Education
How people are formed, for better and worse.
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The Republic is a book about justice that turns out to be a book about education, because a just city needs citizens made a certain way, and Plato works out what music they should hear and what stories they should be told from childhood. The Meno asks whether virtue can be taught at all and does not answer. Aristotle’s Ethics says it can, by habit, and the Politics ends unfinished in the middle of a discussion of the school curriculum.
Augustine’s On the Teacher argues that no one can really teach anyone anything; words only prompt the learner to look inside, where the truth already is. Montaigne wrote an essay on the education of children that recommends travel, conversation and no beating. Rousseau’s Emile is a whole boy raised on a system and is the book that founded progressive education. Mill was raised on the opposite system, Greek at three, and wrote an autobiography about the breakdown it produced.
The programs on this site are themselves a theory of education, the one Newman set out in The Idea of a University and Hutchins and Adler put into practice in Chicago: that reading the great books in conversation makes a mind free. Dewey disagreed, and Democracy and Education is the alternative. The argument between them is the argument about what school is for.
