language of corruption and effeminacy around. For him, Greek love was ‘the
very fountain of civic health’ rather than a source of corruption and decay
(Symonds, 1893, p. 64; see also Symonds, 1901, pp. 3, 8, 51), just as, he wrote
in ‘A Problem in Modern Ethics’, the ‘fighting peoples of the world’, from the
Turks to the Tartars, ‘have been distinguished by the frequency among them of
what popular prejudice regards as an effeminate vice’ (Symonds, 1896, p. 109).
For Symonds, then, there was a political and social point to Greek love, at least
in its best and most martial incarnation. He did not, however, pursue this theme
further in his account of the problem in modern ethics. Rather, this late work
presented suggestions for legal reform, as well as a sympathetic account of the
views of the mid-nineteenth century German lawyer and writer Karl-Heinrich
Ulrichs for English readers (Weeks, 1990, p. 54). Ulrichs took the view that
modern ‘Urnings’ – he took the word from Plato’s distinction between Aphrodite,
daughter of Dione, the goddess of earthly love, and Aphrodite Urania, the
goddess of heavenly love, who had no mother – were the result of an anomalous
development of the embryo in the womb, where although the genitals develop
male or female characteristics, a matching differentiation in the part of the brain
determining sex drives fails to take place. The result was an anima muliebris virile
corpore inclusa – a harmless variation rather than a defect (Weeks, 1990, p. 27).
Debate over the innate and acquired versions of ‘inversion’ had been raging
on the Continent for some time, and although Ulrichs’ notion of a third or
intermediate sex was influential, it had played no real part in the writings of the
aesthetes, for whom the love of boys and young men seems to have been under-
stood as a positive choice, and as a behaviour rather than an ingrained preference.
For Symonds, as for Ulrichs, a sexual preference for other males was, by contrast,
usually innate and inconvertible (Symonds, 1896, pp. 43ff; also p. 11; cf. p. 93;
Weeks, 1990, p. 26) – though Symonds also admitted other possible factors,
such as forced abstinence from females or ‘wantonness and curious seeking after
novel pleasure’ (p. 126), and he suggested that there have been historical epochs
when the habit had become institutionalised and endemic in whole nations –
such as that of the Dorian Greeks (pp. 63, 109). And just as Symonds had
insisted, against the dominant Oxford tradition, on the physicality of Greek love,
so he did later of modern love: ‘human nature being what it is, we cannot expect
to eliminate all sexual alloy from emotions raised to a high pitch of passionate
intensity’ (p. 119). On the other hand, he rejected pederasty as a feature of
modern love between men, noting with approval Krafft-Ebing’s opinion that as
well as not being predisposed to sodomy, Urnings ‘inasmuch as they always
prefer adults, they are in no sense specially dangerous to boys’, although there
were some ‘old debauchees or half-idiotic individuals, who are in the habit of
misusing boys’ (p. 110, paraphrasing Krafft-Ebing, 1889, p. 108; cf. Symonds,
1896, p. 86–7).
In summary, then, it appears to us that in his later writings at least, Symonds
was doing something quite different from the other exponents of aesthetic
Hellenism at Oxford with both Greek and modern love between men. For him,
Greek love was physical and practical in a social and political sense, rather than
being idealist and philosophical, while modern ‘inversion’ was innate, also
physical, but not pederastic. This stance was not only different from that of the
Oxford aesthetes; it was intellectually and politically opposed.
John Addington Symonds died in 1893, but from 1894 his contrarian stance
was developed by his friend and intellectual interlocutor Edward Carpenter.
Carpenter was born in 1844 into an upper middle-class Brighton family,
educated at Brighton College and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, took holy orders,
and became a fellow of Trinity Hall in 1868. He left the church in 1873 and
Cambridge the following year, moving to the North of England as a lecturer in
the Cambridge University extension scheme, and ending up from 1877 in
Sheffield. He became increasingly involved in radical movements, and was
devoted to rural life with his longtime companion George Merrill as a vegetarian,
market gardener, and sandal-maker. Carpenter is principally remembered for his
political writings, which he published in various collections, including Civilization,
its cause and cure, and for an epic poem in the tradition of Walt Whitman called
Towards democracy.
Homosexuality was, however, another constant theme in his work from 1894,
when a lecture on what Carpenter called ‘Homogenic Love’ – originally
intended, as noted above, to become an essay in the collection Love’s coming of
age – was instead turned into a pamphlet printed for private circulation. It is clear
from Homogenic love that Carpenter’s understanding of issues surrounding same-
sex love was in many ways consistent with that of Symonds before him. Modern
‘comradely love’ was not associated with ‘any distinct disease of body or mind’
(Carpenter, 1894, p. 20) and was certainly ‘capable of a healthy and sane expres-
sion’ (p. 31); it occurred universally (p. 5); it had a physical side – though this
was not as important as the emotional one (pp. 14, 16); and, like the Dorian
same-sex relationships from antiquity, it avoided ‘corruption and effeminacy’
(p. 41). Like Symonds, Carpenter was interested in legal changes as well as social
ones, protesting in particular against the Labouchère Amendment – or Section
11 of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act – which created the somewhat
vaguely-specified criminal offence of ‘gross indecency’, for which Wilde was later
to be convicted (p. 49). In some areas Carpenter went further than Symonds had
before him. When it came to pederasty, for example, he not only rejected its
appropriateness for the modern world, but also seemed to downplay its
significance among the ancients as well. One of the reasons he had for rejecting
pederastic models was that he sought to present male love as ‘unswerving devo-
tion and life-long union’ (p. 4). Another was that Carpenter was far more inter-
ested in transgressing the boundaries of social class than those of age. Homogenic
love was a ‘passionate and lasting compulsion [that] may draw members
of the different classes together’ (p. 47) – a view that Symonds had expressed in
correspondence with Carpenter, but not one that he ever publicly declared
(Schueller & Peters, 1967–9, letter #2079, 21 January 1893, vol. 3, p. 808; also
Kaplan, 2005, pp. 16–17).
Then there was the nature question. Carpenter agreed with Symonds that the
scientific study on the Continent of the previous three decades had established
‘that sexual inversion – that is the leaning of sexual desire to one of the same
sex – is in a vast number of cases quite instinctive and congenital, mentally and
physically, and therefore twined in the very roots of individual life and practically
ineradicable’ (Carpenter, 1894, p. 18). But he added that in born inverts, ‘the
person concerned has difficulty in imagining himself affected otherwise than he
is; and to him at least the homogenic love appears healthy and natural, and
indeed necessary to the concretion of his individuality’ (p. 18). This last phrase
suggests that sexual inclination was for Carpenter a constitutive part of personal
identity, something that Symonds never quite said, and something which would
have been meaningless to Dowling’s transcendental Oxford Hellenists, for whom
the act or the relationship was the thing, not the permanent inclination. It may
even have been objectionable to Wilde, too, if we accept Jonathan Dollimore’s
argument that Wilde deliberately portrayed the subject as dispersed, disruptive,
and decentered, as part of a reaction against the repressive ordering of sexuality
and the bourgeois ideology of the unified subject (Dollimore, 1987, pp. 56–61).
Carpenter hardly merits a mention in Dowling’s book, perhaps because he was
a Cambridge man, or perhaps because his views did not fit comfortably into her
version of homosexual counterdiscourse. The only attention he does receive, in
a footnote, is somewhat misleading. ‘Matriculating at Cambridge’, Dowling
writes, ‘Carpenter developed into a homosexual apologist along the earnest,
enthusiastic and activist lines characteristic of that university, although he was no
less dependent on the ideal of the Socratic eros so central to the Oxford writers
treated here’ (Dowling, 1994, p. 79 n. 5). Dowling supports her point by quoting
a passage from Homogenic love, that ‘just as the ordinary sex-love has a special
function in the propagation of the race, so the other love should have its special
function in social and heroic work, and in the generation – not of bodily
children – but of those children of the mind, the philosophical conceptions and
ideals which transform our lives and those of society’ (Carpenter, 1894,
pp. 42–43). But her interpretation of this passage ignores Carpenter’s first claim
here, that the ‘other’ sex-love should have a special function ‘in social and heroic
work’, and over-emphasises the transcendentalism of the second part, that this
other love will generate children of the mind rather than the body. Carpenter was
not propounding an intellectual individualist creed, but rather emphasising the
general social benefits of homosexuality. Although the concept of the ‘generation
of ideas’ as opposed to bodies is taken (perhaps indirectly) from Socrates’ speech
in the Symposium about the generation of the beautiful and good through peder-
astic love, Carpenter’s version of this concept was much more political and active
than transcendental and intellectual. The resemblance to the Hellenists’ ideal of
boy-love is purely at the level of vocabulary; Carpenter’s heart was elsewhere.
And this social and political interpretation of this passage is congruent with the
rest of his writing on homosexuality.
Like Symonds, Carpenter listed examples of Greek love in the service of the
state (p. 5; Symonds, 1901, p. 11–12), but his views of such service in the
modern world were more radical than those of Symonds, and more focused than
Walt Whitman’s romantic vision of democratic comradeship (Weeks, 1990,
p. 49).1 He explained that homogenic love was essential for ‘the State’, since
those involved in male–female relationships could not neglect the home to
perform other social duties, neither could a single person, who lacked the happi-
ness of an affectionate tie.
So it is difficult to believe that anything except that kind of comrade-union

which satisfies and invigorates the two lovers and yet leaves them free from
the responsibilities and impedimenta of family life can supply the force and
liberate the energies required for social and mental activities of the most
necessary kind.
(Carpenter, 1894, p. 44)
His illustration was Greek: if ‘the love of Harmodius had been for a wife and
children at home, he would probably not have cared, and it would hardly have
been his business, to slay the tyrant’ (p. 44). In this the Greeks were a much
better example than the Romans, ‘whose materialistic spirit could only with
difficulty seize the finer inspiration of the homogenic love, and which in such
writers as Catullus and Martial could only for the most part give expression to
its grosser side’ (p. 8).
This paper is chiefly concerned with Carpenter’s essays from the 1890s, but
this theme – the social benefits of homosexuality – was one that he continued to
expound over the course of his writing career, and a later work from 1914,
Intermediate types among primitive folk – a fascinating and extremely odd study
of the origins of homosexuality among early humans and its subsequent practice
among the Greeks and the Japanese – dated them all the way back to pre-history.
There he suggested that ‘intermediate types’ were responsible for the evolution
of the human race out of their caves: for in a world of male hunters and female
gatherers or homemakers there was no impetus towards social development, but
equally also no obvious social function for those who did not fit comfortably into
the categories of male and female. These types had to find new activities
and roles for themselves, and they did so as warriors, sages and priests, artists and
potters, and so on – in the process inventing rational thought, religion, art, and
so on (Carpenter, 1914, esp. pp. 10–12). In the modern world, intermediates
could usefully adopt similarly socially useful work such as teaching, and could act
as communicators and reconcilers between men and women (Weeks, 1990,
p. 75). Indeed, Carpenter inverted the case that Symonds had made against the
Socratic eros: where Symonds had argued that that version of Greek love was not
useful to society because it did not involve procreation and domestic functions,
Carpenter made the lack of procreation and domesticity a social virtue in his own
theorisation of homogenic love. Homosexual relationships held out the promise
of new forms of solidarity, which Carpenter explicitly contrasted with the
connections that had to be maintained between marriage, materialism, and
commerce (Carpenter, 1894, p. 45).
Let us return, at last, to ‘Affection in Education’. It is clear that some of the
themes of Dowling’s transcendental or aesthetic Oxford Hellenism are on display
in this essay, and that we are closer to the world of what we might call Socratic
pederasty here than in, for example, Homogenic love. The relationships Carpenter
advocates are not between equals in terms of age, there is an explicitly
pedagogical or developmental aspect to them, and some of the language is
redolent of the transcendentalism of the earlier Hellenists: ‘I believe affection,
attachment ... springs up normally in the youthful mind’, Carpenter wrote, ‘in a
quite diffused, ideal, emotional form – a kind of longing and amazement as at
something divine – with no definite thought or distinct consciousness of sex in
it’ (Carpenter, 1899, p. 488). Plato was mentioned briefly twice in the essay,
furthermore: once in one of the letters Carpenter quoted, where his correspond-
ent (‘an elderly man who has had large experience as a teacher’) noted that ‘Plato
fully understood’ the importance of affection, and ‘aimed at giving what to his
countrymen was more or less sensual, a noble and exalted direction’ (p. 485);
and again in a note that referred to an episode at the end of Plato’s dialogue Lysis
(p. 488n). At times it is tempting to think that Carpenter, having rejected
Socratic eros for the innate homosexuals described in Homogenic love, was now
recommending a version of this model of same-sex affection as being appropriate
for the development of heterosexual boys in England’s schools – for, as Carpenter
noted, ‘At that age love to the other sex has hardly declared itself, and indeed is
not exactly what is wanted’ (p. 485).
Yet despite these debts to the Platonic, aesthetic tradition, the weight of
Carpenter’s argument here too rested with the kinds of concerns that were
evident in Homogenic love, and which in turn could be traced back to the writings
of Symonds. Although Carpenter was nervous about premature sexual activity,
there was no Socratic flight from the physical expression of affection. Carpenter
suggested that the ‘natural expression’ of a boy’s affection was ‘in caress or
embrace’ (p. 493), and one of the correspondents he quoted approvingly in the
essay asserted that the right kind of ‘rapport’ between a teacher and a pupil was
‘not only of a merely intellectual nature’, but involved ‘a certain physical
element’ (p. 485). And although Carpenter may have concentrated his discus-
sion on the public schools, which only educated a small minority of the popula-
tion, his concern was directed far more towards what he described as ‘the
peculiar character of the middle-class man of today, his undeveloped affectional
nature and something of brutishness and woodenness’ rather than with anything
to do with the development of young aristocrats – indeed, he noted with
approval ‘the rapid rise which is taking place, in scope and social status, of
the state day-schools’ (p. 489n) – and we earlier mentioned one of the letters
from which Carpenter drew in his essay, concerning the ‘naughty’ working-
class boy.
Most importantly of all in this essay, far from a project of fashioning exemplary
individuals, Carpenter’s interest continued to lie in practical, institutional
reform. Carpenter’s was a political – civic, national, perhaps even martial –
agenda. ‘In almost all human societies except, curiously, the modern nations’, he
wrote, ‘there have been institutions for the initiation of the youth of either sex
in these matters’, initiations that ‘have generally been associated ... with inculca-
tion of the ideals of manhood and womanhood, courage, hardihood, and the
duties of the citizen or the soldier’ (p. 489). The Greeks were praised for their
recognition that friendship was ‘a national institution of great importance’ and,
as with Symonds before him, there was particular mention of Müller’s scholar-
ship on the ancient Dorians (p. 485). In Crete and in Sparta, the institution of
male friendship between an elder and a younger man ‘was entered into in quite
a formal and public way, with the understanding and consent of relatives’, and
‘they fought thenceforward side by side in battle’ (pp. 485–486). The task for
the schools of Carpenter’s day was to develop functionally equivalent institutions
and practices within and across schools in order to facilitate the proper emergence
and prevent the abuse of affection in education.
David Halperin, John. J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin have remarked that in
the Greek world, ‘Sexuality ... is not so much a subject in and of itself – a unitary
category of analysis – as it is one of the languages for defining, describing, inter-
preting, and (hence) transacting all manner of other business’ (Halperin et al.,
1990, p. 4). We have already argued for this much later period that the
Hellenising, pederastic, intellectual version of homosexuality, fetishised in particu-
lar at Oxford, was a way of clinging on to elite status and traditions in a rapidly
changing world, a way of maintaining difference and superiority at the dawning
of a democratic age – rather as we believe it often was in Athens itself (see also
Quinn, 2007a, 2007b). For Symonds, to some extent, but especially for Carpenter
in the 1890s, homosexuality was a way of engaging with that new world, a rejec-
tion of aristocratic self-fashionings in favour of a democratic, more inclusive,
reading and use of transgressive sexuality. These writers constructed homosexual-
ity as a means to democracy rather than as a way of avoiding it. Halperin has
written that we will understand Greek pederasty better ‘if we do not view it as an
isolated, and therefore “queer” institution but if we regard it, rather, as merely one
strand in a larger and more intricate web of erotic and social practices in ancient
Greece, ranging from heroic comradeship to commercial sex’ (Halperin, 1990,
p. ix). We believe that the same can be said for late Victorian Britain.
Nor is it simply the case that attention paid to the disagreements among the
advocates of same-sex love helps us to illuminate Carpenter’s project in works
such as Homogenic love or ‘Affection in Education’. Such attention also opens up
a pathway towards a new history of fin de siècle socialisms, for as well as being
two of the most eloquent apologists for love between men, Oscar Wilde and
Edward Carpenter were also two of the most imaginative (and, we might add,
still insufficiently appreciated) socialist thinkers of their age, and the same issues
that separated them when it came to thinking about same-sex love showed up in
their other political writings as well. Wilde’s affection for the individual
intellectual benefits of the Socratic eros fitted well the view expressed in the
opening lines of The soul of man under socialism that the ‘chief advantage’ of
socialism would be to ‘relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others’
in a world where the ‘majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and
exaggerated altruism’ (Wilde, 2001, p. 127). Carpenter’s socialism, by contrast,
was one in which love taught citizens to be unselfish and anti-egoistic, rejecting
individualism along with commercialism, materialism, modern industrial
practices, and so on, in favour of a semi-anarchic, moralising vision of rural
utopianism (see, e.g., Carpenter, 1897). Different versions of homosexuality
could buttress different versions of socialism; to talk about sex – as ever – was
also to be talking about politics.
Note
1 Carpenter’s debts to Whitman are complex, and we have no space to explore them here.
For a variety of approaches to the question, see Carpenter, 1906, 1924; Sedgwick, 1985,
pp. 203–217; Robertson, 2008, ch. 4; Rowbotham, 2009, pp. 38–41, 43–45, 50–57,
72–73; Bevir, 2011, pp. 247ff.
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Carpenter, E. (1897) Transitions to freedom, in: E. Carpenter (ed.) Forecasts of the coming
century (Manchester, The Labour Press), 174–192.
Carpenter, E. (1899) Affection in education, International Journal of Ethics, 9(4), 482–494.
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Carpenter, E. (1908a) Affection in education, in: The intermediate sex: a study of some
transitional types of men and women (London, George Allen & Unwin), 83–106.
Carpenter, E. (1908b) The homogenic attachment, in: The intermediate sex: a study of
some transitional types of men and women (London, George Allen & Unwin), 39–82.
Carpenter, E. (1914) Intermediate types among primitive folk: a study in social evolution
(London, George Allen & Co).
Carpenter, E. (1924) Some friends of Walt Whitman: a study in sex-psychology (London,
J. E. Francis).
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Textual Practice, 1(1), 48–47.
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century writings on homosexuality: a sourcebook (London, Routledge), 54–56.
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University Press).
Gilbert, W. S. (1881) Bunthorne’s recitative and song, from Patience; or Bunthorne’s
Bride, reprinted in C. White (ed). (1999) Nineteenth-century writings on homosexuality:
a sourcebook (London, Routledge), 16–18.
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18 John Dewey
Saviour of American education
or worse than Hitler?
Richard Pring
Introduction
John Dewey (1859–1952) was born in Burlington, Vermont. Aged sixteen he
attended the University of Vermont where he read Darwin’s The origin of species
(1859), although it was not on the college curriculum. Its evolutionary theory,
especially as developed by T. H. Huxley (1825–1895) in his Elements of
physiology, profoundly influenced his ‘distinctive philosophical interest’ and
thereby his educational theory. Indeed, in later reflections on his life, Dewey
wrote:
There was derived from that study a sense of interdependence and interre-
lated unity that gave form to intellectual stirrings that had previously been
inchoate, and created a type or model of a view of things to which material
in any field ought to conform ... I was led to derive a picture of it, derived
from the study of Huxley’s treatment.
(quoted in Ryan, 1997, pp. 53/54)
Graduating from Vermont in 1879, Dewey taught (not very well) for three years
in two schools and then entered Johns Hopkins University to study philosophy.
There he was influenced by C. S. Peirce (1839–1914), the ‘founding father of
pragmatism’, and by the pervading influence of Hegelian idealism, and thereby
the Oxford idealist F. H. Bradley (1846–1924).
In 1884, Dewey was appointed to the University of Michigan. His reading
there of the Oxford idealist philosopher, T. H. Green (1836–1882), who had
argued strongly for the role of philosophy in helping to understand the problems
of social life, influenced Dewey’s conviction of the centrality of such social life in
the transformation of experience – and thus of the link between educational aims
and the development of community. Hence, Dewey was deeply influenced by
evolutionary theory, by the philosophy of pragmatism, and by Hegelian idealism.
These came together in his arguments for the essential unity but evolving nature
of all experience, for the active pursuit of that unity through inquiry and
problem-solving, for the key place of community in the enrichment of that
experience, for the reduction (following such enquiry) of the notion of ‘truth’
268 Richard Pring
to that of ‘warranted assertion’, and for the gradual transformation of such
‘warranted assertions’ through further enquiry and the abolition of ‘dualisms’ –
in particular, between ‘the spectating mind’ and ‘the spectated material world’,
and between knowledge and action, which had bedevilled traditional education.
The child’s experience, inquiry arising from that experience, integration of
thought and action, and nurturing of community should be central to educa-
tional thinking and practice, not peripheral as usually is the case.
In 1894 Dewey was appointed to the University of Chicago. His arrival was
welcomed by William James:
Chicago has a School of Thought! – a school of thought, which it is safe to

predict, will figure in literature as the School of Chicago for twenty-five years
to come. Some universities have plenty of thought to show, but no school;
others have plenty of school, but no thought. The University of Chicago, by
its Decennial Publications, shows real thought and a real school. Professor
John Dewey and at least ten of his disciples, have collectively put into the
world a statement, homogeneous in spite of so many cooperating minds, of
a view of the world, both theoretical and practical, which is so simple, mas-
sive and positive that, in spite of the fact that many parts of it yet need to be
worked out, it deserves the title of a new system of philosophy.
(James, 1904, p. 172)
That ‘new system of philosophy’ is what Dewey spent the next forty years
developing and expounding. But the ‘School of Thought’, which endured for
much more than the predicted quarter of a century, finally neglected the integra-
tion of theory and practice integral to Dewey’s philosophy. For Dewey, theory
had to be an illumination of intelligent practice. That integration of theory and
practice became, instead, the academic study of education, placed in the School
of Social Sciences. The department of education was closed in 1997. Therefore,
to all Departments or Schools of Education: ‘Beware Chicago!’ Once
theory loses touch with practice, then why have a Department or School of
Education?1
In 1904 Dewey moved to Columbia University, New York City, where he
remained for the rest of his academic life, and where he produced the major
synthesis of his educational thinking Democracy and education. The title is
significant because the creation of democratic communities was a principal aim
of education. But his writings were many, as his ideas evolved or needed defence
against his critics.
Saviour or Hitler?
John Dewey was, and still is, a controversial figure in the history of education.
That is reflected graphically in the title of this paper. It is taken from the account
of Dewey by Nel Noddings; not only has he:
John Dewey 269
been hailed as the saviour of American education by those who welcome
greater involvement of students in their own planning and activity [but also]
he has been called ‘worse than Hitler’ by some who felt that he infected
schools with epistemological and moral relativism, and substituted socialisa-
tion for true education.
(Noddings, 2005)
Dewey, the saviour

There are two reasons why Dewey might have merited the title of ‘saviour’. The
first lies in his criticism of what he referred to as ‘traditional education’ and the
substitution of his own ‘pedagogical creed’ in its place. Traditional education was
characterised by the ‘transmission of knowledge’ – from the mouth of the
teacher into the ear of the learner without regard to the interests and experiences
of those learners with which that knowledge, in order to be meaningful, had to
connect. What should be a lively transformation of the learner’s understanding
of experience became for many little more than ‘inert ideas’. The popularity of
this critical account of traditional education was reflected in the growth of what
was called ‘progressive education’, often attributed to the influence of Dewey. A
key person was a colleague of Dewey at Columbia University, W. H. Kilpatrick
(1871–1965) who, in 1918, published The project method. To avoid the dead
hand of ‘the transmission of knowledge’, the curriculum should be built around
the active pursuit of practical and interdisciplinary projects. These projects
would, if carefully chosen, provide both the interest to motivate the young
learner and the acquisition of the different kinds of knowledge needed to pursue
this interest. The classic tome of curriculum theory (Smith, Stanley & Shores,
1957) lists the ‘interests’, according to developmental stages, around which the
curriculum might be integrated. One must, however, be careful of too close an
association of Dewey with this interpretation of his ideas. The ‘pursuit of
interests’, whether through projects or otherwise, requires a closer philosophical
examination of what is meant by ‘interest’ which Dewey, though not all his
supporters, provided (see Dewey, 1916, ch. 10; also, Wilson, 1971).
The second reason why he might have merited the title of saviour is that
education, as he conceived it, had to address the social conditions of the time.
Those social conditions were of an increasingly multiethnic and diverse commu-
nity as immigrants from all over the world entered the United States. Here was
an educational task of some magnitude as they and those already within the
United States had to come together as a community, forming like interests and
concerns despite religious, ethnic, and cultural differences. Education should
serve not only individual advancement but community enrichment and harmony.
This should not be interpreted as a mere instrumental use of education. It
reflected a deeper philosophical understanding of education as essentially demo-
cratic. Democracy for Dewey meant, not a particular organisation of political
power, but a way of life, which reflected the essential social nature of persons and
the personal development through the creation of, and participation in, the
270 Richard Pring
community – a capacity and propensity which needed to be nurtured in school.
That positive view and influence of Dewey is reflected in a once major American
educational text book – The social foundations of education, (Stanley et al., 1955;
see, particularly, pp. 287–332).
Dewey: worse than Hitler

On the other hand, the source of Dewey’s popularity was also paradoxically the
source, too, of the condemnations which he then, and subsequently, received.
Economic difficulties within the United States were in part attributed to the
failures of the educational system, in particular the adoption of the very
approaches to education which others had hailed as a saving grace. Young people
were leaving school without the skills, knowledge, and motivation to proceed
into higher education or employment, and ‘progressive education’ was to blame.
And that blame was directed at the so-called ‘progressive approaches’ associated
with Dewey and his disciples. The criticisms, however, went deeper than that.
Dewey’s emphasis on respect for differences of background and experience, and
on individual inquiry, was rooted in a pragmatic philosophy of truth and knowl-
edge which challenged the prevailing understanding of a liberal education. One
antagonist, the president of Chicago University, R. M. Hutchins, had a clear view
of the foundations of education:
Education implies teaching. Teaching implies knowledge. Knowledge

is truth. The truth is everywhere the same. Hence education should be
everywhere the same.
(Hutchins, 1936, p. 66, quoted in Ryan, 1997, p. 279)
This is a far cry from the idea of knowledge being ‘warranted assertion’ or from
truth being associated with the resolution (tentative and temporary maybe) of
problems faced.
Therefore, one either loved Dewey or hated him, although, as with educational
disagreements generally, the arguments were polarised without too much close
attention to what Dewey actually said. Dewey was himself a fulsome critic of
much that fell under the title of ‘progressive education’. In Experience and
education, responding to his critics in 1938, he steered a middle way between
the traditionalists and the progressives, condemning equally both of these
warring opposites. But such an understanding of his position itself reflects the
way educational thinking is so easily translated into slogans. As Scheffler argues
in The language of education,
The example of John Dewey’s educational influence is instructive. His sys-

tematic, careful, and qualified statements soon were translated into striking
segments serving as slogans for the new progressive tendencies in American ed-
ucation. Dewey himself criticised the uses to which some of his ideas were put.
(Scheffler, 1960, p. 37)
John Dewey 271
Crossing the Atlantic
Britain was not immune from Dewey’s influence. He was identified by the
historian Brian Simon as one of the influences upon the primary school ‘revolu-
tion’ which emerged in the 1930s, and which became part of the ‘ideological
orthodoxy’ behind the Plowden Report of 1967 (Simon, 1991, p. 362), and was
reflected in the publications of the New Education Fellowship and its journal
New Era to which Dewey contributed. The Plowden Report into primary
education was seen to advocate ‘child-centred’ approaches, and many schools,
including secondary ones, promoted a project-based curriculum out of which
knowledge and thinking skills would flourish – well illustrated by Charity James’
Curriculum Laboratory at the University of London’s Goldsmiths College (see
James, 1968). The organisation of the curriculum would be based on the learn-
er’s particular enquiries, questions, and understandings, rather than on the end
products of others’ enquiries, which were reflected in the different branches of
learning and encapsulated in the traditional subjects of the curriculum
(Goldsmiths College Curriculum Laboratory, 1969, p. 6).
As in the United States, concern about standards in education came to be
focused on the influence of what was seen to be the ‘child-centred’ ethos of
the Plowden years, and Dewey was seen as the presiding culprit. For example,
the philosopher, Anthony O’Hear, while a member of the Council for the
Accreditation of Education, proposed that
it is highly plausible to see the egalitarianism which stems from the writings
of John Dewey as the proximate cause of our educational decline.
(O’Hear, 1991a, p. 28)
O’Hear’s pamphlet about Dewey, published by the Centre for Policy Studies,
was entitled Father of child-centredness (O’Hear, 1991b). Indeed, when the
present author arrived in Oxford in 1989 and was seated at dinner next to Keith
Joseph who had been Secretary of State for Education under Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher, he was accused of being responsible for all the problems in
our school – because he had introduced teachers to John Dewey.2 Much more
recently, he was asked by a present Cabinet Minister whether he did not think
that John Dewey was the cause of all our educational problems. More recently
still, however, when a former Secretary of State for Education (an historian by
reputation) was asked why the Conservatives were so against John Dewey, he
simply replied, ‘Who is John Dewey?’ Perhaps, then, the perceived influence of
Dewey himself is waning, though not, evidently, what he was purported to stand
for. In a recent interview, the present Secretary of State for Education blamed
the decline in social mobility as having more to do with ‘progressive teaching
methods and softer subjects in state schools – a move away from traditional
subjects rigorously taught’ (The Guardian, 25.5.12). The conflict between
Hutchins and Dewey continues, though without reference to the original
protagonists.
272 Richard Pring
What were the reasons behind such assumptions? The Plowden Report
seemed to have inherited the view, fairly common in previous decades amongst
influential educationists, that growth of the inner potentials of the child was the
aim of education, and that the guiding principle of the educational process was
to identify and nurture those interests which led to further growth. As with
Dewey, the ‘mortal sin’ was to bore children, to deaden those very forces which
would lead to further growth and to the expansion of the interests of the child.
The teacher’s task was, at least in part, to remove the barriers to the growth of
personality, including building on the natural curiosity to understand and to
know. The Report urged schools ‘deliberately to devise the right environment
for children to allow them to be themselves and to develop in the way and at the
pace appropriate to them’ (Plowden Report, 1967, para. 507). This, of course,
would be different for different children – a far cry from Hutchins’ ‘education
should everywhere be the same’. That required the identification of those
interests which had the potential for such growth – not an easy task, as the
Plowden Report admitted:
We are still far from knowing how best to identify in an individual child the
first flicker of a new intellectual or emotional awareness, the first readiness to
embrace new sets of concepts or to enter into new relations.
(Plowden, 1967, para. 9)
On the whole, however, the critics failed to make an important distinction

between the oft-prevailing understanding of growth in the biological sense and
growth through social interaction. In a book referred to by the education
historian, W. H. Armitage, as ‘the manifesto of the English progressives’ (see
Dearden, 1972, p. 66),
Edmund Holmes displayed the biological analogies often behind thinking of

education as growth when he asserted that the ‘perfect manhood which is
present in embryo in the new-born infant, just as the oak-tree is present in
embryo in the acorn, will struggle unceasingly to evolve itself’.
(Holmes, 1911, p. 241)
The metaphor of the oak-tree, or of plants, was not untypical amongst the
‘education as growth’ theorists, such as Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), who
were suspected by the critics to lie behind Plowden.
It would be (and was) mistaken to identify Dewey with such a view, despite
his constant reference to education as ‘growth’ (for example, Dewey, 1916,
ch. 4). He completely rejected the biological metaphor. Rather, he argued for
growth as emerging from social interaction, initially with those in immediate
social contact, then with the wider community in which one lived, and later with
the community accessed through formal education in which one is challenged by
what others have said and done, including ‘the wisdom of the race’ as that is
embodied in science, history, and so on. Growth occurs through interaction
John Dewey 273
between the active enquiries of the learner and the social and cultural
environment in which those enquiries are pursued. The task of the teacher is to
help in making the connections.
Behind Dewey’s understanding of the individual learner’s ‘growth’ are signif-
icant and controversial issues in philosophy – in particular, in the theory of
knowledge and in ethics (that is, in how one determines what is worth learning).
Before, however, such philosophical matters are approached, it would be useful
to set out Dewey’s ‘manifesto’ for education which was underpinned by such
philosophical positions.
‘My pedagogic creed’

Dewey wrote prodigiously for half a century, but in no way did he deviate from
his core beliefs set out in a sort of manifesto in 1897, My pedagogic creed. This
was based on criticism of what he saw to be defects of ‘traditional education’.
The criticisms might be summarised as follows. Traditional education:
• was disconnected from the experiences that the students brought from their
homes and their communities;
• was disconnected from the practical and manual activity through which they
were engaged with the physical world;
• ignored the interests that motivated young people to learn;
• treated knowledge as something purely symbolic and formal – organised in
textbooks, ‘stuck on’ without connections to existing ways of understanding;
• maintained discipline through external authority rather than through the
active engagement of young people in activities and enquiries.
In contrast to this, the school should be an extension of the home and the
community – building on the knowledge and experience already gained, and
expanding and deepening it with a view to feeding back to those communities
greater understanding and an intelligent contribution to community life.
Second, in being such an extension of home and community, the school should
value practical and manual activity through which one understands the material
world and the necessities for everyday survival. ‘Knowing how’ is as demanding
as ‘knowing that’, and the former might be said logically to precede the latter.
Third, the interests of the learner are to be respected in their own right, not
simply harnessed by the teacher to help motivate the learners to be interested in
something which, in itself, they find uninteresting. The interests themselves need
to be educated.
Fourth, the division of public knowledge into subject compartments must be
seen, not as valuable in itself; rather, they are the cultural resources created by
others which are useful in finding solutions to the problems one faces and to the
enquiries one is pursuing. To transmit them as ‘bodies of knowledge’, discon-
nected from the enquiries to which they are a response, is not simply bad
psychology of learning. It is a misunderstanding of the nature of knowledge and
274 Richard Pring
its logical organisation. Finally, external authority is necessary only because the
activity of the learners has not been disciplined by the intrinsic interest in the
activities or enquiries to be pursued. In an ideal educational setting, externally
imposed discipline should be unnecessary. In practice, such will rarely be
completely achieved. But it needs to be the educational ideal constantly striven for.
These educational ideas were put into practice in his own experimental school
at the University of Chicago.
Philosophical foundations
Dewey was much influenced by the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin
(1809–1882) and the idealism of G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). Following the
former, he rejected the notion of human beings as constituted of mind and body
(the dualism of Descartes). Rather, evolutionary theory pointed to the contin-
uity between primitive organisms, the animal world, and the human species, in
which the organism adapts to the environment in increasingly sophisticated ways,
gradually through sensory and then reflective and self-conscious capacities. The
criticism of Cartesian dualism
is vouched for by the doctrine of biological development which shows that

man is continuous with nature, not an alien entering into her processes from
without.
(Dewey, 1916, p. 285)
Hence, the further dualism – between thought and action – is also dismissed.
Human beings are not ‘thinkers’ and then ‘doers’. They are active and adaptive
organisms, and thinking is but coping with problems arising from the barriers to
adaptation and action. The meaning therefore of a belief is the guidance it gives
to action and to the overcoming of a problem.
The influence of idealism, particularly through the work of T. H. Green,
reinforced this through its emphasis upon the essential unity of experience. That
idealism rejected both the atomisation of experience and thus the atomisation of
the so-called knowledge of that experience. Reality was a construction or an
interpretation of the human mind, and that mind could not isolate one area of
‘constructed reality’ from another. To understand anything fully would be to see
its connections with the whole. The distinction between contingent and
necessary connections between ideas was ultimately unsustainable. Furthermore,
coming to see things as a whole (never completely accomplished) evolved
through yet further experience and through the interaction between different
sets of ideas, different arguments, different protagonists. Ideas are always in a
state of evolution.
Pragmatism, as that is usually attributed to C. S. Peirce, tallied with much of
this. Again, a human being is not a mind in a body, a thinking part set aside from
the physically active part, contemplating a ‘true account’ of the physical world.
Rather, a human being is an organism whose life is one of actively adapting to
John Dewey 275
the environment in terms of how that environment is conceived and how it has
affected the capacities of the organism to adapt. Language embodies a way of
conceiving the world in which one is constantly adapting, but the meaning of the
words and of the propositions in which they occur is the practical effect which
they have. So long as ‘they work’, the beliefs that they reflect are ‘warranted’. As
soon as they do not have the desired effect, the beliefs become problematic, in
need of refining and involving a reorganisation of how one sees practically the
environment within which one is acting and adapting to meet one’s goals. In
order to get at the meaning of a theory, one might ask what practically follows
from it.
Such a criterion would see off much educational theory. If nothing follows
practically from the statement ‘all children are curious’ or if no observed practice
would lead to its rejection, then it is meaningless. Pragmatism is and was a radi-
cal shift in philosophy from an empirical tradition in which truth lies in the
correspondence between statements and reality and in which bodies of such
statements in theories of various kinds reflect a reality independent of them.
Pragmatism may be a philosophical position which many would reject. But in
doing so would they necessarily have to reject the educational theory, and its
implications, of John Dewey?
Key educational ideas

In answering that question, one needs to draw attention to the following key
ideas in Dewey’s educational writings.
Transformation of experience
In his major work on education, Dewey defines education as the
reconstruction or reorganisation of experience which adds to the meaning

of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent
experience.
(Dewey, 1916, p. 70)
Experience is an awareness. But such awareness is tinged with feelings; it is an

awareness of something; it is shaped by its association with previous experiences;
it is ‘organised’ by conceptual schema which we have inherited from others and
which are embodied in the language we learn from childhood. Such experiences
therefore come not raw – as sense data unspoilt by the perceiving subject (as the
empiricists argued) – but ‘theory-laden’. To experience something is to see it
from a particular point of view, linked to a broader set of understandings and
emotions, having a history arising from the unique circumstances of each person.
Such experiences determine how one sees and interprets further experience.
They open up possibilities for further experiences, and they cut out others. A
child slipping on the ice will come to see the ice in a different way and that will
276 Richard Pring
affect the meaning he or she attaches to ice and its possibilities. Each person,
therefore, is constantly re-interpreting the world of things and people in the light
of the experiences they have had, affecting what they want to do and not to do,
closing off some experiences, and opening up others. These re-organisations are
often not explicit. They are internalised.
Dewey spoke of both the educational possibilities of some experiences and the
mis-education of others. A mis-educational experience is one that deadens the
mind – for example, the ‘inert ideas’ typical of much ‘traditional education’. A
pupil may learn the right performances for an examination on Macbeth, but, if
that experience is shrouded in boredom, then the result is a determination never
to read Shakespeare again. That experience of Shakespeare was mis-educational.
One might put this in another way by talking about the meaning of an experi-
ence. For Dewey, ‘meaning’ of something is what it does for you, how it affects
your action or reaction. The distinction, which we normally assume between ‘the
meaning’ of a belief or a proposition, objectively speaking, and the meaning of
it in the sense of its particular connotation which is derived from the person’s
experience, is blurred.
Doubts about the pragmatist foundations of Dewey’s educational thinking
should not detract from the arguments he made concerning the centrality of
experience and its gradual transformation through further experience. To ignore
the significance of the experiences which the learners bring from home and
community is to leave them, at a deeper level, largely unaffected by their formal
learning. The academic work which in no way connects with what shapes their
beliefs, or ignites their emotions, or excites their imagination, is sloughed off as
of little significance. The good teacher in Dewey’s scheme of things is one who
makes the connections between the child’s interests and experience and the
‘wisdom of the race’ which we have inherited. Where such a connection is made,
the learner will be able to find greater depth in what has been experienced, to
see how it might be enriched or found wanting, and to appreciate its being
subjected to criticism or to further elucidation. It is this connection which needs
to be explained further.
Reconciling experience and inquiry with ‘objective knowledge’

Inquiry is the process that takes place when the person, pursuing an activity, faces
a problem that is not easy to resolve. It is as though one’s previous experiences
and the ways of organising them are not up to the job. One tries to solve the
problem with further experience. It is what Dewey referred to as a ‘forked road
situation’. One makes a choice (formulates a hypothesis) and takes a particular
route (tests the hypothesis). If that reaches a dead end (if the hypothesis is
falsified), then one tries another route (having reformulated the hypothesis). And
so on ad infinitum. Therefore, as is argued in Experience and education (1938,
p. 25), there is ‘an organic connection between education and personal experi-
ence’. Education is part of that ‘search for meaning – that ‘trying to make sense’
as one seeks to solve a problem through inquiry. The resolution of the problem
John Dewey 277
is a ‘warranted assertion’. One is warranted to trust it until further experience
shows that it is no longer warranted.
Dewey argues that the growth of knowledge (as that is written down in books
and shared by other inquirers in science or in history, for example) is but
‘warranted assertion’, tentatively held. But such assertions have withstood a great
deal of testing by others’ experiences in similar contexts. Hence, in facing similar
problems people should take seriously what has been tentatively agreed in publicly
accessible inquiries. It is the job of the teacher to make the connection between
these inherited traditions of inquiry (‘the wisdom of the race’) and the inquiries
of the learners as they endeavour to make sense of their experiences. Thus,
the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single
process. Just as two points define a straight line, so the present standpoint of
the child and the facts and truths of studies define instruction. It is a continu-
ous reconstruction, moving from the child’s present experience out into that
represented by the organised bodies of truth that we call studies.
(Dewey, 1902, pp. 126–127)
This is the basis of Dewey’s criticism of formal education. It treats knowledge,

in its various forms, as bodies of knowledge to be handed on as such, objective,
intrinsically worthwhile, without any connection, logical or contingent, to the
personal understandings, the search for meaning, or the attempts to make sense
of the learners. No connection is made between the inquiries as they are frozen
in the textbooks and the inquiries of the young learner. It is also the basis of
Dewey’s criticism of the ‘progressives’, that is, those who see growth to arise
simply from the pursuit of interests, the enlargement of experience, disconnected
from the results of others’ inquiries as these are embodied in the traditional
disciplines or so-called bodies of knowledge.
In bridging this gap between the way of thinking of the child and the
developed thinking we have inherited from others (between what David Hamlyn
[1967] referred to as the psychological and the logical aspects of learning),
Dewey uses the following analogy:
We may compare the difference between the logical and the psychological to
the difference between the notes which an explorer makes in the new coun-
try, blazing a trail and finding his way along as best he may, and the finished
map that is constructed after the country has been thoroughly explored.
(1902, p. 136)
The maps of knowledge (created by the ‘explorers’ within science, history,

anthropology, etc.) put together the combined ways of organising experiences
for particular purposes. Their value lies in their practical use. The maps put to
the aid of the traveller the wisdom gained from previous travels. It is the job of
the teacher to make the links – to ‘psychologise’ the logical framework of
received knowledge as embodied in the inherited maps of inquiry.
278 Richard Pring
Dewey worked through examples. He illustrates the connection between the
logical and the psychological through the growth of mathematical thinking. The
abstractions of mathematical formulas have grown out of
the child’s present crude impulses in counting, measuring, and arranging

things in rhythmic series.
(1902, p. 134)
It is possible and important to reconnect if the abstractions are to be understood

and if they are to be put at the service of the ‘impulses’ (the interests, the
activities) of the learner.
This connection between the ‘logical and the psychological’ might be
illustrated through Bruner’s ‘Man: a Course of Study’ (MACOS), an American
inquiry-based curriculum project within social studies, highly popular in Britain
before being killed off by the National Curriculum in 1988. It posed the
questions: ‘What is human about human beings? How did they get that way?
How can they be made more so?’ Students, in seeking answers to these ques-
tions, engaged in various forms of inquiry – role playing as anthropologists,
simulating problems of survival, answering questions about child-rearing. In
doing so, however, they drew upon the inquiries, where they felt it appropriate,
of anthropologists, sociologists, linguists, historians, theologians, artisans. Their
inquiries were both deeply personal (these questions, carefully posed, touched a
chord with the concerns of the young people) and yet systematically informed by
traditions of inquiry (Bruner, 1966). Here, as in Dewey, ‘traditional learning’ is
valuable as a cultural resource, well attested by the systematic inquiries of others,
to be drawn upon by the learners as they engage in deliberations about what is
of deep concern in their own lives and inquiries.
Social nature of growth – community and school

The gradual transformation of experiences takes place through the social interac-
tions, first within the family, later within the wider community. Hence, the
importance attached by Dewey to the ‘centrality of social life’ and to the
development of community (as opposed to an aggregate of individuals). Once,
most people lived in small, fairly self-sufficient rural communities, where they
would learn the economic skills and the social values for a flourishing life. But,
roughly speaking, [schools] come into existence when social traditions are so
complex that a considerable part of the social store is committed to writing
and transmitted through written symbols ... As soon as a community de-
pends to any considerable extent upon what lies beyond its own territory and
its own immediate generation, it must rely upon the set agency of schools to
ensure adequate transmission of all its resources ... Hence, a special mode of
intercourse is instituted, the school, to care for such matters.
(Dewey, 1916, p. 19)
John Dewey 279
The school provided an enrichment of community in two ways. First, the
greater the diversity of the social group, the greater would be the enrichment
and possible transformation of the meaning attached to social experiences,
especially beyond the rural communities. Received assumptions and ways of
seeing the world are more likely to be challenged. Other points of view have to
be reconciled with one’s own. One’s experiential grasp of reality must be chal-
lenged in wider interaction with others of different experiences. Second, the
school put the young people in touch with the wider community, which ‘lies
beyond [their] own territory and own immediate generation’.
Purposive education or schooling should present such an environment that

this interaction will effect acquisition of those meanings which are so impor-
tant that they become, in turn, instruments of further learning.
(Dewey, 1916, p. 19)
Dewey argued for the common school, because a diverse school population
would be enabled, with direction and support from the teacher, not simply to
tolerate the different views and backgrounds of the other learners, but to be
challenged and informed by them. Diversity of background was to be seen as an
asset rather than barrier to learning. School would not only nurture the sense of
community amidst diversity, but also provide the basis, the shared understand-
ings, necessary for the development of future communities.
Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common.
What they must have in common in order to form a community or society
are aims, beliefs aspirations, knowledge – a common understanding.
(Dewey, 1916, p. 14)
The aim of education: growth within democratic communities

This learning to live actively within a community was not a mere additional perk
in a good education. The major work in which Dewey developed the educational
philosophy arising from the pragmatic theory of meaning and knowledge was
Democracy and education. This book seems initially to have little to say about
democracy in its procedural sense. There is nothing there about ‘one person one
vote’ or the ‘universal franchise’. But for Dewey these were the technical aspects
of democracy, not what it really meant. Democracy for him was inseparable from
the empowerment of all to live fulfilled lives, to be enabled through learning and
experiences to make valuable contributions to communal life as earlier described,
and to have all barriers removed which prevented them from doing so. Education
of all within a community of shared understandings which enabled all to learn
from each other was the condition for true democracy. As he argued,
Democracy has many meanings, but if it has a moral meaning, it is to be

found in resolving that the supreme test of all institutions and industrial
280 Richard Pring
arrangements shall be the contribution they make to the all-round growth of
every member of society.
(Dewey, 1920, p. 186)
The whole of Dewey’s philosophy, therefore, and thereby his educational

theory, was profoundly political – not in the sense of propagating a particular
political doctrine or arrangement (for example, one person, one vote), but in the
sense of arguing for a form of life, central to the growth of knowledge through
inquiry, through social interaction, and through critical reflection on experience.
In this way, all would be able to learn from each other, to respect each other and
to participate in the deliberations and decision-making which affected all.
The teacher-centred vision of education

It is particularly essential, at the present time when the teacher is seen as ‘deliver-
ing’ the curriculum written elsewhere, to see by contrast the exalted role which
Dewey attributed to the teacher in My pedagogic creed.
I believe that the teacher is the true prophet and the usherer in of the king-
dom of God.
(Dewey, 1985, p. 30)
The reason for this exalted view of teaching is that teaching lies in that bridg-
ing of the gap between the enquiries of others (the ‘logical aspects’ of the under-
standings we have inherited) and the modes of understanding and experiences of
the learners (the ‘psychological aspect’). That requires on the part of the teacher
not only the pedagogical skills to bridge that gap, but also a profound love and
knowledge of the different modes of inquiry. These are our inheritance and the
teacher is both the guardian of them and ‘the prophet’, pronouncing their
importance and relevance to the next generation.
The failure to recognise this by the public school system:
in such a way that every teacher has some regular and representative way in
which he or she can register judgement upon matters of educational impor-
tance, with assurance that this judgement will somehow affect the school
system, [means that] the assertion that the system is not, from the internal
standpoint, democratic, seems to be justified.
(Dewey, article in The Elementary School Teacher, 1903).
The relevance of John Dewey to educational

policy and practice
As was reflected in the response from the former Secretary of State for Education,
it would seem that, in Britain, Dewey has left no legacy. Who has read John
Dewey? Or who, indeed, amongst the present cohort of teachers has even heard
John Dewey 281
of him? Those preparing to be teachers or those in receipt of professional
development receive little or no introduction to the history of educational ideas
or to the philosophical questions underpinning them. Less and less influence is
attributed to him for the so-called ‘poor standards’ in our schools. The ‘Plowden
era’ is a fading memory.
That is a pity because in England and Wales, as in the United States, we are
witnessing a revolution in educational language, aims, and provision of which
Dewey’s philosophical and educational writings offer a trenchant critique. There
is an ‘Atlantic Bridge’, indeed, by which ideas cross the ocean with remarkable
rapidity. Diane Ravitch summarises the revolution in the United States, following
President Bush’s No Child Left Behind, thus:
NCLB introduced a new definition of school reform ... In this new era,
school reform was characterised as accountability, high-stakes testing, data-
driven decision-making, choice, charter schools, privatisation, deregulation,
merit pay and competition between schools. Whatever could not be mea-
sured did not count.
(Ravitch, 2010, p. 217)
One consequence of this is that,
As it elevated the concept of school choice, the Department of Educa-

tion destroyed the concept of neighbourhood schools ... Neighbourhoods
were once knitted together by a familiar local high school that serves all the
children of the community, a school with distinctive traditions and teams
and history.
(Ravitch, 2010, p. 83)
The present author shows how Ravitch’s trenchant critique is equally relevant to
England and Wales – as also is the response that Dewey would give in the light
of the ideas summarised above (Pring, 2012). First, local community responsibil-
ity for education has been gradually eroded over a long period, but it has
quickened under present policies with the creation of ‘free schools’ (based on the
model of the US Charter Schools) and ‘academies’, under direct contract to
the Secretary of State. Gone is local accountability of the education within the
community. Furthermore, the creation of greater choice within a more market
driven system has polarised rich and poor, ethnic groups and social classes. There
is a severance between the aims of education as a personal good and those aims
as a public service for the creation of common experiences, common culture,
common understandings which were at the heart of Dewey’s notion of
democracy – and indeed of that of R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) (Tawney, 1938).
Second, the new language of education, adopted from performance manage-
ment, bears little relation to that of Dewey’s ‘transformation of experience’ –
respecting, as a starting point, the experiences and ways of understanding which
the learners bring with them into school. There is little room in such performance
282 Richard Pring
management for the ‘exploration of ideas’, the ‘tentative inquiring’, the ‘struggle
to understand’, the ‘targets’ imposed by Government, the ‘performance
indicators’ by which learners and teachers and schools are tested, the ‘audits’ by
which schools are classified and failed. There is a need to ask, as Dewey constantly
asked, what are the aims of education in the light of what we mean by saying we
help all young people to develop their humanity within the wider society.
Third, the Hutchins/Dewey disagreement remains with us still. What is the
nature of the school subjects which shape the curriculum? Dewey’s critique of
the curriculum as ‘the transmission of knowledge’ (and of the dualism between
thinking and doing, theory and practice) is as relevant today as it was then – the
transmission of inert ideas, failing to illuminate the experiences and interests of
young people and leading to disengagement of so many.
Finally, Dewey’s extolling of the teachers as ‘the true prophet and the usherer
in of the kingdom of God’ may seem over the top, but it is in sharp and refresh-
ing contrast with the teacher as the deliverer of the curriculum, in the creation
of which he or she has had little or no position. For Dewey, a healthy education
requires a profound respect for the teacher.
The dictation, in theory at least, of the subject-matter to be taught, to the

teacher who is to engage in the actual work of instruction ... [which] meant
nothing more than the deliberate restriction of intelligence, the imprison-
ment of the spirit.
(Dewey, 1903)
Rather should
The public school system [be] organised in such a way that every teacher
has some regular and representative way in which he or she can register
judgment upon matters of educational importance, with assurance that this
judgment will somehow affect the school system[?]
(Dewey, 1903)
There is a revolution in both the content and the provision of education in the
United States and Britain – an underlying disdain for the practical, a deregulation
of educational provision, a transfer of responsibility from public to private and
for-profit companies, an emphasis on competition at the expense of partnership,
a deprofessionalisation of teachers, a reduction of worth-while learning to what
is measurable. Those who wish to question such a revolution may find support
in the very different vision of education of John Dewey.
Notes
1 It is important to distinguish between ‘School’ in the sense of an informal collection
of like-minded thinkers, ‘School’ as a formally constituted university department, and
‘school’ as a place where young people go. Here ‘School’ refers to the first, although
John Dewey 283
such like-minded interests would seem to have developed into ‘School’ in the second
sense (the one which in recent years, has closed), and not to the third sense, or the Lab
School, which Dewey helped create.
2 After several lengthy discussions, I can report that Lord Joseph no longer holds these
views.
References
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284 Richard Pring
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Index
Abelard, Peter 56 Bacon, Francis 86

abolitionism, anti-slavery 122, 124, 196, Bain, Alexander 219, 222
200, 204 Barbauld, Anna 196, 204
academy 43, 134 Beale, Dorothea 226, 229, 230, 232
affection 10, 15, 19, 94, 133, 135, 138, Bell, Andrew, see: monitorial system
152, 155, 182, 184, 186, 252–6, Bell-Lancaster system, see: monitorial
257–8, 262–4 system
Aikin, John 196 Bentham, Jeremy 212, 216, 222
allegory, allegorical method 39, 40, 54 Berkeley, Bishop George 237
Analytic Review, The 145–6 Beyme, Karl Friedrich 168
aristocracy 28, 34, 211, 256, 263, 264 Biber, George Edward 210, 218, 221
Aristotle 4, 6, 7, 8, 15, 21–39, 46, 47, 68, Bildung 160, 161, 162, 163, 173,
83, 87–8, 237 212, 241
Arnold, Matthew 220, 245 Bodichon, Barbara 227–8, 231, 232
art 23, 33, 34, 46, 49, 54–6, 57–8, 60, body 7, 11, 13, 18, 24, 47, 60, 63, 105,
62, 63, 67, 70–1, 94, 121, 131, 132–3, 148, 149–50, 164, 195, 198, 252, 260,
168, 184, 196; fine art, creative art 7, 261, 274; see also physical education
19, 29, 32, 40, 124, 161, 163, 165, Bosanquet, Bernard 238, 242
189, 202, 220, 256, 262; liberal Bradley, F.H. 238, 242, 248, 267
arts, see: liberal studies etc; Bramhall, John 93
see also: techne Bruner, Jerome 278
asceticism 47, 52 Budé, Guillaume 66, 67, 73
associationism, association of ideas 132–3, Butler, Josephine 224–5, 228, 229, 230,
135, 141, 150, 195, 196, 198, 275; see 231, 233
also: pedagogical method
Athanasius 52 Calvin, John 79, 113, 129
Augustine, St. 53–6, 58, 62, 63, 64, 68, Campe, Joachim Heinrich 162
81, 124 Carpenter, Mary 197
authority 49, 73, 76, 87–8, 90, 94, Carpenter, Edward 2, 252–4, 255–6,
107, 109, 111–2, 116, 117–8, 122, 260–5
123–7, 147, 149, 155, 162, 169–70, Carpenter, Lant 197, 198
174, 180, 182, 212, 218, 273; Cassiodorus 52, 62
government authority over Cleanthes 38, 40, 48
education 70; sovereign character, character development 2, 12,
authority 85, 95–6 29–30, 69–70, 74, 77, 108, 130, 140,
autonomy 2, 3, 22, 27, 31–3, 113, 115–6, 150, 167, 173, 179–88, 191, 195, 204,
118, 125–6, 151, 163, 165, 167, 170, 211, 212, 213, 214, 222, 232, 233,
171, 173, 220, 241, 244; 244, 252, 253, 263; see also:
see also: freedom, independence environmentalism, ethology
286 Index
childhood, children 2, 3, 10, 13–4, 27, consensus, concord 85, 90, 92, 96–7, 140;
28, 31–4, 46, 75–6, 77–80, 88, 95–6, see also: harmony, peace
100, 103–4, 104–12, 113, 119, 125–6, consent 27, 32, 85, 95–6, 122–3, 264
132–3, 136, 149, 154–5, 157, 179, consequential argument,
182, 183–5, 188–91, 195, 196, 198, consequentialism 9, 18, 70, 91–2, 95,
203, 205, 214–6, 217, 219, 228, 239, 106, 107, 154, 165, 179–80, 184, 186,
241, 244, 246, 258, 261–2, 268, 215, 244, 250, 258
271–2, 275, 276–8; early childhood contemplation 26, 32, 33, 47–8, 54–5, 59,
learning 69–70, 72–4, 137–8, 152 62, 132, 134, 137, 167, 274
Chrysippus 38, 40–4, 48, 49 contextualism 35
Cicero 7, 12, 38–40, 43, 52, 57, 58–9, cooperative movement, cooperation 32,
67, 88 121, 164, 179, 181, 183, 198, 200
citizenship, citizens 2, 10, 28–30, 32, 33, Cornutus 38–42, 43
44, 46, 60, 69, 75–6, 80, 89, 90, 93, corporal punishment, see: punishment
96–7, 109–12, 113, 115–7, 119, 125, corruption 27, 61, 70, 74, 77, 84, 120,
126, 127, 130, 133, 134, 137, 140, 129, 132, 133, 135–6, 137, 138–40,
155, 156, 167, 173, 178, 195, 204, 141, 149, 151, 152, 155–6, 163,
210, 214, 217, 220, 241, 243–4, 186–7, 200–1, 259, 260
245–6, 249–50, 264, 265 cosmopolitanism 116, 119, 121, 160,
class 28, 45, 76, 157, 181, 182, 187–8, 165, 167, 171
191, 196, 201, 202, 205, 211, 216, counter-reformation 79
220, 228, 232, 245, 250, 260–1, 281; Cousin, Victor 218, 221
middle class 28, 157, 165, 166–7, 172, crime 77, 123, 180, 181
173, 200, 227–8, 233–4, 263; working Croce, Benedetto 240, 248–9
class 179, 180, 197, 200, 202, 205, curriculum 139, 162, 183–4, 191, 195,
209, 210, 228, 234, 246, 252 197, 210, 211, 215, 220, 231, 239,
Cleomedes 39, 42, 49 241, 243, 244, 246, 249, 267, 269,
Cobbe, Frances Power 228, 229, 271, 277, 278, 280, 282
230–1, 233
Cobbett, William 202 Daily News, The 201, 204, 205
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 211, 222 Darwin, Charles 267, 274
Collingwood, R.G. 238 Davies, Emily 225, 228, 229, 230,
Comenius, Jan 86, 89 231, 232
commerce, commercial society 29, deism 147, 148, 152, 154, 184; see also:
129–31, 131–3, 134–8, 139–42, 156, theology
163, 169, 173, 185, 194, 196, 263, democracy, demos 7, 16, 29, 32, 76, 84,
264, 265 88–9, 113, 180, 182, 195, 202, 204,
common good, common interest 27–8, 211, 214, 220, 254, 256, 260, 262,
49, 60, 117, 121, 124, 125, 169, 264, 268, 269, 279, 281
190, 242 Dewey, John 2, 209, 267–284
commonwealth 76–7, 84–6, 88–9, 90, Descartes, Rene 274; see also: dualism
91, 93, 95–6, 99, 110, 111, 147, dialectic 17, 22, 55, 57–9, 62, 67–8,
178, 192 240–1
community, communitarianism 27–8, 32, Diogenes Laertius 40, 42, 44, 46, 47
59–61, 167, 173, 179, 181–3, 184–9, Disraeli, Benjamin 209
191, 192, 200, 243, 245, 250, 256, dissent, rational dissent, dissenting
267–8, 269–70, 272, 273, 278–81 academies 85, 92, 98, 145, 194–7,
competition 72, 162, 171–2, 181–3, 191, 202, 205
225, 231, 281, 282 domestic life, home 13, 108, 155, 196,
Comte, Auguste 204, 212, 214, 221 197, 203, 226, 227, 232, 233, 262,
Condorcet, Marquis de, Nicolas de 273, 276; see also: education, domestic
Caritat 166 Dowling, Linda 255, 256, 257, 258,
Conington, John 257 259, 263
Index 287
dualism 150, 268, 274, 282 157, 184, 185, 214–5, 221, 230,
Dunne, Joseph 33, 35 267–8, 269, 275, 280, 282; innatism
Dunning, Thomas 202 104, 123, 152, 186, 195, 229, 259–60;
Dury, John 86 environment, environmentalism 76,
179–80, 182, 195, 198, 205, 243,
educated individual 29, 95, 124, 149, 161, 272–5, 279; pragmatism 267, 270,
164, 178, 194, 203–4, 212, 217, 227, 274–6, 279
228, 239, 241 educational philosophy 1, 3–4, 21–2,
education; christian 52–3, 54–5, 56, 63, 30–2, 34, 66, 79, 83, 115, 150, 169,
66–8, 78, 87, 89, 121, 147, 184, 218, 195–7, 198, 237, 239, 241–3, 249–50,
221, 230; of citizens, civic education 63, 267, 269, 270, 273, 279, 280–1
84–6, 90, 91–2, 93–4, 96, 111, 115–9, egotism, egocentrism, see: self interest,
121, 124–6, 127, 134, 140, 196, 250, self absorbtion
264; domestic 125, 148, 154–5, 182, elenchos, see: socratic method
199, 203, 262; elite 38, 76, 86, 93, 99, Ellis, Havelock 254, 256
225, 264; ethical, moral 8, 11, 21–2, eloquence 52, 57–8, 62
25–6, 29, 31, 35, 43, 45, 47, 53, 56, Emerson, Roger 130
58–9, 68, 69, 72–4, 76, 77–8, 79, 80, emotion 25, 31, 136, 143, 149, 150, 151,
84, 87, 98, 112, 115–6, 117, 119, 155, 157, 189, 191, 213, 217, 220,
122–3, 124–5, 126, 129–30, 133, 135, 234, 259, 260, 272, 275–6
136, 138, 140, 148, 149, 150, 152, English Woman’s Journal, The 225, 227
156, 161–2, 164–6, 169, 172–3, 174, enlightenment 85, 97, 100, 115, 129–30,
185, 189, 191, 195, 197–9, 203–4, 131, 134, 136, 138–40, 162–3, 164
209–10, 213–4, 215, 220, 227, 230, environment, see: educational theory
232–3, 280, 242, 244–6, 249, 250, Epictetus 38, 39, 43, 44–6, 48–9, 50, 148
253, 265, 279; literary, literature 38, epicureans, epicureanism 41, 45
40, 41, 43, 67, 68, 73, 80, 162, 196, episteme, epistemology 3, 5, 21–3, 53, 61,
197, 201, 203, 216, 220; musical, 62, 131, 132, 141, 160, 164,
music 29, 41, 55, 189, 202; national 165, 269
148, 153, 154, 169, 171, 185, 195, equality, egalitarianism 3, 27, 73, 75, 149,
197, 202, 204–5, 210, 214, 245–6, 155, 161, 163–5, 169–70, 181, 187,
248–9, 254; of people, of common 191, 198, 209, 230, 231, 245, 249, 271
people 84–6, 88, 92, 94, 96, 99, 104–7, eros, erotic love, desire 7, 11, 12, 13–8, 19,
140, 195, 198–9, 200–1, 204; 190, 254–7, 278–9, 261, 262, 264–5
philosophical 163, 169, 220, 240–1, Erasmus, Desiderius 2, 66–74, 78,
249; physical 165, 183, 189, 191, 195, 79–80, 81
197, 198; public 4, 21, 24, 27, 28, 30, erudition 43
31, 32, 59, 69, 75, 83, 85, 87, 89, 92, ethics 3, 7–9, 11, 21–2, 26, 31–2, 35, 39,
96, 99, 108, 111–2, 125, 126, 194, 41–8, 49, 54, 55, 58–9, 60, 63, 68, 79,
204, 205, 216, 218, 244, 264; religious 117, 130, 134, 146, 148, 149, 153,
28, 68, 75, 76, 94, 98, 111, 136–7, 156, 167, 171–2, 197, 215, 241–2,
168, 173, 184, 197, 211, 218, 231; of 244, 248, 249, 259, 273
rulers 59–60, 61, 201; sex education ethology 213–5
190, 224, 244, 253, 264; of women and Eudaimonia, see: human flourishing
girls 4, 73, 149–50, 152, 183–4, 188, evil 17, 47, 74, 78, 89, 91, 95, 104–6,
191, 197, 203, 219, 222, 224–33, 234, 110, 122, 147–8, 153–4, 183,
253; of young children, see early 199–200, 228, 258
childhood education; see also: examinations 15–6, 170, 201, 218, 221,
socialisation 226, 231–3, 234, 247, 276
educational history 6, 53, 171, 268, 281 experience 12, 15–7, 22, 25–6, 31, 70, 90,
educational theory 1, 6, 18, 35, 53, 57, 92, 148, 153, 162, 182, 194–5, 199,
66, 69, 103, 104, 112, 125, 126, 238, 240, 243, 257, 267–8, 269, 270,
129–30, 131–4, 135, 137, 148, 151, 273, 274, 275–7, 278–80, 281–2
288 Index
family 19, 85, 95–7, 104, 108–10, 112, Graces, Three 40
120, 146, 169, 171, 181, 188, 198, grammar 38, 39, 41, 55, 57, 58, 68
203, 227, 233, 244, 249, 262, 278; see Green, T.H. 237, 239–40, 242, 245,
also schools - home schools, parenting, 246–7, 248, 267, 274
domestic life Grosskurth, P 256–7
feminism, feminists 3, 146, 155, 157, 204,
221, 224–234 habit, habitus 22, 24, 25, 28, 31, 47, 57,
Ferguson, Adam 130, 138–9, 140, 141 61, 73–4, 88, 92, 95, 105, 106–8, 152,
Fichte, Johann 2, 161, 163–70, 171–2, 179, 180, 182, 184–5, 198, 199, 241,
173, 174, 237, 245–6 243, 252–3, 258, 259; see also:
flourishing, see: human flourishing socialisation, practice
Fordyce, David 130, 134–6, 138, 141 Haldane, R.B. 237, 238, 245,
Fourier, Charles 178, 185–90, 191–2 247–8, 250
Fox, William Johnson 197, 199 Hall, C. 201
free thinking 88, 98, 172, 194–5, 197, Halperin, D. 264
199, 205, 232; see also dissent happiness 7, 9, 21, 22–3, 31, 33, 47, 58,
freedom, free man 27, 33, 41, 46, 48, 60, 76, 110, 121, 133, 138, 140, 155,
61–2, 71, 76, 96, 109, 111, 113, 164, 181, 186, 195, 196, 215, 262; see
116–7, 118, 120–1, 125–6, 133, 160, also: human flourishing
161, 164–9, 172–3, 186, 188, 189, harmony 16–7, 18, 60, 61, 62, 164, 165,
191, 196, 199, 202, 224, 227, 229, 166, 182, 186, 187–90, 269
232, 244, 246, 250, 262; free will 87, Hartley, David 195, 197, 198, 199, 205
122–4, 148, 164, 212; liberation 67, Hartlib, Samuel 86
78, 99–100, 186–8, 191, 241, 244, Hays, Mary 196
245, 262; friendship 2, 13, 15–7, Hegel, G.W.F 117–8, 125, 237, 238–40,
19, 27, 30, 34, 131, 155, 181, 186, 241, 242, 244, 245–6, 267, 274
252–4, 257, 258, 264; see also Hellenism 38, 254–5, 256–8, 260, 261,
affection 263, 264
Froebel, Friedrich 197, 272 Herder, Johann 162–3, 165, 171
Fronto 38 Hierocles 39, 43
history of education, see: educational
general will 115–6, 116–126, 127, 242–3 history
gender 73, 79, 150, 157, 201, 205, 225, Hobbes, Thomas 2, 4, 83–102, 121, 122,
233, 255 131, 145, 146, 147–8
Gentile, Giovanni 240–1, 248–9 Home, Henry, Lord Kames 130, 136–8
gerontocracy 182 Homer 39, 41, 49, 98, 257
Gilbert of Poitiers 56 homosexuality 254, 256, 258, 260,
girls, see education, schools, 261–3, 264, 265
good, human good 7–8, 11, 15–16, 22–3, Howell, James 86
26, 27, 29, 31, 33, 34, 42, 44–5, 46–7, Hugh of St Victor 52–3, 53–6, 57–9,
49, 53, 72–4, 77–8, 86, 89–91, 94, 60, 62–3
104–7, 110, 115, 119, 120, 122–3, Hullah, John Pike 202
124, 125, 131–3, 135, 136, 147–8, human flourishing 26–7
154, 169, 171, 183, 188, 194, 227, humanism 66–9, 74, 78–9, 80, 130
229, 241–2, 243, 254, 261, 281; see human nature 22, 28, 29, 44, 59, 71, 73,
also: common good 100, 105, 113, 115, 163, 178, 179–80,
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 212 186–7, 188, 214–5, 249, 259
government, governments 3, 4, 24, 27, Humboldt, Wilhelm 160–1, 163,
29, 30, 31–2, 67, 86, 88, 96, 104, 107, 170, 173
109–12, 136, 140, 147, 156, 163, 168, Hume, David 130, 140, 141, 145, 147–8
180, 182, 197, 202, 205, 210–1, 214, Hutcheson, Francis 131, 140, 141, 165
218, 225, 246, 248, 282 Hutchins, R.M. 270, 271, 272, 282
Grace 59, 108, 204, 258 Huxley, T.H. 220, 267
Index 289
idealism 163, 221, 237–250 218, 224, 225, 230, 232, 238, 239–40,
incentives 2, 91, 107, 139, 153, 254 249, 258, 268, 269, 270–1, 273, 274,
independence 30, 32, 117, 121, 122, 123, 277, 279–80, 282; moral knowledge, of
126, 161, 189, 202, 203, 212, 213, virtue 8, 9, 22–3, 72, 107, 126, 147,
219, 233; see also: autonomy, freedom 153, 154
inequality, social inequality, see: equality Kristjansson, K 32, 35
Infant School Society, The 192
innatism, innate ideas, see: educational labour 9, 29, 60, 68, 104, 131, 139, 157,
theory 160, 164, 165–6, 179, 182, 187, 191,
institutions 2, 4, 27, 28, 33, 34, 74, 76, 202, 227–8,
77–8, 80, 115, 120, 124, 129–30, 131, Ladies Educational Associations 226
139, 140, 148, 153, 154, 167, 171, Lancaster, Joseph, Lancastrians, see:
180, 185, 187, 194, 203, 210, 211, Monitorial system
218, 226, 228, 232, 233, 242, 243–4, language, 18, 25, 27, 40, 68, 70, 71, 85,
248, 250, 252, 253, 257, 259, 264, 280 87, 108, 121, 132, 164, 171, 179, 186,
instrumentalism 2, 29, 33, 168, 248, 269 187, 203, 216, 219, 227, 245, 259, 263,
interest 16, 30, 41, 42, 57, 58, 59, 63, 78, 264, 275, 281; ordinary language 238
90, 93, 104, 105, 106, 110, 113, 121, La Vopa, A. 167
136, 147, 181, 182, 184, 189, 190, law of nature, natural law 91, 98, 109,
196, 215, 224, 228, 241, 244, 269, 120, 147, 166
272, 273–4, 276, 277, 278, 282, 283; legislation, legislator 21, 22, 23, 24, 32,
see also: self interest; public and private 93, 109, 115, 116–8, 119–20, 124,
interests 125, 179, 204, 212, 246, 259
inversion, see: gender; see also: leisure 28–9, 46, 75, 200
homosexuality liberal studies, liberal education, liberal
Iselin, Isaak 165 arts 11, 16, 19, 29, 31, 41, 42, 45, 52,
53, 54, 55, 60, 70, 75, 130, 131, 139,
James, William 268 194, 196, 200, 211, 219, 221, 232,
John of Salisbury 52, 56–59, 64 233, 246, 270
Johnson, Joseph 146 liberalism 31, 91, 97, 113, 129, 140,
Jowett, Benjamin 246, 254, 255 157, 172, 194, 196, 197, 205, 211,
justice, injustice 3, 7, 8, 17, 30, 98, 108, 214, 221, 225, 246, 247, 249, 250,
123, 134, 136, 138, 148, 150, 250 254, 256
justification 2, 9, 13, 31, 55, 61, 91, 107, liberation, see: freedom
110, 111, 112–3, 139, 183, 210, 227, literacy, literacy rates 72, 86, 200, 210
254, 280 literature, see: education - literary
Locke, John 2, 3, 4, 5, 103–113, 120,
Kames, see home, Henry 121, 126, 141, 148–9, 151, 154, 157
Kant, Immanuel 160, 163, 165, 171, logic 6, 9, 16, 17, 24, 39, 42, 43–4, 46,
237, 241; Kantianism, neo-Kantianism 49, 52, 55, 57, 59, 62, 67, 69, 81, 216,
31, 115– 116, 163, 164–5, 169, 238, 242, 246, 273, 277, 278, 280
170, 171 love (philia) 10, 11, 13–7, 18, 19, 107,
Kilpatrick, W.H. 269 108, 116, 120, 181, 186, 195, 217,
kingship, see: monarchy 244, 252, 256; love of learning etc 56,
Kingsley, Charles 226 105, 108, 133, 280; see also: eros,
knowledge 3, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 22–4, friendship
29, 34, 35, 40, 41–2, 43, 44, 45, 46, Lowe, Robert 202
48, 53, 54–5, 57–60, 61, 62, 66, 68, Lucan 39
69, 70, 72, 87, 91, 93, 94, 107, 112, Luther, Martin 79
113, 116, 118, 126, 133, 137, 139,
140, 146, 160, 161, 162, 163, 168, Macaulay, Catharine 146–7, 147–8, 149,
171, 173, 182, 184, 191, 195, 196, 150–1, 155, 156
200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 212, 215, MacIntyre, A 32
290 Index
MacLure, William 182 Noddings, Nel 268–9
Manilius 39, 42 norms of conduct 2, 25, 42, 141, 150,
Marcet, Jane 199, 205 153, 184, 195, 233, 244
Marcus Aurelius 38–9, 44–5, 48–9 North of England Council for the Higher
marriage 146, 150, 151, 153, 181, 213, Education of Women 225, 231
228, 255, 258, 263 Northcote-Trevelyan Committee 211
Martineau, Harriet 194–206
Macé, Jean 192 Oakeshott, Michael 238
Makarenko, Anton 192 obedience 84, 87, 89–90, 91, 95–6, 99,
Marx, Karl 178, 190 100, 107, 109
Maurice, F.D. 226 obligation 10, 48, 89, 98, 109, 110, 122,
Mechanics Institutes, The 197, 200, 123, 134, 136, 148
202, 228 original sin, see: Sin
Melancthon, Philipp 79 Owen, Robert 178, 179–85, 186, 191,
meritocracy 147, 162, 170, 211–2 192, 212, 213, 222, 227
militarism, military service, military
training 24, 29, 75, 111, 124, 168, 169, parenting, parents 2, 10, 14, 27, 70, 78,
170, 184, 257 95–6, 103–4, 105, 106–12, 113, 152,
Mill, James 212 153, 154, 155, 170, 183, 184, 188,
Mill, John Stuart 2, 5, 209–222 189, 198, 213, 217, 219, 227, 244, 246
Milton, John 86, 87, 89, 198 Panaetius 38, 40
modern, modernity 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 66, parliament 86, 87, 89, 145, 202, 204,
79, 80, 98, 100, 112, 121, 124, 126, 209, 210, 212, 221
127, 129, 130, 131, 134–6, 137–8, passion, see: emotion
139, 141, 147, 160–3, 167, 171, 178, Pater, Walter 254, 256, 257
181, 188, 195, 201, 245, 249, 256, patriarchy, paternal authority 103, 109,
259–60, 262, 264, 265 112, 123, 182
monarchy 83, 88–9, 103, 127, 147, patriotism 145, 149, 168, 171
149, 155 peace 27, 85, 89, 90–1, 94, 95, 96–7, 99,
monitorial system 183, 202, 216, 222 117, 167, 169, 201
Montessori, Maria 4, 5 pedagogy 1, 49, 57, 61, 62, 79, 108,
Monthly Repository, The 199, 218 240, 249
morality, see: ethics pedagogical method; associationism,
More, Thomas 2, 66, 67, 69, 72–3, 74–8, association of ideas 132–3, 135, 141,
80, 81 150, 195–6, 198, 275; commentary 43;
More, Margaret 72 dialectic 17, 22, 57, 58, 59, 62, 67–8,
Muller, Carl 257, 264 240, 241; demonstration, proof 44, 47,
music, see: education 84, 92, 93, 94, 199–200; enjoyment
Musonius Rufus 38, 39, 44, 45–6, 46–8, 70–1, 196, 200, 203; experiment 194,
49, 50 195, 196, 197; games, play 71, 72,
Myth, Mythology 40, 228 75–6, 79, 108, 148, 183, 184, 190,
239; manipulation, subterfuge 84, 99,
National Association for the Promotion of 135, 140, 146, 155; rote learning,
Social Science 202, 204 memory 87, 185, 203, 222; story telling
nationalism 171, 245 152, 199; see also: teaching
natural law, see: law of nature pederasty 254, 257–8, 259–60, 261,
necessity, necessitarianism 23, 76, 118, 263, 264
122, 126, 134, 148, 198, 212, 240, Peirce, C.S. 267, 274
244, 265, 273 Pestalozzi, Johann 4, 5, 182, 183, 188,
Nederman, C 57, 58, 60, 63, 64 197, 203
Nero, Emperor 186–7 philia, see: love, friendship
New Lanark 179, 180, 181, 182–3, 184 philosophical method 6, 7, 15, 17, 39, 41,
Nightingale, Florence 201, 203 55, 57–8, 75, 79, 87–8, 150, 195, 220,
Index 291
237–8, 245; see also: allegory; 250, 252, 253, 255, 262, 264–5, 268,
consequentialism; contextualism; 274, 275, 280–2; see also: habit,
dialectic; idealism; socratic method; socialisation
philosophy; divisions of 3, 9, 21–2, 31–2, pragmatism 57–8, 234, 267, 270, 274,
35, 38, 39, 42–6, 54–5, 67–8, 104, 275–6, 279
141, 147, 153, 164, 186, 197, 215; pride 78, 107, 138, 165, 190
Purposes of 1, 2–3, 8, 9, 16–7, 23, 38, Priestley, Joseph 195–6, 198, 200, 205
41, 46–9, 76, 80, 84, 116, 140, 169, privacy, private 1, 3, 30, 55, 71, 75–6, 84,
215, 239–40, 241, 246, 261, 267 89, 90, 107, 115, 120, 121, 124, 125,
phronesis 22–3, 26, 32–3, 35 126, 135, 135, 153, 154, 182, 187,
Phronesis Praxis Perspective (PPP), see: 255–6, 282
dunne progress, progressivism 22, 25, 30, 43, 45,
physical education, see: education, 48, 129–30, 147, 161, 163, 165–8,
physical 171, 173, 189, 191, 195, 197, 199,
physics 39, 40, 41, 42–46, 49, 54, 122, 214 200, 201, 205, 214, 215, 222, 227,
piety 7–8, 9–11, 40, 68, 69, 78 238, 239, 244, 269, 270, 271, 272, 277
Plato 4, 7–8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 17–8, 21, 23, property 89, 104, 108, 111, 125, 137,
27, 38, 41, 43, 46–7, 48, 83, 115, 116, 151, 162, 182, 187, 197, 244
126, 134, 176, 220, 237, 254–9, 263; public, public concern, public life 1, 2, 3,
Crito 10; Charmides 7, 11–13; 4, 10, 21, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 49,
Euthyphro 8, 10, 15, 16, 116; Gorgias 7, 59, 69, 73, 75, 76, 83, 85, 87, 89,
16–7; Republic 9, 10, 17, 18, 27, 41, 90–1, 92, 93, 96, 98, 99, 108, 111–2,
116, 134, 178; Symposium 13, 18, 254, 115, 119, 121, 125, 126, 129, 133,
256, 257, 261 135, 136, 151, 153, 157, 160, 162,
Plowden Report 271–2, 281 163, 166, 167, 170, 179, 181, 187,
Plutarch 40, 42 194, 197, 201, 203, 204, 211–2, 216,
poetry 29, 39, 40–1, 189, 196, 212, 217, 218, 221, 226, 227, 229, 244, 245,
219, 220, 231, 245, 256, 258 246, 247, 248, 253, 264, 273, 277,
Polis 23, 24, 27, 115, 118; see also: state 281, 282; see also: schools, public
political science 23–4, 26, 32, 59; punishment 2, 71, 77, 91, 92–3, 95, 98,
aristotelian 21–3 99, 106–7, 111, 113, 123, 148, 150,
political stability, see: stability 156, 162, 179, 184, 188, 197, 203
political theory 24, 59, 66, 98, 129, 148, pupil 40, 47, 72, 169, 185, 212, 216,
153, 156, 157, 220 218, 239, 276; see also: teacher-pupil
polity, political community 3–4, 21, 28, relationship
24, 27, 156
Pope, Alexander 147 Quadrivium 41, 54
Posidonius 39, 40, 47 Quarterly Review, The 200, 205
power, 1–2, 3, 4, 11–12, 15, 59, 63, 67,
74, 91, 93, 98, 103, 106, 109, 111, rationality, rationalism, reason 3, 18, 22,
113, 116, 118, 122, 123, 127, 147, 24–5, 27, 31–2, 34, 44, 46–8, 57, 59,
156, 167, 194, 196, 198, 202, 229, 74, 76, 81, 90–3, 95, 97, 98, 105, 106,
239, 242; political power 1, 3, 4, 61, 118–20, 120, 124, 125, 147–8, 149,
103, 109–10, 157, 161, 168, 181, 269, 152, 154, 156, 157, 171, 244; see also:
279; spiritual, religious, power 99, 230, Justification
246; of prince, of king, of sovereign 49, Rawls, John 1–3, 5, 91, 98
60, 83–4, 85, 89, 90, 95–6, 97 reading 29, 38, 43, 48, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58,
practice 6, 18, 22, 23, 25, 28, 31, 32, 88, 183, 233; see also: signs
33–4, 35, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46–7, 55, reality, realism, realisation 47, 56, 118,
57–8, 59, 61, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 121, 125, 127, 129, 152, 153, 156,
74, 75, 77, 78–9, 80, 83, 97, 105, 111, 178, 188, 192, 200, 219, 228, 237,
115, 132, 185, 195, 201, 211, 225, 238–9, 240, 241–3, 249, 250, 258,
237, 241, 242, 244, 245, 246, 248, 274, 275, 279
292 Index
reformation 67, 78–9 self; self-interest 10, 15, 147, 156, 249;
Reid, Thomas 131 self-cultivation, self-improvement 45,
religion, religious practice 3, 7, 9, 28, 68, 160–73; self-love 14, 15, 43, 117, 118,
75–6, 79, 80, 88, 90, 94, 110–2, 124, 124, 135; self-realisation 188, 250;
136, 140, 141, 146–7, 148, 151, 153, self-understanding, self-knowledge 12,
157, 168, 171, 173, 179, 180, 181, 14, 15, 53
184, 185, 194–7, 227, 230, 232, 233, Seneca 4, 38–43, 45, 46, 48, 88, 186
254, 257, 262, 269; see also: Education, sex 149, 150, 154, 155, 183, 184, 188,
religious 190, 191, 224, 229, 230, 232, 233,
renaissance 21, 22, 63, 66, 67–9, 79 252–5, 258–61, 263–5
republic, republicanism 38, 60, 86, 87–9, sexual difference 149, 151, 226–8, 230,
90, 100, 117, 120–1, 127, 130, 132–4, 233; see also: Gender
149, 155–7, 169, 258–9 Shaftesbury 131
rhetoric 38–40, 55, 57, 58, 67–70, 79, 99, Sidgwick, Henry 231
151, 209 sin 53, 73, 74, 79, 89, 194, 227,
rights X, 60, 85, 88, 91, 99, 146, 149, 230, 272
153, 155, 156, 196, 197, 204, 205, signs, meaning 54, 184; see also:
217, 223–6, 231, 246; to Education 85, interpretation
102–13, 153, 156, 217, 224; to Punish Smith, Adam 130, 131, 134,
111; to Resist 112, 146; to Work 138–40, 244
153, 156 social obligation, see: obligation
Robertson, J. 162 social relationships, society, social
Roman Empire, Roman imperial era 161, structure 43, 51, 72, 73, 107,
38–49 155, 167
Rorem, P. 55 socialisation 1–3, 122, 152, 173, 214
Rousseau, John-Jacques 115–27, 134, socialism 180, 181, 183, 192, 265
136–8, 148–51, 153, 154, 163, 165, social science 129, 130, 204, 214, 219; see
166, 169, 241 also: ‘Ethology’
Society for the Diffusion of Useful
sacred 53–6, 60, 62, 151 Knowledge, The 202
Savigny, Friedrich Carl 161 Socrates 1, 4, 6–10; see also: eros,
scepticism 9, 59, 61, 162 pederasty
Schelling, Friedrich 163 socratic method 6, 8, 10, 15
Schleiermacher, Daniel Friedrich 160–73 Somerville, Mary 203, 205, 225
scholastics, scholasticism 1, 4, 52, 62, 67, soul 7, 9, 11–18, 47, 56, 61, 124
68, 79, 87, 88 Soulsby, Lucy 225
schools; boarding schools 108, 153, 155; sovereignty 4, 85, 88, 91
cathedral schools 52; common school Spalding, Joachim 164
27, 28, 32, 279; free schools 86, 281; spiritualism 179,
French écoles speciales 171; girls’ stability 2–3, 91, 97, 115, 212
schools 225, 226, 253; home school state power 60, 103, 104, 111, 112, 153,
72, 73; Infant Schools, écoles 167, 168, 171; see also: sovereignty,
maternelles 192; national schools 185, polis, power
210; public schools (English)108, 112, Steffens, Halle Henrik 163
216, 218, 226, 252, 253, 263, 280, Stoics, stoicism 38–50, 147–148
282; private schools 153; secondary student life, student culture 17, 167; see
schools 225, 231, 248 also: universities
science 22–3, 24, 41, 59, 85, 90–2, 129, subsistence 187
130, 140, 161, 163–5, 167, 168, 172, suffrage 202, 210, 224; plural voting 210;
173, 189, 195–7, 199, 201, 202, 204, votes for women 210, 234
213–5, 220, 240, 272, 277; see also: Sweeney, E 54, 56
Episteme, Social Science Symonds, John Addington 1, 255–264
secular 52–6, 60–2, 94 sympathy 134, 147, 184
Index 293
Taunton Commission 210, 218, 225 Wallis, John 83
Taylor, Harriet 212, 213 war 14, 84, 163, 184, 247, 248,
Taylor, J 54, 62 259; English civil wars 86, 87,
teacher 17, 22, 43, 44, 48, 52, 69, 71–4, 90, 98
92, 115, 124, 184, 191, 239, 241, Ward, Mary 225
272–273, 280, 282; teacher-pupil Ward, Seth 83–84, 87, 88
relationship 4, 46, 212–213, 252, 263 warrior ideal 259
teaching; as catechism 94; as coaching 25; weakness, human weakness 47, 55, 58,
as imprinting 94, 96–97; as preaching 147, 150, 192, 259
58, 87, 93; see also: pedagogy, Webster, John 83, 87
padagogical method, education Whigs 145, 149
temperance 7–8, 47, 180, 253 Whitman, Walt 260, 262
theology 39–40, 68, 71, 126, 155–156; Wilde, Oscar 254–255, 260, 261, 264
see also: deism, piety Wilderspin, Samuel 192
theory 6, 42, 46–47, 104, 126, 129–141, Wilkins, John 83, 87, 88
151, 267, 268, 269, 275; and practice will 14, 15, 115–127, 148, 156, 164,
33, 46–47, 185, 268, 275, 282; see 242–244; will of God 117, 148; see also:
also: practice free will, general will
Tocqueville, Alexis de 214 William of Conches 56
Tory 145 Winkler, J. 264
trades unions, trades unionism 179, 202 Winstanley, Gerrard 87
Trivium 41, 55–58, 62 wisdom 7–16, 25–26, 41, 47,
truth 2, 21, 24, 40, 59 105; christian 52–61, 150, 153, 167, 195, 199,
truth 54, 68, 75 276, 277
Turnbull, George 130, 131–133 Wollstonecraft, Mary 1, 2, 4, 145–157,
tyranny, tyrant 60, 62 196, 204, 230
Wolstenholme, Elizabeth 224, 227, 228,
unitarianism 194–197 229, 233
universal basic income 187–188; see also: Wordsworth, Elizabeth 225, 230,
equality 231, 232
universe 40, 42, 45, 186 work, see: labour
university, universities 3, 62, 66, 83, women 72–73, 145, 146, 150–151, 154,
85–87, 139, 160–163, 168–172, 219, 195–205, 210, 213, 219, 224–234,
220, 246–248, 254 246, 248; see also: girls
utilitarianism 197, 215, 250 work 29, 46, 76, 156, 183, 187–190, 225,
Utopianism 74–78, 105, 178–192, 237 227–229, 249, 262
worship, see: religious practice
Valla, Lorenzo 67
Veyne, P 42 Xenophon 8, 13,
vices, human vices 25, 61, 73, 76, 107,
131, 153; of rulers 250, 259; Zeno 38, 40, 44, 48
see also: pride Zeus 44; Zeus’s city 44; see also: universe
Vives, Juan Luis 66, 67 Zeitlin, F. 264
virtue 7–9, 24–26, 76–80, 132, 135–136, Zwingli, Ulrich 79
147, 153; citizen virtue 28, 30, 86, 90;
human virtues 7–8, 26, 30, 41; of rulers
61–62, 259; see also: wisdom
Vlastos, G 15

Ideas of Education Philosophy and Politics From Plato To Dewey Christopher

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Ideas of Education

• an analysis of pedagogy, socialisation, schooling, and university education, with

This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and scholars of education,

Christopher Brooke is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Bristol, UK.

Elizabeth Frazer is Official Fellow and Tutor in Politics at New College,

Edited by Christopher Brooke

ISBN: 978-0-415-58252-0 (hbk)

List of contributors vii

Introduction: education and political theory 1

1 Socrates, Plato, erôs, and liberal education 6

2 Aristotle’s educational politics and the Aristotelian

3 Philosophy and education in Stoicism of the

4 Medieval theories of education: Hugh of

5 Education, Erasmian humanism, and More’s Utopia 66

6 Teaching the Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on education 83

7 Locke on education and the rights of parents 103

9 Educational theory and the social vision of the

10 Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay

11 Self-cultivation (Bildung) and sociability between

12 Education and utopia: Robert Owen and

13 Harriet Martineau and the Unitarian tradition

14 J. S. Mill on education 209

15 Feminist thinking on education in Victorian England 224

16 Idealism and education 237

17 ‘Affection in Education’: Edward Carpenter,

18 John Dewey: saviour of American education

Teresa M. Bejan is a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the

Christopher Brooke is Lecturer in Politics in the School of Sociology, Politics

Randall Curren is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester, in

Brian D. FitzGerald is a D.Phil. candidate in Medieval History at Lincoln

Elizabeth Frazer is Official Fellow and Tutor in Politics at New College,

David Leopold is University Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of

Mark L. McPherran is Professor of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University.

John M. Parrish is Associate Professor of Political Science at Loyola Marymount

Richard Pring was Director and Professor of Educational Studies at the

Josephine Crawley Quinn is University Lecturer in Ancient History in the

Patrick Riley is Oakeshott Professor of Political Philosophy Emeritus at the

Alan Ryan teaches at Princeton and is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory at

Alexander Schmidt is a Junior-Professor of Intellectual History at Friedrich

Laura Schwartz is Assistant Professor of Modern British History at the

Alex Tuckness is Professor of Political Science at Iowa State University. He is

Andrew Vincent is Honorary Professor at Cardiff University and Emeritus

Ruth Watts is Emeritus Professor of History of Education at the University of

Socrates and his methods

1 Every kind of creature desires/aims by nature to achieve that kind’s particu-

1 the advancement of a moral proposition p by some interlocutor,

There is no clear scholarly consensus on how Socrates’ method was actually

Elenchos, philia, and erôs

Plato and education

But individuals can be best cared for by a doctor or gymnastic instructor or

Educating is described here as a form of care, an art (technê) comparable to

The contemporary import of Aristotle’s

an academic institution’s mission cannot be understood in a purely or even

Pre-philosophical education: Cornutus and Seneca

Philosophy: logic, physics, ethics

The role of philosophy, the goal of life

Hugh of St Victor: Didascalicon

John of Salisbury: Metalogicon

Education and politics

John’s conception of political power is ‘an entirely personalised one’ (Nederman,

Erasmian humanism as an educative movement

Education in More’s Utopia

Instruction in morality and virtue is considered no less important than