University of Buckingham Press

radical libertarian answer is that the state provides nothing useful that liberty cannot provide better—by free choices, free markets and charity. People are the best judges of how to lead their own lives.

What I am driving at here was nicely expressed by Newton, who described himself and his fellow scientists from the seventeenth century as dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. Even in saying this, the author of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (written in ancient Latin, of course) was echoing the 12th century Bishop of Chartres, John of Salisbury, who said the same thing.

To echo T.S. Eliot, we know more than our forebears, and part of what we know is them.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Set in medieval Nurembe

Tradition and the Individual Talent’, T.S. Eliot’s masterful essay from 1919

Thus, particularly among those who wield power and influence in our educational universe, there are many who see education simply in equipping young people for work in the world as it is to-day, so in terms of skills that might equip them for this work and for living in the modern world; talk of targets might be appropriate here, but this would simply be to underline the distinction between the open-endedness of education and training in the acquisition of clearly defined skills. Then there are those who would see education primarily in terms of the child’s own growth and maturation, largely self-directed and untouched by influences from outside. There are those – and more than one might think – who believe that presenting children with the artistic and literary giants of the past will stunt their innate creativity. There are those who see education in largely
political terms, as aiming to deal with contemporary problems and issues of relevance to-day. There are those who think that what matters in education is the happiness and self-esteem of the child, and that forcing them to learn difficult things and procedures is to oppress them; and going on in that vein, that teaching children the works and values of the high culture of the past is to deny them the validity of their own contemporary culture and enjoyments. There are those who see education as a fundamentally political project, addressing and compensating for past injustices, racism, ideological oppression, and inequality. And there are those who think that educators in the contemporary world have no need to focus on content in their teaching, and especially not content based on past writing and history, because in the age of electronic media everything can be looked up and accessed with the flick of a mouse.

Geography, to take another example, is compromised if the subject is taken, as it often is, as a pretext for getting pupils to pronounce on the supposed fairness or unfairness of global arrangements.

deference to Daisy Christodoulou’s Seven Myths About Education

C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Leo Strauss, F.R. Leavis, Iris Murdoch, Michael Oakeshott, Allan Bloom, Charles Murray).

That ought not to seem so surprising: after all, education and the care of the soul from its infancy was one of Plato’s major concerns, so right from the beginning education has been seen as a philosophical matter: and Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Locke, Rousseau, J.S. Mill, and Dewey, to name only some of the most famous, have all made major philosophical contributions to educational thought and practice.