John Amos Comenius was a Czech educator who promoted ‘universal education’ to solve the problem of human and religious conflict. After the Lutherian Reformation, the idea of education for all took root. As a member of the Unity of Brethren, a group of Protestant reformers, he was educated within this system, as well as receiving a Calvinist education in Herborn and Heidelberg. Living in turbulent…
Desiderius Erasmus was a truly European figure, having worked in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France and England. He is a pan-European figure, the ‘prince of Humanism’ who marks the end of slavish scholasticism and played a role in the Reformation that got his entire corpus prohibited by the Catholic Church. He also marks a change in attitudes towards learning, where the…
Calvin, with Luther, was a hugely influential Protestant reformer who attacked the Catholic Church and worked towards a return to a more basic form of Christianity, based on a personal relationship between God the creator, scripture and his subjects. It is also important to remember that his intellectual lineage is from St Augustine, so predestination (the doctrine that God has eternally chosen…
In Martin Luther’s call for universal education, literacy was part of his programme for ‘reformation’. It was education, schools and literacy that would put young people in touch with the realities of scripture and knowledge, without the mediating power of a priestly elite. Education would produce individuals who had direct access to the good book and therefore God. JUST YOU, the GOOD BOOK and GOD…
Ignatius Loyola was a Basque soldier turned priest who formed the Jesuits, or Society of Jesus, a missionary order driven by a military-type zeal to spread the Catholic faith. He famously said ‘Give me a boy until he is ten, and I’ll give you the man’. Education was to be their primary and most successful weapon. Jesuit education is apostolic and the order demanded missionary and educational…
Although a critic of Al-Ghazzali, Ibn Tufayl follows through in this tradition of educational enlightenment in another part of the Muslim world, modern Spain, in Granada. This was a period of intense intellectual activity in this part of the Muslim world. He wrote a work of fiction Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, (Hayn was here), which was widely admired across Europe for centuries, even by Leibniz and Locke, a…
Al-Ghazzalis was a renowned Muslim scholar, in an age where education, knowledge and scientific endeavour were greatly valued, encouraged and practiced in the Muslim world. Born in Iran, he taught theology and philosophy in that great centre of learning, Baghdad. Familiar with Christian scholars and Greek texts from Plato, Aristotle and others, he remains one of the most influential Muslim…
Augustine was a towering figure in Christian thought throughout the Dark Ages, as he helped transform the world of absolute forms and the world of representation into earthy and heavenly realms, Platonism into Christian theology. He was born in North Africa, then via Rome and a conversion to Christianity in Milan, went back to North Africa as a Bishop. Writing towards the end of the Roman Empire,…
It is claimed that Mohammed was illiterate and the Koran literally the word of God, transcribed by others from his revelations. Mohammed is therefore a prophet and teacher but in reality a mouthpiece for the absolute message of God. Koran and education In Islam, books, especially the Koran, are held in the highest regard and mosques functioned as repositories of books. One even had to wash before…
Jesus, as a teacher, was primarily a man of action but in terms of instruction it was his powerful parables and sermons that stand out in the Gospels. Importantly, there is no sense of exclusion as he encourages shunned lepers, hated tax inspectors, prostitutes, criminals and especially the poor, to receive his message. When it came to powerful messages it was through his individual acts of love,…
The Buddha lived across the sixth and fifth centuries BC, although the exact dates are disputed. Buddhism plays a significant role in education directly and indirectly in China, Japan, Thailand, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Korea, India and Malaysia. Seven countries have Buddhist majorities: Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Laos and Mongolia, where Buddhism plays a…
Like Plato and Aristotle, Confucius (551-479 BC) had his own school, which he started in 552BC. Despite a period of exile he became a very influential official and adviser but it was through his four texts, especially The Analects that his fame was secured. China invented paper and printing which meant that the dissemination of his ideas through texts was also possible, in an early echo of…
Moses is a seminal figure in the religious traditions of Judaism but also Christianity, and Islam. He is recognised as a prophet, lawgiver and leader who lived around the 13th to 15th centuries BC. Born to Hebrew parents in Egypt when the Pharaoh ordered the death of Hebrew male infants, Moses was saved and raised in Pharaoh's palace, then later fled Egypt after killing an Egyptian taskmaster and…
Hypatia (360 - 415 AD) of Alexandria was a renowned philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician in ancient Alexandria. As one of the first female mathematicians about whom substantial details are known, we know that her father was the mathematician and astronomer Theon of Alexandria. Under his guidance, she was educated in an environment where she could flourish academically, eventually surpassing…
Euclid (~ 300 BC) A parallel figure in the foreground of Raphael’s fresco, on the right is Euclid, from the Greek colony Alexandria in Egypt, by far the most important Greek mathematician, leaning down to demonstrate his mathematical proofs, on what looks like a slate, with calipers, where the students are in discussion, working through the proofs in their heads. Again, this contrast exists…
Teacher to Alexander the Great and Plato’s pupil, Aristotle is in some ways a more important educational theorist and philosopher than Socrates or Plato. His work has resonated down the ages, and although we have only fragments from his book On Education, we have enough secondary evidence to piece together his theories on the subject. Empirical, scientific approach Like Plato, he founded a school,…
It is through Plato that we know Socrates, but Plato is no mere mouthpiece. All western philosophy was described by Whitehead as ‘footnotes to Plato’. Like Socrates, he believed in the power of questioning as a method of teaching and most of his writing is in the form of ‘dialogue’. Indeed his dialogues do not feature Plato himself, they illustrate by example his view that learners must learn to…
Socrates was one of the few teachers who died for his craft, executed by the Athenian authorities for supposedly corrupting the youth. That in itself has earned him eternal fame. Most learning professionals will have heard of him through their acquaintance with the ‘Socratic method’ but few will know that he never wrote a single word describing this method, fewer still will know much detail about…
Pre-Socratics Although subjected to criticism, even ridicule by Plato, who used them as a foil in his Socratic dialogues, the Sophists were arguably the first professionally paid teachers, who travelled from city to city during the 5 th century BC teaching for a living. They claimed expertise in philosophy and rhetoric, the latter an important skill in fledgling democracies such as Athens. Hippias…
Egypt In parallel, Egyptian Civilization (c. 3100 - 30 BC), saw hieroglyphic writing emerge around 3200 BCE, contemporaneous with or slightly after the earliest Sumerian writing. Initially used for religious texts and on monuments. Hieratic script, a cursive form used for administrative and literary purposes, developed alongside hieroglyphs. The use of writing expanded in the Old Kingdom (c. 2686…
Sumerians The Sumerian Civilization (c. 4500 - 1900 BC) saw the earliest form of writing around 3200 BC. Cuneiform, first as pictographs, initially used for accounting and recording trade transactions, evolved to include more complex documents, such as laws, administrative records, and literary works. The standardization of cuneiform script made it the lingua franca of trade, diplomacy, and…
It is clear that the brain is an evolved organ with evolved cognitive features such as sensory apparatus and the structure and process of memory. The brain is not, as Locke thought, a tabula rasa, but an active organ structured to learn. This organ evolved to such a degree that it could ‘learn’. How we learn, the essential process of relatively permanent encoding, storage and recall from long-term…