Sublime

purpose of education.

Selon Peter Gray, il s’agit d’une perte tragique pour nos enfants. Il se situe en cela dans une longue lignée de psychologues, philosophes, anthropologues et enseignants pour lesquels les enfants « par nature, jouent et explorent par eux-mêmes, indépendamment des adultes. Ils ont besoin de liberté pour se développer ; sans quoi ils souffrent. L’ins

Plato believed what so many of us instinctively believe: that the way to produce knowledge is to sit down in a quiet spot and think clearly. The best knowledge comes to him who thinks best. Liberalism holds that knowledge comes only from a public process of critical exchange, in which the wise and unwise alike participate.

A new science of politics is indispensable to a new world. This, however, is what we think of least; launched in the middle of a rapid stream, we obstinately fix our eyes on the ruins which may still be described upon the shore we have left, whilst the current sweeps us along, and drives us backwards towards the gulf.

Few people know very much about why schools exist as they do today; the intellectual traditions that have shaped education seem to be invisible to most observers. This is a strange gap in the knowledge of the public. With physics, most informed laypeople could write a coherent sentence or two about Einstein and Newton. For biology, a page might be

No-holds-barred public debate is the most reliable process for attaining such knowledge, since other processes—accepting another’s authority, following emotions, agreeing with the most attractive advertising, acting on gut-instincts—are not directed toward knowledge and reach it only by accident. The higher the level of public debate—that is, the c

In his book, On Liberty, published in 1859, John Stuart Mill was giving similar advice, arguing that societies need people to embrace their individuality and perform “experiments in living.” He argued that such experiments are vital to the pursuit of knowledge and that cultures only learn and evolve when original approaches to living are discovered

education should be about investigating the solutions to real-world problems.

John Amos Comenius, a Moravian bishop of the seventeenth century, a self-styled pansophist and pedagogue, is rightly considered one of the founders of the modern school. He was among the first to propose seven or twelve grades of compulsory learning. In his Magna Didactica he described schools as devices to “teach everybody everything” and outlined