Education, history of philosophy of

5. The Renaissance and Reformation

The Renaissance and Reformation are noteworthy in educational history on many grounds, including the incorporation of the educational ideals and programme of Quintilian into the Christian humanism of Desiderius Erasmus and others; Martin Luther’s translations and promotion of universal, publicly-funded elementary education, so that the common people might read and thereby consult for themselves the Scriptures (see Luther, M.); and the founding of the Jesuit order and its system of colleges by Ignatius Loyola. What inspired the most weighty philosophical response, however, was the turbulent course of the Reformation itself, and the urgent questions it raised about the relationships between church, state, school and individual conscience.

Thomas Hobbes has been neglected by histories of philosophy of education, but a central concern of his Leviathan was to establish the desirability of uniting civil and ecclesiastical authority in a sovereign empowered to use public education to inculcate correct religious and moral beliefs. In both Leviathan and Behemoth, his history of the English Civil War, he attributed social disorder, including conflict and civil war arising from the exercise of individual judgment in religious matters, to faulty instruction from the pulpit and in the universities. This instruction not only incited conflict over theological questions without answers, he argued, but spread doctrines contrary to the natural law of civil and moral duty. Because these doctrines shaped a conception of religious interests linked to the expectation of an afterlife, Hobbes regarded attempts to suppress rebellion by force as futile, and argued that sovereign authority over education and the interpretation of scripture was desirable and necessary to ensure peace.