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Humanists explore how an individual's thoughts, beliefs, expectations, and interpretation of the world in addition to their conscious choices, responses to internal needs, and current environment affect their behavior (Penny, et al., no date). According to humanists, humans, unlike animals, are not governed by their instincts. Free will, self-awareness, and an ability to make conscious choices enables humans to defy their psychological and biological foundations to create their own life (Penny, et al., no date; Neft, 1999). According to Maslow’s motivation theory, both internal and external forces control human behavior. Humans have the unique ability to make choices and exercise free-will .

This ability to make choices also allows an individual to deliberately seek out value and meaning. How an individual chooses to find such meaning or value determines their personal identity, which distinguishes them from other people. How an individual views their "self" further influences their behavior as well as providing insight into their emotional state, well-being and judgement. Ultimately, individuals are internally motivated to fulfill their potential (Penny, et al., no date). Although humanistic psychology acknowledges negative and destructive internal forces, it does not de-emphasize an individual’s independent dignity, worth, and their capacity to develop competence and self-respect (AHP, 1996). In order to reach the highest level of self understanding and development, an individual needs three essential components: self-actualization, self-fulfillment, and self-realization (Penny, et al., no date).

Historically, humanistic education can be traced back to the times of classical Athens, with its central notion of Paidiea, and a few centuries later to the times of ancient Rome with it central notion of Humanitas. Up until the eighteenth-century, Humanistic Education and Liberal Education - studia humanitatis and artes liberales - were interchangeable synonyms, designating the education appropriate for a free man. The aim of such education was the attainment of full and worthy human life with the possession of culture and civic spirit. In the last two centuries, however, the cultural trends of the enlightenment – the shift to scientific and critical thinking and to liberal and egalitarian democracy – brought about changes in the theories and practices of humanistic education. It has become much more democratic and pluralistic, open-minded and critical, sensitive and considerate to cultural as well as individual differences and needs. Notwithstanding the differences in approaches and emphases, it seems that all contemporary humanistic educators share a commitment to humanize their students in a spirit of intellectual freedom, moral autonomy, and pluralistic democracy. They strive to provide the kind of education that, on the one hand, liberates their students from the fetters of ignorance, caprice, prejudice, alienation, and false-consciousness, and, on the other, empowers them to actualize their human potentialities and lead autonomous, full, and fulfilling human lives.

Theoretically, Humanistic Education can be classified into four distinct forms or approaches. The first might be called the classical, which inherently implies the existence of an ideal of human perfection that should serve as a universal and objective model for regulating the education of all human beings qua human beings. As mentioned earlier, the origins of this form of humanistic education lie in ancient Athens, especially in the ideas of Pericles, Socrates, Protagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates. A few centuries later it was the Romans who established the studia humanitatis as a normative and formative education for free persons, which aims at the cultivation of sound judgment and noble character.

The Renaissance was the first era in which people called themselves humanists. These humanists were determined to emancipate themselves from the ignorance, dogmatism, and self-abnegation of the "dark ages" towards the kind of truth, beauty, freedom, and dignity that could be produced by the human faculties if only properly cultivated and exercised. It was also these humanists who established the central theme in all classical humanistic education, adopted by Hutchins and Adler, that "no man was considered educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition" and that "the best way to a liberal education in the West is through the greatest works the West has produced." Finally, from the Enlightenment to the end of the 20th century - with the ideas of Kant, Mill, Newman, Arnold, Babbit, Hutchins, Maritain, Libingston, Adler, Kirk and others – classical humanistic education has become more egalitarian, critical, and liberal. Its ultimate ideal, however, has not changed: as put in the words of the Renaissance humanists Pier Paolo Vergerio, humanistic education includes "those studies by which we attain and practice virtue and wisdom; that education which calls forth, trains and develops those highest gifts of body and mind which ennoble man."

The second form of humanistic education is most commonly known as the romantic, naturalistic, or therapeutic approach. It makes its first appearance in the 18th century with the writings of Rousseau who blamed the obsession with cultural progress, encyclopedic knowledge, authoritarian education, and the pursuit of social status for the ills of society and for the production of the alienated, other-directed, and corrupt personality of the bourgeois. Rousseau introduced an alternative conception of the good life that ascribes goodness to man's natural inclinations and self-regulated development, to spontaneous and playful exercise of natural powers, and to self-directedness and personal authenticity. Good human beings, he contended, should manifest holistic integration of sentiment with reason and of personal interest with the common good. These new images of human goodness and naturalistic education have generated in the 19th and 20th centuries a manifold change in educational theory and practice.

In the modern educational thought of Pestalozzi, Froebel, Dewey, Neill, Rogers, Maslow, Combs and others, we encounter all of Rousseau’s basic intuitions. To these they have added the presently familiar notions of care, growth, self-actualization, personal fulfillment, self-regulation, trust, experience, relevance, authenticity, democratic and pedagogical climate – all as growth-promoting conditions for the "young plant" in its continual and self-actualizing process of becoming. In sum, the romantic form of humanistic education can be characterized by its fundamental premise that there exists in every one of us an "inner nature" or a "fixed self" that is fundamentally good and unique, and that pushes to unfold and actualize itself - in accordance with its built-in code - toward healthy existence and full humanity. True education, therefore, consists of careful "drawing out" and attentive actualization of the individual's inner nature.

The third form of humanistic education is existentialist, based mainly on the philosophical insights of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Camus, and Buber. Existenialist educators reject the classical notion of human beings as "rational beings" as well as the romantic assumption that there exists in every one of us an "inner nature" or "fixed self" that is fundamentally good and unique. The alternative advanced by most existentialists is that since the essence of man is freedom, in the matter of values humans can appeal to no external authority, either natural or supernatural, and are therefore destined to choose, define, and create themselves as the true - and therefore responsible - authors of their identities. As Sartre put it, in "The Humanism of Existentialism," "Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself"; and authentic human life, therefore, exhibits an acute sense of self-concern and acceptance of his or her freedom and responsibility for becoming the kind of person he or she eventually becomes. In the light of these philosophical and moral insights, existentialist humanistic educators seek to humanize their students by urging them to pursue neither ultimate truths nor self-realization, but to constantly choose, form, and create their identities and life-projects – enlarging their sense of freedom and responsibility for the meanings, values, and events that constitute the public as well as the private realms of their lives.

The fourth form of humanistic education is most often identified with Radical Education or Critical Pedagogy and with the pedagogical theories of Freire, Apple, Giroux, Simon, and Kozol. From this vantage point, to consider educational issues independent of the larger cultural, social, and economic context involves either serious ignorance or cynical, if not criminal, deception. Poverty, crime, homelessness, drug addiction, wars, ecological crises, suicide, illiteracy, discrimination against women and ethnic minorities, technocratic consciousness, and the disintegration of communities and families, to name some of our most pressing problems, are facts of life that effect directly the physical, emotional, intellectual, and moral development of the great majority of children in our culture. Hence, radical educators argue, "pedagogy should become more political and the political more pedagogical". This implies three major changes in our educational system. It requires, (a) that educational discourse, policy, and practice would deal directly with the notions of power, struggle, class, gender, resistance, social justice, and possibility; (b) that teachers would aim to emancipate and empower their students towards the kind of critical consciousness and assertive point of view that allow people to gain control over their lives; and (c) that teachers, in the words of Giroux, "would struggle collectively as transformative intellectuals...to make public schools democratic public spheres where all children, regardless of race, class, gender, and age, can learn what it means to be able to participate fully in the ongoing struggle to make democracy the medium through which they extend the potential and possibilities of what it means to be human and to live in a just society."

Notwithstanding the differences among these four forms of humanistic education, it seems that in their educational projects of humanization they all accept Whitehead’s point that "there is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations." The business of humanistic education is nothing less than to empower and guide individuals to lead a vital and sound life, marked by wide-awakeness and thoughtful deliberation, moral conduct and political involvement, authentic engagement in life and discriminating appreciation of beauty in both nature and art. Humanistic educators should further seek to develop well-rounded and integral persons whose culture is manifested not only in their broad-learning but also in wise and responsible utilization of knowledge - so that the "tree of knowledge" would also serve as a nourishing "tree of life." Its ideal is to achieve in their students the right integration as well as the right tension between a commitment to high cultural standards and a strong sense of individuality in both the forms of autonomy and authenticity. Finally, to achieve all this, truly humanistic teachers take the responsibility to set personal example in the art of living as well as to create at their schools a pedagogical atmosphere of care, trust, support, dialogue, respect, fairness, tolerance, inquiry, freedom, commitment, responsibility and reciprocity. Without these last elements, even the most beautifully woven theory of humanistic education would fail to become a lived reality for its teachers and students.

Paideia refers to a related set of concepts that were central to the ethos of classical civilization. The meaning of the word changed from the early sixth century B.C., when it referred to childhood education, to the mid-fifth, when it began to refer to education in general and to the civic culture that supported education through the lifespan. The city-state and the citizen were seen to exist in what is essentially an educational relationship in which both the culture and the individual had reciprocal obligations to improve one another. The striving of each individual to achieve arête, or moral excellence, was synonymous with the striving of the community for the common good. Although there could be and was much disagreement over what constitutes arête and the common good, the Athenians of the fifth and fourth century B.C. were of one mind in the belief that what was good for each individual must first be measured by its goodness for the community. The purpose of education was largely to aid the individual and the larger society in their movement toward their telos, or purpose.The great Athenian philosophers Socrates and Plato extended the meaning of paideia to include more than the relationship between the individual and the city-state. They believed paideia was to be gained not from the active life of engagement in the assembly or the marketplace, but rather in a contemplative life of a city that is within. The individual’s object in life is to cultivate the intellect and the individual garden of the soul. http://boomerfrigate.tripod.com/paideia.htm

In ancient Greek, the word Paideia (παιδε?α) means "education" or "instruction." Paideia was "the process of educating man into his true form, the real and genuine human nature."[1] Since self-government was important to the Greeks, Paideia combined with ethos (habits) made a man good and made him capable as a citizen or a king.[2] This education was not about learning a trade or an art, which the Greeks called banausos, and was a mechanical task unworthy of a learned citizen, but was about training for liberty (freedom) and nobility (The Beautiful). Paideia is the cultural heritage that is continued through the generations.

The Greeks considered Paideia to be carried out by the aristocratic class, who were said to have intellectualized their culture and their ideas. The culture and the youth are then 'moulded' to the ideal. Starting in Archaic times love played an important part in this process,[4] as adult aristocrats in most cities were encouraged to fall in love with the youths they mentored. The aristocratic ideal is the Kalos Kagathos; "The Beautiful and the Good." This idea is similar to medieval knights, their culture and the English concept of the gentleman.

Greek Paideia is the idea of perfection, of excellence. The Greek mentality was "to always be pre-eminent." Homer records this charge of King Peleus to his son Achilles. This idea is called arete. "Arete was the central ideal of all Greek culture."[5]In the Iliad, Homer portrays the excellence of the physicality and courage of the Greeks and Trojans. In the Odyssey, Homer accentuates the excellence of the mind or wit also necessary for winning. Arete is a concomitant of what it meant to be a hero and a necessary component in warfare in order to succeed. It is this ability to "make his hands keep his head" against enemies, monsters, and dangers of all kinds, and to come out victorious."[6] This mentality can also be seen in that the Greeks only reproduced and copied the literature that was deemed the 'best.' The Olympic games were products of this mentality. Moreover, this carried over into literature itself with competitions in poetry, tragedy and comedy. 'Arete' was infused in everything the Greeks did. The Greeks described themselves as "Lovers of Beauty." They were very much attuned to Aesthetics. They saw this in nature, and a particular proportion, the Golden Mean (roughly 1.618) and its recurrence in many things. Beauty was not in the superficialities of color, light or shade but in the essence of being which is structure, line and proportion. The Greeks sought this out in all aspects of human endeavor and experience. The Golden Mean (Aristotle) is the cultural expression of this principle throughout the Greek paidea, architecture, art, politics and human psychology.

Isocrates was slightly older than Plato and lived and wrote in the same cultural situation: Peloponnesian War, demise of Golden Age, etc. He was born into the wealthy family of a flute manufacturer and was given the best education available. He studied with a variety of sophists, as well as with Socrates. His family lost its money in the war, and Isocrates was faced with the dilemma of earning a living. He became a lawyer, a speech writer for the courts, for about ten years. We still have some of the speeches he wrote, although he denies that he ever did this.

He wanted to be an orator, but he lacked the strong voice and stage presence (he had stage fright) to do this, so instead he became a teacher of rhetoric. He was very successful at this and became both rich and famous at it. He attracted students from all over the Greek speaking world, many of whom went on to important leaders of their day. Isocrates died at the age of 98. According to tradition he committed suicide by starving himself to death upon hearing of Philip's conquest at the Battle of Charonea. This seems unlikely, since he encouraged Philip to do this.

He thought the tedious, abstract arguments of Plato about metaphysics, epistemology, axiology and human nature were so much jibberish. He was a practical, down-to- earth man who wanted to solve mmediate problems. Reality is immediate human experience: "What you see is what you get." Metaphysical speculation is a waste of time and energy. Knowledge is tentative. We can't know anything for sure. What we can have is good opinions. A good opinion is one that helps explain life in a way that helps me get along in the world. Correspondence to ultimate reality is not important.

Values are relative. Isocrates agrees with Plato in promoting traditional Greek values, but he does it for different reasons. Isocrates believes those values are useful, but not necessarily the true values. Plato wanted to develop in the people a passion for those values because they are real and eternal and never changing. Therefore, they could give a unity of purpose and meaning to Athenian life - a reason for living and participating. Isocrates realized that his relativistic value system did not have the psychological force to draw people together into the common bond of unity and fraternity that would stabilize society. Therefore, he promoted a political ideal which he thought could unify: panhellenism. How could this political ideal be achieved? Only through education. Isocrates, like many modern thinkers, tends to view education as the savior of the world. Human nature is distinctive because of man's ability to communicate, to speak. It appears as though Isocrates may see this as a quantitative, rather than qualitative difference.

Erasmus (1466-1536), attacked the religious teaching and thought prevalent in his time to focus on free inquiry and rediscovery of the classical roots from Greece and Rome. Erasmus believed in the essential goodness of children, that humans have free will, moral conscience, the ability to reason, aesthetic sensibility, and religious instinct. He advocated that the young should be treated kindly and that learning should not be forced or rushed, as it proceeds in stages.

The Dutch humanist, Desiderius Erasmus, was born at Rotterdam, apparently on October 28, 1466, the illegitimate son of a physician's daughter by a man who afterwards turned monk. He was called Gerrit Gerritszoon (Dutch for Gerard Gerardson) but himself adopted the tautalogical double name by which he is known. He attended the school of the "Brothers of the Common Life" at Deventer. On his parents' death his guardians insisted on his entering a monastery and in the Augustinian college of Stein near Gouda he spent six years -- it was certainly this personal experience of the ways of the monks that made Erasmus their relentless enemy. At length the Bishop of Cambrai made him his private secretary. After taking priest's orders Erasmus went to Paris, where he studied at the Collège Montaigu. He resided in Paris until 1498, gaining a livelihood by teaching. Among his pupils was Lord Mountjoy, on whose invitation probably Erasmus made his first visit to England in 1498. He lived chiefly at Oxford, and through the influence of John Colet his contempt for the Schoolmen was intensified.

In 1500 he was again in France, and for the next six years lived chiefly at Paris. To this period belong his Adagia and Enchiridion Militis Christiani. In 1506 he made a short visit to England, carried out a long-desired journey to Italy, and at Padua acted as tutor to Alexander, Archbishop of St. Andrews, natural son of James IV of Scotland. His visit closed with a short stay in Rome, whence he carried away a far more friendly impression than did Luther when he made his visit.

The accession of Henry VIII, and the invitation of Lord Mountjoy, induced Erasmus once more to make England his home. In his satire, Encomium Moriae (1509), we have him in his happiest vein, as the man of letters and the critic of kings and churchmen. Erasmus resided chiefly at Cambridge, where he acted as Margaret professor of Divinity and professor of Greek. After 1514 he lived alternatively in Basel and England, and from 1517 to 1521 at Louvain. In 1519 appeared the first edition of his Colloquia, usually regarded as his masterpiece. The audacity and incisiveness with which it handles the abuses of the Church prepared men's minds for the subsequent work of Martin Luther.

In 1516 was published his annotated New Testament, virtually the first Greek text, and in 1519 his edition on St. Jerome in nine folio volumes. In both of these works the aim of Erasmus was to introduce a more rational conception of Christian doctrine, and to emancipate men's minds from the frivolous and pedantic methods of the Scholastic theologians. But when the Lutheran revolution came he found himself in the most embarrassing position. Those of the old order fell upon him as the author of all the new troubles. The Lutherans assailed him for his cowardice and inconsistency in refusing to follow up his opinions to their legitimate conclusions. In 1521 he left Louvain, where the champions of the old faith had made his stay unendurable and with the exception of six years in Freiburg, he spent the rest of his life at Basel.

He edited a long succession of classical and patristic writers, and was engaged in continual controversies. The most important of these were with Ulrich von Hutten, Luther, and the Sorbonne, Hutten judged Erasmus harshly for not taking his place by the side of Luther; and with Luther himself Erasmus, after long hesitation, crossed swords in his De Libero Arbitrio (1523). Attacked by men like Hutten on the one side, he was as fiercely assailed on the other by the Sorbonne. By his Ciceroniansus he raised against himself new adversaries -- those humanists, namely, who set style above matter. Yet during his last years Erasmus enjoyed great fame and consideration. He died July 12, 1536.

Erasmus stands as the supreme type of cultivated common sense applied to human affairs. He rescued theology from the pedantries of the Schoolmen, exposed the abuses of the Church, and did more than any other single person to advance the Revival of Learning.

The merchants are the biggest fool of all. They carry on the most sordid business and by the most corrupt methods. Whenever it is necessary, they will lie, perjure themselves, steal, cheat, and mislead the public. Nevertheless, they are highly respected because of their money. There is no lack of flattering friars to kowtow to them, and call them Right Honorable in public. The motive of the friars is clear: they are after some of the loot. . . .

Humanists believe that the learner should be in control of his or her own destiny. Since the learner should become a fully autonomous person, personal freedom, choice, and responsibility are the focus. The learner is self-motivated to achieve towards the highest level possible. Motivation to learn is intrinsic in humanism.

Humanism was developed as an educational philosophy by Rousseau (1712-1778) and Pestalozzi, who emphasized nature and the basic goodness of humans, understanding through the senses, and education as a gradual and unhurried process in which the development of human character follows the unfolding of nature.

There is an intelligent will. This will moves the universe and gives life to nature. Rousseau calls this intelligent will ‘God’. With this ‘intelligent will’ or ‘God’ he connects intelligence, power, will and kindness. He knows that God exists and believes that his own existence is subordinate to God’s. Therefore he worships and serves God. He perceives God in all his works and feels Him inside himself. In human nature he recognises two clearly distinct principles. One elevates humans so that they search for the eternal truths - love, justice and morality - and so that they are lifted into the regions of the spirit. The other drags humans down into themselves, to be ruled by the senses and the passions. Humans are free in their actions. They are free beings animated by an immaterial substance which survives physical death. Evil does not come from God, but from humans. God does not want evil, but does not stop humans from committing evil, because he does not want to restrict their freedom. God created humans as free beings, so that they could choose to not commit evil and to do good. The conscience of humans knows what justice and virtue are and always tells them what is good. As for the Bible, it speaks to Rousseau’s heart, but he does not accept it as binding revelation. http://www.heinrich-pestalozzi.de/en/documentation/fundamental_ideas/religion/

We are perhaps hearing too much of Rousseau these days, and he threatens to become a kind of fetich of criticism. To the French he is, more than any other one man, the author of the Revolution with all the subsequent good or evil implied in that movement. And now the Germans have discovered in him the father of their romanticism. "In reality his influence is accomplished on German soil," says Paul Hensel in the latest monograph on the subject; "here Rousseau was not the basis of a guillotine, but of a new culture .... Kant and Herder, Goethe and Schiller are not to be conceived without Rousseau, and through them is formed the new science, the new philosophy, the new poetry of German idealism." One has an impulse to avoid a theme that has grown cheap from too much writing of this sort; but how escape the writer who gathered up in himself the floating ideas of his age, and, by simplifying them to a portable creed and infusing into them the carrying power of his own great personality, made them the chief formative influence down to our own times?

Only by keeping in view this new emotional element can we understand how the intellectual life of to-day has its source in Rousseau more than in any other single man, for the ideas themselves--liberty and progress and natural religion and innate goodness--were in no wise original with him. If, indeed, disregarding the complexities of a civilisation and obscurer influences, we undertake to analyse the revolution of the eighteenth century, we shall find that the guiding principles and the original dynamic impulse of the age came from England, that the translation of these into a homogeneous social law was the work of France, and that their conversion into a metaphysical formula was finally accomplished by Germany. Certainly, the starting place of this movement, the caldron, so to speak, in which this great fermentation began, was the turbulent England of the seventeenth century. There, the notion of liberty took practical form in the acts of the Rebellion and the Revolution and in the writings of such republicans as Algernon Sidney. Is it not almost, if not quite, the accent of Rousseau's Contrat Social we hear in Sidney's brave reply to Hobbes and Filmer: "If men are naturally free, such as have wisdom and understanding will always frame good governments; but if they are born under the necessity of a perpetual slavery, no wisdom can be of use to them"? Certainly, too, the most fecund idea taken over by the nineteenth century from its predecessor, the conception of indefinite moral progress based on the accumulating knowledge of physical laws, had been proclaimed by Bacon with the grandiose fervour of a Hebrew prophet. And the accompanying change of religion from a belief in superrational revelation to a rational deism was also formulated in England. It was Lord Herbert of Cherbury who, as far back as 1624 in his De Veritate, gave the first clear exposition of religion as the product of a purely natural instinct. Later he resolved this religious instinct into five theses which became the "charter of the deists," and which may be found simplified and summed up in the three articles of Chubb's True Gospel. There is, if we may believe that inspired tallow-chandler of Salisbury, no demand in the Gospel for subscribing to a supernatural scheme of salvation, nor is the new birth anything more than a "figure of speech." On the contrary, "the Gospel of Christ is a plain, simple, uniform thing," as thus:

It is worth while to quote this remarkably lucid summary of deism, unobscured as it is by the glamour of the imagination thrown over the creed by Shaftesbury and his school, if only to show how closely Rousseau, who was well-read in these authors, adhered to his sources. Here, in a paragraph, is the whole skeleton of the Profession de foi. And here in few words is, without the surrender of a religious semblance altogether, the last and inevitable stage of that Pelagianism against which St. Augustine had for the time inveighed so successfully and under which the Port-Royal of Pascal was at last beaten down.

It is by no means easy to trace the evolution of our secular belief in the essential goodness of human nature. It was implicit, no doubt, in the first contention of Pelagianism that salvation is primarily the work of man, but it has become the driving force of society only since the notion of a needed reconciliation with God has been quite eliminated. Nor was it a product of the Renaissance in so far as that movement implied a return to the past. Total depravity may have been Christian and mediaeval; but total goodness can find no authority in the classical writers of Greece and Rome, and is, in fact, the mark of modern humanitarianism as distinguished from Renaissance humanism. It should seem to be rather a secularisation of mediaeval theology, if such a term is not self-contradictory. Grant the longing for personal justification and supreme bliss which passed from the Middle Ages into the freer emotional life of the Renaissance, take away the supernatural scheme of redemption, and the Pelagian confidence in man's ability to satisfy God might easily pass into a belief that human nature, being essentially right, has within itself the power to expand indefinitely, without any act of renunciation, toward some far-off, vaguely-glimpsed, "divine event."

The ideas of progress and innate goodness are thus companions; they sprang up side by side with humanism, but they are not a product of the classical revival in the sense that humanism was such a revival, and in the end they killed humanism. Nothing is more curious throughout the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century than the way in which the contradictory notions of essential evil and essential goodness alternate with each other, sometimes in the same writer. The neo-classicists as a rule, the great human moralists of France, have no doubt of the inherent selfishness and depravity of the human heart; and a pure sceptic like Bayle, at a time when deism was in full vein, can still be absolutely convinced that "man is incomparably more drawn to evil than to good." The English deists on the other hand were necessarily driven to believe in man's native soundness; for what indeed is the excuse for natural religion if nature is estranged from the supreme good? Yet even here there are strange compromises and inconsistencies. A Bolingbroke might preach philosophically that this is the best of worlds, but as a politician and somewhat deeply versed man of the world he treated mankind with a perfectly cynical distrust. Nowhere does this contrast glare more impudently than in Pope, who learnt his satire from Dryden and the nco-classicists and his optimism from Bolingbroke and the deists; and Pope, it must be remembered, was accepted seriously as a moral teacher not only in England but in France and Germany as well. Nothing is more bewildering than to read Pope's general justification of human passions and instincts in his Essay on Man and then in the same poem to find his scathing denunciation of these passions in a Bacon or a Gripus (his friend Mr. Wortley Montagu). On one page we find this pleasant optimism:

The surest virtues thus from passions shoot,
Wild Nature's vigour working at the root;

As man, perhaps, the moment of his breath,
Receives the lurking principle of death;
The young disease, that must subdue at length,
Grows with his broth and strengthens with his strength;
So, east and mingled with his very frame,
The mind's disease, its ruling passion came.

Pope might try to carry this double-faced attitude off under the effrontery of assuming an enormous paradox in the nature of things, but it was in truth a real inconsistency due to the confusion of two diverse tendencies of thought. Did not Voltaire also, the spokesman of the age, pass his life ridiculing the pretensions of mankind to virtue and at the same time advocating the liberation of mankind from the restraints that would keep vice within bounds? It required more than one century to root out the ancient conviction that the heart of man is naturally disposed to evil.

Meanwhile, it is dear that these dominating ideas of the age, whether they received their vital force from England or France or elsewhere, all imply a denial of that sense of dualism which hitherto had lain at the base of religion and philosophy, and that lacking this sense they seem always to be shirking certain of the more troublesome problems of life. The artificiality of that literature has become a proverb. This is not to say that the eighteenth century did not have its own theories of dualism. There was in Germany, for instance, that amusing doctrine of the harmonia praestabilita, spun by a discursive wit who imposed on the world as a profound philosopher. "The soul," says Leibnitz, "follows its proper laws, and the body likewise follows those which are proper to it, and they meet in virtue of the preestablished harmony which exists between all substances, as representations of one and the same universe." According to which system, "bodies act as if there were no souls, and souls act as if there were no bodies, and yet both act as though the one influenced the other," etc. But these vagaries of a mechanical parallelism are, so to speak, a by-product of the age, developed from the metaphysics of Descartes, aside from the naturalistic influences of England. The dominating line of thought runs from Newton and Locke,[2] who formulated the laws of nature in the physical world and in the human intellect, through the French philosophes, to Condillac, who banishes dualism so far as to derive the whole man, including Locke's reflective faculty, the moral sense, and consciousness, from the effect of physical impact.

One thing was wanting to all these theories--to the dead parallelism of Leibnitz, to the moral rationalism of Toland and Chubb, to Shaftesbury's florid deism of the imagination, to the cynical or boisterous philosophy of Voltaire and Diderot--they all excluded the sense of that deep cleft within the human soul itself, which springs from the bitter consciousness of evil. This, in a way, Rousseau supplied, and through him what was a theme of speculation for the few was vivified into a new gospel.

How thoroughly Rousseau was a child of his age is proved by the continual recurrence of English names in his works. Intellectually, he has little that is original; his deism, his passion for liberty, his doctrine of instinctive goodness, are all avowedly from over the sea, and even his minor ideas can, for the most part, be traced to various predecessors. It was because he made all these subservient to a passionate proclamation of a dualism between the individual and society, between nature and art, that he became so powerfully provocative of change. In a way, even this dogma--for it is as arbitrary a dogma as any set up by St. Augustine--was not his own. It may be found implicit in English deism, in the discrepancy between Pope's praise of the savage, to whom "full instinct is the unerring guide," and his satire of a malignant society; it underlies the Night Thoughts of Young:

In his Fable of the Bees Mandeville had given it an odd twist by vindicating the old notion of inherent evil and making the progress of society depend on this corruption of the individual. But these were unfruitful hints and thoughtless inconsistencies; they became a social force through the temperament of one man who, as Madame de Stael said, discovered perhaps nothing, but set everything ablaze.

From lonely brooding on his own divided self, Rousseau was led to erect the dualism implicit in the philosophy of his day into a formula with all the popular persuasiveness of a religion. The Pelagian doctrine of man's potential goodness united with his intense egotism to create the idea of the individual, conceived in himself and unmodified by others, as a pure uncontaminated product of nature. He, Rousseau, was, he felt, by his instincts good, yet he was painfully aware of his actual lapses into turpitude and shame; he could only shift the responsibility of this corruption upon outside influences. Here was no room for the Augustinian idealisation of the good in man as an infinite God set over against the finite and hence erring natural man, nor for the conception of man as bearing within himself infinitely diverse promptings toward good and evil; on the contrary, he was driven to the idealisation of his own personality, and of every personality in so far as he projected himself into another, as good, and of other personalities, in so far as they are hostile to him and limit or pervert his native proclivities, as evil. Hence the dualism of the individual regarded in the state of nature and in the state of society, of the one and the many without the old accompaniment of the infinite and the finite. And evil to Rousseau was not a thing of jest and satire, but, by the whole weight of his emotional being, a power to be feared and spurned. As embodied in society it looms up in his writings like some living and malign monster, lying in wait to corrupt and destroy the unwary individual. It is the Devil of the mediaeval monks reborn in the height of the boastful age of reason to trouble the consciences of men, for who can say how long a time.

The first serious work of Rousseau was the prize essay, written at the age of thirty-eight, on the question proposed by the Academy of Dijon as to Whether the Progress of Science and Art has Contributed to Corrupt or Purify Morals. Either by the advice of Diderot or, more probably, by the natural bent of his mind, he there advocated the thesis, by no means so novel as he seems to have believed, that civilisation results in the perversion of society. It is at best a slight academic exercise, but it fell in with the mood of the day sufficiently to arouse discussion, and gave the author a position to defend. Five years later, in 1755, he published his Discourse on Inequality, in which this theory is found fully developed. Here we have the picture of primitive man, living in solitude, mating by chance, and following undisturbed his healthy animal instincts. The first law of nature is love of self, and in this paradise of primeval isolation there is nothing to distort that innocent impulse. When by chance man meets with man he is kept from wrongdoing by the feeling of sympathy and pity which is, after the instinct of self-preservation, the second law of nature. But--"The first man who, having enclosed some land, thought of saying 'this is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civilised society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors would have been spared human nature had some one snatched away the stakes, or filled in the ditch, calling out to his neighbours: 'Beware of listening to this impostor'!"[3] With the acknowledgment of property comes the division of more and less out of which springs all the brood of ambitions, crimes, penalties. Sympathy is stifled in envy, and harmless amour de soi-meme is converted into that social disease amour-propre; in a word, property means society. There is nothing fanciful in comparing this marvellous change from the individual in a state of natural innocence to the same individual as corrupted by society with the theological doctrine of the Fall. They are both an attempt to transfer the inexplicable dualism within the heart of man to some ancient mythological event; nor does Rousseau denounce the evil introduced by property with less unctuous and priestly fervour than was used by a Bossuet in laying bare the depths of total depravity. For the rest of his life he merely developed in various ways the thesis of his Discourse on Inequality. As he said himself at the end of his career, speaking of his own works:

Following as best I could the thread of his meditations, I saw everywhere the development of his main principle, that nature has made man happy and good, but that society depraves him and renders him miserable. And particularly Emile, that book so much read, so little understood, and so ill appreciated, is nothing but a treatise on the original goodness of man, with the aim of showing how vice and error, strangers to his constitution, are introduced from without and imperceptibly work a change.

In reality Emile is something more than a treatise on original goodness; it is an elaborate plea for a form of education by which the individual may be rescued from the perverting influences of society and restored to his primitive state of innocence. It is thus in a manner to the Discourse what Paradise Regained is to Paradise Lost. The instincts implanted in the child by nature are right; therefore the aim of education is to place the child in such a position that these instincts may develop freely without any thwarting control from master or society. To this end he separates his typical child Emile from family and comrades, and gives him a home in the country with a guardian, whose duty is, not to instruct, but to preserve him from physical accidents, and to act as a kind of concealed Providence. Books during his early years are eschewed; all information is brought to the boy through the pleasure of observing natural processes and through play cunningly directed to manual training. Such a plan is, as Rousseau willingly acknowledged, impossible except for a favoured few, if not for all; but as an ideal toward which education might tend, it has exercised through the theories of Pestalozzi, Froebel, and other German pedagogues an enormous influence, and is still to-day the inspiration of most writers on education. In part the book is admirably wise; in its provision for training the body, in many other details, even, one gladly admits, in its opposition to an unreasoning system of compression, it was not only a wholesome reaction from the practice of the day, but is full of suggestions of permanent value. But there is a growing belief among a certain class that the fundamental thesis of the book has worked, and is still working, like a poison in the blood of society. To make instinct instead of experienced judgment the basis of education, impulse instead of control, unbridled liberty instead of obedience, nature instead of discipline, to foster the emotions as if the uniting bond of mankind were sentiment rather than reason, might seem of itself so monstrous a perversion of the truth as to awaken abhorrence in any considerate reader. And, indeed, these notions were slow in making their way against long-established traditions. Yet so honorable is the name of liberty, even when it is a mask for license, so flattering is the appeal to the individual's desire of unchecked autonomy, that Rousseau's "education of nature" has deeply modified, if it has not entirely transformed, the practice of our schools. It is seen at work in the vagaries of the elective system, in the advocating of manual training as an equivalent for books, in the unbounded enthusiasm for nature-study, in the encroachment of science on the character-discipline of the humanities, in the general substitution of persuasion for authority. To some observers certain traits of irresponsibility in the individual and certain symptoms of disintegration in society are the direct fruit of this teaching.

To find the source of the nature-cult raised by Rousseau to so predominant a place in imaginative literature it might seem sufficient to go back to English naturalism, and no doubt many pages of the Nouvelle Heloise and of Emile were in this respect inspired by Shaftesbury and Thomson and the other deists. More particularly The Wanderer (1729) of Richard Savage and that strange and neglected book, The Life of John Buncle (published in 1756, five years before the Nouvelle Heloise), are filled with a Rousselian mixture of deistic enthusiasm and grandiose eloquence on the aspect of romantic mountain scenery. But there is withal a new accent in Rousseau, which derives its penetrating quality from his developed dualism of the individual and society, and which renders him the true father of modern nature-writing. Man before the social Fall was a compound of harmless self-love and sentimental sympathy. Whoever seeks any spark of this innocence in an age when self-love is changed to egotism and sympathy to envy must go out from society and make his peace alone with Nature. There, by a pathetic fallacy, the sympathy which he vainly demands of men flows to him freely from the beauty and solitude of the inanimate world; there he meets no contrary will to frustrate his own, nothing to prevent him from personifying his emotions in some alter-ego that smiles at him benignly from field and brook, echoes his loneliness, and weeps with his self-pity.

From this it is but a step to the religion of Nature. Everybody is familiar with the scene in Emile where the Savoyard vicar leads his young friend at sunrise to a hill rising above the fair valley of the Po and looking off afar to the chain of the Alps, and there in language of melting charm expounds his profession of faith. There is much that is discordant in the ideas of that document. The retention of the old belief in a heaven and hell has no justification in Rousseau's theory of man's essential goodness, and in fact might without injury be removed from his profession. The gist of his faith is a pure deism, a trustful reliance on some beneficent God who is united with Nature by a mutual sympathy corresponding to that which he himself feels, and who is in fact no more than a magnified projection of his own innocent personality into the infinite void--himself and Nature, God and Nature. Beyond this is no need of dogma or revelation or faith. Rousseau felt the instability of such a religion, and recommended a compliance with the popular forms of worship in whatever land a man might be, as a guide and stay, so to speak, to this vague emotionalism. It is a pretty theory, not without its advantages, and has warmed the fancy of more than one poet to noble utterance. But it has one insurmountable element of weakness. It depends for its strength, for its very vitality, on the more precise faith of those whose worship it adopts. So long as these believe energetically in the virtue of forms and creeds, your deist may prey upon their emotions; but a lasting church made up of deists is inconceivable. Rousseau's deism in fact came toward the end and not at the beginning of a movement; it flashed out into a grotesque worship of the Etre Supreme at the Revolution, but it has had no permanent and fruitful results. Rousseau has, more than any other one man, given us our religion of today, but it is a religion of the State, and not of God.

That change from theology to sociology is announced in the most radical of his works. "There is then," he says, "a profession of faith purely civil of which it pertains to the sovereign [people] to fix the principles, not exactly as dogmas of religion, but as sentiments of sociability without which it is impossible to be a good citizen or a faithful subject." The determining principle of this creed is the sanctity of the Social Contract as he has developed it in his treatise of that name. Man, he declares in his opening sentence, with that precision and vehemence that have made his words the battle cry of revolution --"man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Property has introduced a harsh inequality among men, and established those conventions of society upon which rests the right of the stronger. There is but one way in which liberty can be restored: society itself must be transformed into a composite individual equivalent so far as possible to the isolated individual in the state of nature. That is the work of the Social Contract. His theories reduce themselves to this single proposition:

The complete alienation of each associate with all his rights to the whole community; for, in the first place, each man giving himself entirely, the condition is equal for all; and, the condition being equal for all, no one has any interest in rendering it burdensome to the others [oh, most holy innocence!] .... Each of us places his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and we receive back each member as an indivisible part of the whole.

It would not be fair to say that Rousseau himself was unaware of the absurdity in supposing that all men, granted even that the nature of humanity is essentially good, will thus surrender their separate desires and ambitions to this phantom of the common interest; he endeavours to obviate such criticism by a shadowy distinction between the volonte generale and the volonte de tous, and indeed, it must be remembered that always he has in mind an ideal rather than any facile and probable revolution. At bottom his proposal comes to this: by some persuasion of a divine legislator (he has an eye on himself) or some intervention of Providence that sense of sympathy, which we found in the natural man along with a harmless self-love, may miraculously take possession of mankind, now corrupted by society into a conglomeration of warring egotisms, and transform that society itself into a quasi individual with a single purpose and a single will; and so the antinomy of the one and the many shall be finally solved. It is a vain utopia or a prophecy of terrible despotism, as you will; but you cannot doubt that this ideal of social sympathy has wrought enormously in the civilisation of the present day.

In part, Rousseau's influence was gained by his pure literary talent. His was the faculty of creating phrases which remain in the memory after all the inconsistencies and chimerical follies of his writings have been forgotten, and which ring like trumpet calls to action. But beneath it all lies the daemonic personality of the writer, the inexplicable force that imposed the experience of this man Rousseau--vagabond as he was, a foe of convention, betrayer of sacred trust, morbid self-analyst ending with fixed hallucination of a conspiracy of society against him--the magic glamour that imposed the private emotions of this man upon the world. As the creed of Christianity came to the Middle Ages coloured by the intense self-absorption of St. Augustine's Confessions, so the new faith has flamed up from the Confessions of Rousseau. The Roman had set an example for the pride of the saints; our modern confessor proclaimed a similar pride for all the weak and downtrodden. In the audacity of his self-justification as of one who dares say I am that I am, in his boastful admission that it was always impossible for him to act contrary to his inclination, in his defiant cry against a Providence that caused him to be born among men yet made him of a different species from them, in all this itching to exhibit himself, he was the father of romanticism and of a morbid individualism that seeks to hide itself under the cloak of a collective ideal.

For in reality his double motive of self-love and sympathy was one thing, and not two. The full development of the notion of sympathy will be found in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, where either independently or through the influence of Rousseau's Discourse morality is based systematically on that sense. Both the Scot and the Frenchman would perhaps admit that, to a certain extent, sympathy, as the faculty of putting one's self in the place of another, is a phase of amour-propre, in so far as we are led thereby to convert the pain of others into fear for ourselves and the joy of others into hope for ourselves. But neither of them recognises the cognate truth that when the condition of others is conceived in a causal relation to ourselves this order is reversed. That is to say, if the pain or loss of another in any way contributes to our own advantage, we rejoice in it, even when the feeling of uneasiness remains more or less consciously present; and contrariwise with the joy or gain of another which effects our own disadvantage. Thus a son must harbour some satisfaction in the death of a father whereby he comes into an estate; while at the same time he may feel a sorrow derived both from the severance of long ties and from the uneasy foreboding of his own future fate as brought home to him by the present example. It is because of this ambiguous character of sympathy that it can never take the place of discipline and justice in regulating the affairs of men; as it is at best an extension of self-love, so it is always, when interests clash, in peril of unmasking as downright selfishness. A little honest observation of the actual working of Rousseauism in modern society would confirm this opinion only too cruelly.[4]

It will have been remarked that one leading idea of the eighteenth century finds no place in Rousseau's system; the idea of progress he even repudiated. Yet, by a paradox, the believers in progress have found in him weapons ready-forged to their hands; for that doctrine, it is clear, derives its strength from a trust in the essential and natural rightness of human instincts, which need only freedom to develop into right institutions. In practice, however, this faith in evolution has assumed seemingly diverse forms as it has attached itself to the principle of self-love or sympathy. On the one hand we have the unabashed acceptance of egotism as worked out in the philosophy of Nietzsche, and as shown in the unconscious acts of the dominant controllers of the material world. Nietzsche's theory is beautifully simple. Society as he sees it now existent is a conspiracy against the individual. The religious creeds, with their preaching of sympathy and renunciation, the curbing laws of the State, are merely an organised hypocrisy by which the few strong are held in subjection to the many weak. In time the Will to Power (der Wille zur Macht) will become conscious and assert itself; then the instincts of the strong will break from pusillanimous control, and we shall have an harmonious civilisation in which the few, following their unhampered desires, will rise on the labours of the submissive many, as now man makes use of a beast of burden. On the other side stands the whole group of theories known as Socialism. To Marx and his followers mankind is divided between the great mass of workers and the few capitalists who by the iron law of wages exploit them ruthlessly. Such a condition is the result of economic evolution; it will be cured when the workers, through the growth of class-consciousness, learn their sovereign power, and take full possession of the sources of production and wealth. Competition and all its consequent suffering will thus cease when the people are welded into a unit by sympathy. The workers are in the solidarity of their interests a kind of individual oppressed and corrupted by the privileged class who represent the traditional institutions of the State.

It might seem fanciful to derive systems so contrary in tendency from the same origin, yet both are alike in that they regard the evils of civilisation as caused by that dualism of the individual and society, which was imposed upon the world as a new religion by one who sought in this way to escape the burden of personal responsibility. Both look to relief in the solution of that antinomy through the application of natural science to human affairs and through the resulting free development of man's natural instincts, one in the direction of egotism, the other of sympathy. Nor is this difference of direction so real as may appear. It is like a bad jest to suppose that under the Nietzschean regime, when the liberated superman has thrown off all sense of responsibility and self-control, the masses would not be driven by unity of interests to combine for retaliation. To many it will seem an equally bad jest to pretend that a social sympathy based avowedly on class hatred would not, if relieved from the constraint of that opposition, fly into an anarchy of egotisms. One wonders curiously, or sadly sometimes, that the preachers who abdicate the fear of God for humanitarianism, and the teachers who surrender the higher discipline for subservience to individual choice, do not see, or, seeing, do not dread, the goal toward which they are facing. We are perhaps hearing too much of Rousseau these days, and he threatens to become a kind of fetich of criticism. To the French he is, more than any other one man, the author of the Revolution with all the subsequent good or evil implied in that movement. And now the Germans have discovered in him the father of their romanticism. "In reality his influence is accomplished on German soil," says Paul Hensel in the latest monograph on the subject; "here Rousseau was not the basis of a guillotine, but of a new culture .... Kant and Herder, Goethe and Schiller are not to be conceived without Rousseau, and through them is formed the new science, the new philosophy, the new poetry of German idealism." One has an impulse to avoid a theme that has grown cheap from too much writing of this sort; but how escape the writer who gathered up in himself the floating ideas of his age, and, by simplifying them to a portable creed and infusing into them the carrying power of his own great personality, made them the chief formative influence down to our own times?

First, he [Christ] requires and recommends [note the curiously unreligious word] a conformity of mind and life to that eternal and unalterable rule of action which is founded in the reason of things, and makes or declares that compliance to be the only, and the sole ground of divine acceptance, and the only, and the sure way to life eternal. Secondly, if men have lived in a violation of this righteous law, by which they have rendered themselves displeasing to God, and worthy of his just resentment; then Christ requires and recommends repentance and reformation of their evil ways as the only, and the sure grounds of the divine mercy and forgiveness. And Thirdly, Christ assures us that God has appointed a time in which he will judge the world in righteousness, and that he will then approve or condemn, reward or punish every man according to his works.[1]

The surest virtues thus from passions shoot,
Wild Nature's vigour working at the root;

The nature of man is not a uniform thing; it has tensions and contradictions within it. This nature has two definite sides: ‘sensual’ nature and ‘higher’ nature.
Sensual nature consists of the basic instincts that humans and animals have in common. (Pestalozzi sometimes calls sensual nature ‘animal nature’). These instincts are mainly there to satisfy the needs of the body and so preserve the individual and the human race. They also make humans want to do things that make them feel happy
Higher nature is what lifts humans to a level above animals. This higher nature consists of the ability to perceive truth, to show love, to believe in God, to listen to one’s own conscience, to do justice, to develop a sense of beauty, to see and realise higher values, to be creative, to act in freedom, to bear responsibility, to overcome one’s own egoism, to build a social life, to act with common sense, to strive for self-perfection. A ‘divine spark’ can be seen in this nature and this is what causes man to be the image of God. For this reason, Pestalozzi often calls this higher nature the ‘inner’, ‘spiritual’, ‘moral’ or ‘divine’ nature.
Animal nature and higher nature are interrelated, like a fruit and its seed. These two sides of human nature are very different from each other but they are connected because the higher nature unfolds and develops out of the lower animal nature. The higher nature is permanent and cannot be destroyed; the lower, sensual nature is temporary and can be destroyed. It is the task of education as far as possible to cultivate what is low in order to bring it to the higher level.
The process described above unfolds in a three-step course of development; from the natural state through the social state to the moral state.
In the natural state animal nature dominates; higher nature is dormant, like a seed. Curiosity, for example, is part of animal nature, but in higher nature it can develop into a genuine interest in truth. Indolence originates in the tendency to avoid discomfort, but at the same time it is the natural basis for impartiality.
Theoretically there are two natural states – the unspoiled natural state and the spoiled natural state. One has to distinguish between these two:
- The unspoiled natural state can only be imagined. It is the state when we live completely in the moment and there is a perfect balance between everybody’s needs and the fulfilment of everybody’s needs. As in the Garden of Eden before the Fall.
- Only the spoiled natural state can really be experienced. When a human takes action to fulfil the needs he experiences in the unspoiled natural state, he cannot help being selfish, and in taking action spoils the unspoiled state. Sometimes a human does more than what is needed to satisfy his needs, for example, by becoming greedy and eating more than he needs.
In the spoiled natural state of humans, entry into the social state of being – being part of a society - becomes necessary to avoid unpleasantness and to think, plan and work together. Entry into the social state is inevitable and cannot be reversed. Through socialisation humans on the one hand get the benefit of rights, but on the other hand have to fulfil duties and accept restrictions - they have to obey.
Through socialisation humans have created and continue to create a world that does not exist in the animal kingdom, a world of rights and duties and of laws and institutions (state, economy, finance, associations of any kind, communication systems) – in short, civilisation.
Entry into society does not prevent the natural egoism of the individual; society only restricts it and thus protects people from its negative effects. Humans, in the social state live in contradiction to their natural tendencies. Out of egoism or selfishness people desire all those advantages, which can only be attained through society. Out of the same selfishness people want to avoid or sometimes refuse all the restrictions and burdens of society, which exist to make social advantages possible.
The state, as the keeper of the legal order that society needs, can enforce the laws of the legal order only if it has the physical power to make disobedient individuals obey the law. The state, in guaranteeing security for the individual, has to do two contradictory things: On the one hand it has to ask everyone not to use physical force for solving conflicts; on the other hand it has to use physical force against those who break the law.
Being part of society does not bring about inner harmony for the individual. As the need to be part of society is a selfish need, one remains selfish by continuing to be part of society. Also, the tension in the individual between need and power is increased further because being part of society brings new needs that a person as an individual would not have had, and the powers that a person had as an individual are taken away by society in return for social conveniences.
Thus, society as such can never guarantee the individual real fulfilment, but can always only set up a framework in which the individual can gain self-realisation. The individual will remain in contradiction with himself and will suffer from the contradictions that lie in the nature of society. This will go on until the individual realises that real fulfilment can be attained only by voluntarily giving up egotistic or selfish claims. In this way suffering the burdens of social life can make people realise the importance of living as moral individuals.
A moral person realises that he has to fulfil a life-task – attaining his own perfection. This can only be achieved by the renunciation of selfishness and by the development of the moral powers or the powers of the heart - love, trust, gratitude, public-spiritedness, an eye for beauty, responsibility, creativity, religiousness, doing good of one's own free will etcetera. Through the realisation of morality we transform ourselves into a better form of ourselves and therefore become truly ‘free’. The contradictions which are felt in the spoilt natural state and in the social state can only be solved by the attainment of individual morality.
Although ultimately morality takes shape by and large as social behaviour, it can never be ascribed to a group; it is completely a matter for the individual. Morality is not necessarily a matter of being ‘good’ in manners or behaviour, because this may have selfish reasons behind it; true morality is the individual’s success in attaining his higher nature without pressure from society.
Humans as physical beings with instincts and needs cannot shed their animal nature except in death. Since each individual is a part of society, taking part in social systems, which are there for his self-preservation, the individual cannot live without contradiction. No one can be purely moral if he wants to survive physically.
Thus contradiction is part of the nature of humans. This is because different rules apply in each of the three states of being:
The natural state and the social state on the one hand and the moral state on the other hand are interrelated. The two states in which animal nature dominates (the natural state and the social state) are the necessary condition for the moralisation of the individual. Moral humans can shape a society or a state in a moral way (as legislators and in the way they observe the laws). Social life would be less of a burden if more individuals felt that their own moralisation is their life-task. Social conditions in themselves are unstable, because they are dependent on the one hand on how many people act egotistically, and on the other hand on how many people understand the real principles of socialisation. This understanding can come only from individual moralisation.
The three states must be understood as three different kinds of human existence and each human pursuit can be analysed as regards each of the three states. For example solving a conflict in the natural state is based on the rights of the stronger, in the social state it is based on the current positive law, and in the moral state it is based on dealing with the legitimate concerns of the opponent with understanding and consideration.
All acts and achievements of society can be called civilisation, whereas culture comes about as the result of individuals acting morally. All civilising institutions consider the individual to be the bearer of definite roles, consequently the individual is seen under the collective aspect, and thus civilising institutions always refer to the collective existence of man. In contrast to this, true culture involves taking seriously the individual existence of man, which means responding to the singularity as well as to the concrete life situation of the individual. To cope with certain tasks of the state and of society (like finance, the police, the armed forces) it is essential that human beings understand their roles within society. However - according to Pestalozzi – the concerns of religion, education and charity should be addressed with regard to the existence of the individual.
Everything that is civilising can be handled either by acknowledging the actual purpose of the social community (thus from the moral attitude of the decision-makers), or by following the purely egotistical interests of individuals or groups. If the latter is the case, Pestalozzi considers society to be ruined.
So, Pestalozzi believes there to be four possible ways of human existence:
- A purely natural kind of existence, which is free of social institutions and which can in fact only be imagined
- An existence in which people follow their own selfish desires and show no consideration for the purpose of socialisation
- A restrictedly egotistical kind of existence, which, by acknowledging the social purpose, sees to the legitimate care of oneself
- A moral kind of existence, in which the human lifts himself above egoism and aims at self-perfection, which involves making other people happy.

John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, whose thoughts and ideas have been greatly influential in the United States and around the world. He, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophical school of Pragmatism. He is also known as the father of functional psychology; he was a leading representative of the progressive movement in U.S. schooling during the first half of the 20th century [1]. Along with the historian Charles Beard, economists Thorstein Veblen and James Harvey Robinson, Dewey is one of the founders of The New School for Social Research.

Dewey's philosophical anthropology, unlike Egan, Vico, Ernst Cassirer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Nietzsche, does not account for the origin of thought of the modern mind in the aesthetic, more precisely the myth, but instead in the original occupations and industries of ancient people, and eventually in the history of science.[10] A criticism of this approach is that it does not account for the origin of cultural institutions,which can be accounted for by the aesthetic. Language and its development, in Dewey's philosophical anthropology, have not a central role but are instead a consequence of the cognitive capacity.[10]

As can be seen in his Democracy and Education (1916) Dewey sought to at once synthesize, criticize, and expand upon the democratic or proto-democratic educational philosophies of Rousseau and Plato.[citation needed] He saw Rousseau's philosophy as overemphasizing the individual and Plato's philosophy as overemphasizing the society in which the individual lived. For Dewey, this distinction was by and large a false one; like Vygotsky, he viewed the mind and its formation as a communal process. Thus the individual is only a meaningful concept when regarded as an inextricable part of his or her society, and the society has no meaning apart from its realization in the lives of its individual members. However, as evidenced in his later Experience and Nature (1925) Dewey recognizes the importance of the subjective experience of individual people in introducing revolutionary new ideas.

For Dewey, it was vitally important that education should not be the teaching of mere dead fact, but that the skills and knowledge which students learned be integrated fully into their lives as persons, citizens and human beings. This practical element—learning by doing—sprang from his subscription to the philosophical school of Pragmatism.

Dewey's ideas were never broadly and deeply integrated into the practices of American public schools, though some of his values and terms were widespread. Progressive education (both as espoused by Dewey, and in the more popular and inept forms of which Dewey was critical) was essentially scrapped during the Cold War, when the dominant concern in education was creating and sustaining a scientific and technological elite for military purposes.[citation needed] In the post-Cold War period, however, progressive education had reemerged in many school reform and education theory circles as a thriving field of inquiry learning and inquiry-based science. Dewey is often cited as creating the foundations for outcomes-based education and Standards-based education reform, and standards such as the NCTM mathematics standards, all of which emphasize critical thinking over memorization of facts.

The central concept of John Dewey's view of education was that greater emphasis should be placed on the broadening of intellect and development of problem solving and critical thinking skills, rather than simply on the memorization of lessons. This is because Dewey saw the public school's relation to society was much like a repair organ to the organism of society.Dewey, J (1897) “My Pedagogic Creed’ in The School Journal, Vol 14, No 3, pp 77-80.[citation needed]

One of Dewey's main theories was the incorporation of the student's past experiences into the classroom (Experience and Education 1938). This was a job of both the educator and the caretaker. The quality of experiences is key in the development of Dewey's progressivism. Without beneficial experiences growing off prior ones, education would not be able to use these experiences to reflect on the past, work through the present and prepare for the future (Experience and Education 1938).

While Dewey's educational theories have enjoyed a broad popularity[citation needed] during his lifetime and after, they have a troubled history of implementation due to the fact that there were no teachers qualified to incorporate these ideas. (Experience and Education 1938). Dewey's writings can be difficult to read, and his tendency to reuse commonplace words and phrases to express extremely complex reinterpretations of them makes him susceptible to misunderstanding. So while he held the role of a leading public intellectual, he was often misinterpreted, even by fellow academics. Many enthusiastically embraced what they mistook for Dewey's philosophy, but which in fact bore little or a distorted resemblance to it.

Dewey tried, on occasion, to correct such misguided enthusiasm, but with little success[citation needed]. Simultaneously, other progressive educational theories, often influenced by Dewey but not directly derived from him, were also becoming popular, such as Educational perennialism which is teacher-centered as opposed to student-centered. The term 'progressive education' grew to encompass numerous contradictory theories and practices, as documented by historians like Herbert Kliebard.

It is often claimed that progressive education "failed", though whether this view is justified depends on one's definitions of "progressive" and "failure". Several versions of progressive education succeeded in transforming the educational landscape: the utter ubiquity of guidance counseling, to name but one example, springs from the progressive period. Radical variations of educational progressivism were troubled and short-lived, a fact that supports some understandings of the notion of failure. But they were perhaps too rare and ill-funded to constitute a thorough test.

1. The Historic Background of Humanistic Study. It is noteworthy that classic Greek philosophy does not present the problem in its modern form. Socrates indeed appears to have thought that science of nature was not attainable and not very important. The chief thing to know is the nature and end of man. Upon that knowledge hangs all that is of deep significance -- all moral and social achievement. Plato, however, makes right knowledge of man and society depend upon knowledge of the essential features of nature. His chief treatise, entitled the Republic, is at once a treatise on morals, on social organization, and on the metaphysics and science of nature. Since he accepts the Socratic doctrine that right achievement in the former depends upon rational knowledge, he is compelled to discuss the nature of knowledge. Since he accepts the idea that the ultimate object of knowledge is the discovery of the good or end of man, and is discontented with the Socratic conviction that all we know is our own ignorance, he connects the discussion of the good of man with consideration of the essential good or end of nature itself. To attempt to determine the end of man apart from a knowledge of the ruling end which gives law and unity to nature is impossible. It is thus quite consistent with his philosophy that he subordinates literary studies (under the name of music) to mathematics and to physics as well as to logic and metaphysics. But on the other hand, knowledge of nature is not an end in itself; it is a necessary stage in bringing the mind to a realization of the supreme purpose of existence as the law of human action, corporate and individual. To use the modern phraseology, naturalistic studies are indispensable, but they are in the interests of humanistic and ideal ends.

Aristotle goes even farther, if anything, in the direction of naturalistic studies. He subordinates (ante, p. 254) civic relations to the purely cognitive life. The highest end of man is not human but divine -- participation in pure knowing which constitutes the divine life. Such knowing deals with what is universal and necessary, and finds, therefore, a more adequate subject matter in nature at its best than in the transient things of man. If we take what the philosophers stood for in Greek life, rather than the details of what they say, we might summarize by saying that the Greeks were too much interested in free inquiry into natural fact and in the aesthetic enjoyment of nature, and were too deeply conscious of the extent in which society is rooted in nature and subject to its laws, to think of bringing man and nature into conflict. Two factors conspire in the later period of ancient life, however, to exalt literary and humanistic studies. One is the increasingly reminiscent and borrowed character of culture; the other is the political and rhetorical bent of Roman life.

Greek achievement in civilization was native; the civilization of the Alexandrians and Romans was inherited from alien sources. Consequently it looked back to the records upon which it drew, instead of looking out directly upon nature and society, for material and inspiration. We cannot do better than quote the words of Hatch to indicate the consequences for educational theory and practice. "Greece on one hand had lost political power, and on the other possessed in her splendid literature an inalienable heritage.... It was natural that she should turn to letters. It was natural also that the study of letters should be reflected upon speech.... The mass of men in the Greek world tended to lay stress on that acquaintance with the literature of bygone generations, and that habit of cultivated speech, which has ever since been commonly spoken of as education.... Our own comes by direct tradition from it. It set a fashion which until recently has uniformly prevailed over the entire civilized world. We study literature rather than nature because the Greeks did so, and because when the Romans and the Roman provincials resolved to educate their sons, they employed Greek teachers and followed in Greek paths." 1

The so-called practical bent of the Romans worked in the same direction. In falling back upon the recorded ideas of the Greeks, they not only took the short path to attaining a cultural development, but they procured just the kind of material and method suited to their administrative talents. For their practical genius was not directed to the conquest and control of nature but to the conquest and control of men.

Mr. Hatch, in the passage quoted, takes a good deal of history for granted in saying that we have studied literature rather than nature because the Greeks, and the Romans whom they taught, did so. What is the link that spans the intervening centuries? The question suggests that barbarian Europe but repeated on a larger scale and with increased intensity the Roman situation. It had to go to school to Greco-Roman civilization; it also borrowed rather than evolved its culture. Not merely for its general ideas and their artistic presentation but for its models of law it went to the records of alien peoples. And its dependence upon tradition was increased by the dominant theological interests of the period. For the authorities to which the Church appealed were literatures composed in foreign tongues. Everything converged to identify learning with linguistic training and to make the language of the learned a literary language instead of the mother speech.

The full scope of this fact escapes us, moreover, until we recognize that this subject matter compelled recourse to a dialectical method. Scholasticism frequently has been used since the time of the revival of learning as a term of reproach. But all that it means is the method of The Schools, or of the School Men. In its essence, it is nothing but a highly effective systematization of the methods of teaching and learning which are appropriate to transmit an authoritative body of truths. Where literature rather than contemporary nature and society furnishes material of study, methods must be adapted to defining, expounding, and interpreting the received material, rather than to inquiry, discovery, and invention. And at bottom what is called Scholasticism is the whole-hearted and consistent formulation and application of the methods which are suited to instruction when the material of instruction is taken ready-made, rather than as something which students are to find out for themselves. So far as schools still teach from textbooks and rely upon the principle of authority and acquisition rather than upon that of discovery and inquiry, their methods are Scholastic -- minus the logical accuracy and system of Scholasticism at its best. Aside from laxity of method and statement, the only difference is that geographies and histories and botanies and astronomies are now part of the authoritative literature which is to be mastered.

As a consequence, the Greek tradition was lost in which a humanistic interest was used as a basis of interest in nature, and a knowledge of nature used to support the distinctively human aims of man. Life found its support in authority, not in nature. The latter was moreover an object of considerable suspicion. Contemplation of it was dangerous, for it tended to draw man away from reliance upon the documents in which the rules of living were already contained. Moreover nature could be known only through observation; it appealed to the senses -- which were merely material as opposed to a purely immaterial mind. Furthermore, the utilities of a knowledge of nature were purely physical and secular; they connected with the bodily and temporal welfare of man, while the literary tradition concerned his spiritual and eternal well-being.

2. The Modern Scientific Interest in Nature. The movement of the fifteenth century which is variously termed the revival of learning and the renascence was characterized by a new interest in man's present life, and accordingly by a new interest in his relationships with nature. It was naturalistic, in the sense that it turned against the dominant supernaturalistic interest. It is possible that the influence of a return to classic Greek pagan literature in bringing about this changed mind has been overestimated. Undoubtedly the change was mainly a product of contemporary conditions. But there can be no doubt that educated men, filled with the new point of view, turned eagerly to Greek literature for congenial sustenance and reinforcement. And to a considerable extent, this interest in Greek thought was not in literature for its own sake, but in the spirit it expressed. The mental freedom, the sense of the order and beauty of nature, which animated Greek expression, aroused men to think and observe in a similar untrammeled fashion. The history of science in the sixteenth century shows that the dawning sciences of physical nature largely borrowed their points of departure from the new interest in Greek literature. As Windelband has said, the new science of nature was the daughter of humanism. The favorite notion of the time was that man was in microcosm that which the universe was in macrocosm.

This fact raises anew the question of how it was that nature and man were later separated and a sharp division made between language and literature and the physical sciences. Four reasons may be suggested. (a) The old tradition was firmly entrenched in institutions,. Politics, law, and diplomacy remained of necessity branches of authoritative literature, for the social sciences did not develop until the methods of the sciences of physics and chemistry, to say nothing of biology, were much further advanced. The same is largely true of history. Moreover, the methods used for effective teaching of the languages were well developed; the inertia of academic custom was on their side. Just as the new interest in literature, especially Greek, had not been allowed at first to find lodgment in the scholastically organized universities, so when it found its way into them it joined hands with the older learning to minimize the influence of experimental science. The men who taught were rarely trained in science; the men who were scientifically competent worked in private laboratories and through the medium of academies which promoted research, but which were not organized as teaching bodies. Finally, the aristocratic tradition which looked down upon material things and upon the senses and the hands was still mighty.

(b) The Protestant revolt brought with it an immense increase of interest in theological discussion and controversies. The appeal on both sides was to literary documents. Each side had to train men in ability to study and expound the records which were relied upon. The demand for training men who could defend the chosen faith against the other side, who were able to propagandize and to prevent the encroachments of the other side, was such that it is not too much to say that by the middle of the seventeenth century the linguistic training of gymnasia and universities had been captured by the revived theological interest, and used as a tool of religious education and ecclesiastical controversy. Thus the educational descent of the languages as they are found in education to-day is not direct from the revival of learning, but from its adaptation to theological ends.

(c) The natural sciences were themselves conceived in a way which sharpened the opposition of man and nature. Francis Bacon presents an almost perfect example of the union of naturalistic and humanistic interest. Science, adopting the methods of observation and experimentation, was to give up the attempt to "anticipate" nature -- to impose preconceived notions upon her -- and was to become her humble interpreter. In obeying nature intellectually, man would learn to command her practically. "Knowledge is power." This aphorism meant that through science man is to control nature and turn her energies to the execution of his own ends. Bacon attacked the old learning and logic as purely controversial, having to do with victory in argument, not with discovery of the unknown. Through the new method of thought which was set forth in his new logic an era of expansive discoveries was to emerge, and these discoveries were to bear fruit in inventions for the service of man. Men were to give up their futile, never-finished effort to dominate one another to engage in the cooperative task of dominating nature in the interests of humanity.

In the main, Bacon prophesied the direction of subsequent progress. But he "anticipated" the advance. He did not see that the new science was for a long time to be worked in the interest of old ends of human exploitation. He thought that it would rapidly give man new ends. Instead, it put at the disposal of a class the means to secure their old ends of aggrandizement at the expense of another class. The industrial revolution followed, as he foresaw, upon a revolution in scientific method. But it is taking the revolution many centuries to produce a new mind. Feudalism was doomed by the applications of the new science, for they transferred power from the landed nobility to the manufacturing centers. But capitalism rather than a social humanism took its place. Production and commerce were carried on as if the new science had no moral lesson, but only technical lessons as to economies in production and utilization of saving in self-interest. Naturally, this application of physical science (which was the most conspicuously perceptible one) strengthened the claims of professed humanists that science was materialistic in its tendencies. It left a void as to man's distinctively human interests which go beyond making, saving, and expending money; and languages and literature put in their claim to represent the moral and ideal interests of humanity.

( d ) Moreover, the philosophy which professed itself based upon science, which gave itself out as the accredited representative of the net significance of science, was either dualistic in character, marked by a sharp division between mind (characterizing man) and matter, constituting nature; or else it was openly mechanical, reducing the signal features of human life to illusion. In the former case, it allowed the claims of certain studies to be peculiar consignees of mental values, and indirectly strengthened their claim to superiority, since human beings would incline to regard human affairs as of chief importance at least to themselves. In the latter case, it called out a reaction which threw doubt and suspicion upon the value of physical science, giving occasion for treating it as an enemy to man's higher interests.

Greek and medieval knowledge accepted the world in its qualitative variety, and regarded nature's processes as having ends, or in technical phrase as teleological. New science was expounded so as to deny the reality of all qualities in real, or objective, existence. Sounds, colors, ends, as well as goods and bads, were regarded as purely subjective -- as mere impressions in the mind. Objective existence was then treated as having only quantitative aspects -- as so much mass in motion, its only differences being that at one point in space there was a larger aggregate mass than at another, and that in some spots there were greater rates of motion than at others. Lacking qualitative distinctions, nature lacked significant variety. Uniformities were emphasized, not diversities; the ideal was supposed to be the discovery of a single mathematical formula applying to the whole universe at once from which all the seeming variety of phenomena could be derived. This is what a mechanical philosophy means.

Such a philosophy does not represent the genuine purport of science. It takes the technique for the thing itself; the apparatus and the terminology for reality, the method for its subject matter. Science does confine its statements to conditions which enable us to predict and control the happening of events, ignoring the qualities of the events. Hence its mechanical and quantitative character. But in leaving them out of account, it does not exclude them from reality, nor relegate them to a purely mental region; it only furnishes means utilizable for ends. Thus while in fact the progress of science was increasing man's power over nature, enabling him to place his cherished ends on a firmer basis than ever before, and also to diversify his activities almost at will, the philosophy which professed to formulate its accomplishments reduced the world to a barren and monotonous redistribution of matter in space. Thus the immediate effect of modern science was to accentuate the dualism of matter and mind, and thereby to establish the physical and the humanistic studies as two disconnected groups. Since the difference between better and worse is bound up with the qualities of experience, any philosophy of science which excludes them from the genuine content of reality is bound to leave out what is most interesting and most important to mankind.

3. The Present Educational Problem. In truth, experience knows no division between human concerns and a purely mechanical physical world. Man's home is nature; his purposes and aims are dependent for execution upon natural conditions. Separated from such conditions they become empty dreams and idle indulgences of fancy. From the standpoint of human experience, and hence of educational endeavor, any distinction which can be justly made between nature and man is a distinction between the conditions which have to be reckoned with in the formation and execution of our practical aims, and the aims themselves. This philosophy is vouched for by the doctrine of biological development which shows that man is continuous with nature, not an alien entering her processes from without. It is reinforced by the experimental method of science which shows that knowledge accrues in virtue of an attempt to direct physical energies in accord with ideas suggested in dealing with natural objects in behalf of social uses. Every step forward in the social sciences -- the studies termed history, economics, politics, sociology -- shows that social questions are capable of being intelligently coped with only in the degree in which we employ the method of collected data, forming hypotheses, and testing them in action which is characteristic of natural science, and in the degree in which we utilize in behalf of the promotion of social welfare the technical knowledge ascertained by physics and chemistry. Advanced methods of dealing with such perplexing problems as insanity, intemperance, poverty, public sanitation, city planning, the conservation of natural resources, the constructive use of governmental agencies for furthering the public good without weakening personal initiative, all illustrate the direct dependence of our important social concerns upon the methods and results of natural science.

With respect then to both humanistic and naturalistic studies, education should take its departure from this close interdependence. It should aim not at keeping science as a study of nature apart from literature as a record of human interests, but at cross-fertilizing both the natural sciences and the various human disciplines such as history, literature, economics, and politics. Pedagogically, the problem is simpler than the attempt to teach the sciences as mere technical bodies of information and technical forms of physical manipulation, on one side; and to teach humanistic studies as isolated subjects, on the other. For the latter procedure institutes an artificial separation in the pupils' experience. Outside of school pupils meet with natural facts and principles in connection with various modes of human action. (See ante, p. 30.) In all the social activities in which they have shared they have had to understand the material and processes involved. To start them in school with a rupture of this intimate association breaks the continuity of mental development, makes the student feel an indescribable unreality in his studies, and deprives him of the normal motive for interest in them.

There is no doubt, of course, that the opportunities of education should be such that all should have a chance who have the disposition to advance to specialized ability in science, and thus devote themselves to its pursuit as their particular occupation in life. But at present, the pupil too often has a choice only between beginning with a study of the results of prior specialization where the material is isolated from his daily experiences, or with miscellaneous nature study, where material is presented at haphazard and does not lead anywhere in particular. The habit of introducing college pupils into segregated scientific subject matter, such as is appropriate to the man who wishes to become an expert in a given field, is carried back into the high schools. Pupils in the latter simply get a more elementary treatment of the same thing, with difficulties smoothed over and topics reduced to the level of their supposed ability. The cause of this procedure lies in following tradition, rather than in conscious adherence to a dualistic philosophy. But the effect is the same as if the purpose were to inculcate an idea that the sciences which deal with nature have nothing to do with man, and vice versa. A large part of the comparative ineffectiveness of the teaching of the sciences, for those who never become scientific specialists, is the result of a separation which is unavoidable when one begins with technically organized subject matter. Even if all students were embryonic scientific specialists, it is questionable whether this is the most effective procedure. Considering that the great majority are concerned with the study of sciences only for its effect upon their mental habits -- in making them more alert, more open-minded, more inclined to tentative acceptance and to testing of ideas propounded or suggested, -- and for achieving a better understanding of their daily environment, it is certainly ill-advised. Too often the pupil comes out with a smattering which is too superficial to be scientific and too technical to be applicable to ordinary affairs.

The utilization of ordinary experience to secure an advance into scientific material and method, while keeping the latter connected with familiar human interests, is easier to-day than it ever was before. The usual experience of all persons in civilized communities to-day is intimately associated with industrial processes and results. These in turn are so many cases of science in action. The stationary and traction steam engine, gasoline engine, automobile, telegraph and telephone, the electric motor enter directly into the lives of most individuals. Pupils at an early age are practically acquainted with these things. Not only does the business occupation of their parents depend upon scientific applications, but household pursuits, the maintenance of health, the sights seen upon the streets, embody scientific achievements and stimulate interest in the connected scientific principles. The obvious pedagogical starting point of scientific instruction is not to teach things labeled science, but to utilize the familiar occupations and appliances to direct observation and experiment, until pupils have arrived at a knowledge of some fundamental principles by understanding them in their familiar practical workings.

The opinion sometimes advanced that it is a derogation from the "purity" of science to study it in its active incarnation, instead of in theoretical abstraction, rests upon a misunderstanding. AS matter of fact, any subject is cultural in the degree in which it is apprehended in its widest possible range of meanings. Perception of meanings depends upon perception of connections, of context. To see a scientific fact or law in its human as well as in its physical and technical context is to enlarge its significance and give it increased cultural value. Its direct economic application, if by economic is meant something having money worth, is incidental and secondary, but a part of its actual connections. The important thing is that the fact be grasped in its social connections -- its function in life.

On the other hand, "humanism" means at bottom being imbued with an intelligent sense of human interests. The social interest, identical in its deepest meaning with a moral interest, is necessarily supreme with man. Knowledge about man, information as to his past, familiarity with his documented records of literature, may be as technical a possession as the accumulation of physical details. Men may keep busy in a variety of ways, making money, acquiring facility in laboratory manipulation, or in amassing a store of facts about linguistic matters, or the chronology of literary productions. Unless such activity reacts to enlarge the imaginative vision of life, it is on a level with the busy work of children. It has the letter without the spirit of activity. It readily degenerates itself into a miser's accumulation, and a man prides himself on what he has, and not on the meaning he finds in the affairs of life. Any study so pursued that it increases concern for the values of life, any study producing greater sensitiveness to social well-being and greater ability to promote that well-being is humane study.

The humanistic spirit of the Greeks was native and intense but it was narrow in scope. Everybody outside the Hellenic circle was a barbarian, and negligible save as a possible enemy. Acute as were the social observations and speculations of Greek thinkers, there is not a word in their writings to indicate that Greek civilization was not self-inclosed and self-sufficient. There was, apparently, no suspicion that its future was at the mercy of the despised outsider. Within the Greek community, the intense social spirit was limited by the fact that higher culture was based on a substratum of slavery and economic serfdom -- classes necessary to the existence of the state, as Aristotle declared, and yet not genuine parts of it. The development of science has produced an industrial revolution which has brought different peoples in such close contact with one another through colonization and commerce that no matter how some nations may still look down upon others, no country can harbor the illusion that its career is decided wholly within itself. The same revolution has abolished agricultural serfdom, and created a class of more or less organized factory laborers with recognized political rights, and who make claims for a responsible role in the control of industry -- claims which receive sympathetic attention from many among the well-to-do, since they have been brought into closer connections with the less fortunate classes through the breaking down of class barriers.

This state of affairs may be formulated by saying that the older humanism omitted economic and industrial conditions from its purview. Consequently, it was one sided. Culture, under such circumstances, inevitably represented the intellectual and moral outlook of the class which was in direct social control. Such a tradition as to culture is, as we have seen (ante, p. 260), aristocratic; it emphasizes what marks off one class from another, rather than fundamental common interests. Its standards are in the past; for the aim is to preserve what has been gained rather than widely to extend the range of culture.

The modifications which spring from taking greater account of industry and of whatever has to do with making a living are frequently condemned as attacks upon the culture derived from the past. But a wider educational outlook would conceive industrial activities as agencies for making intellectual resources more accessible to the masses, and giving greater solidity to the culture of those having superior resources. In short, when we consider the close connection between science and industrial development on the one hand, and between literary and aesthetic cultivation and an aristocratic social organization on the other, we get light on the opposition between technical scientific studies and refining literary studies. We have before us the need of overcoming this separation in education if society is to be truly democratic.

Summary. The philosophic dualism between man and nature is reflected in the division of studies between the naturalistic and the humanistic with a tendency to reduce the latter to the literary records of the past. This dualism is not characteristic (as were the others which we have noted) of Greek thought. It arose partly because of the fact that the culture of Rome and of barbarian Europe was not a native product, being borrowed directly or indirectly from Greece, and partly because political and ecclesiastic conditions emphasized dependence upon the authority of past knowledge as that was transmitted in literary documents.

At the outset, the rise of modern science prophesied a restoration of the intimate connection of nature and humanity, for it viewed knowledge of nature as the means of securing human progress and well-being. But the more immediate applications of science were in the interests of a class rather than of men in common; and the received philosophic formulations of scientific doctrine tended either to mark it off as merely material from man as spiritual and immaterial, or else to reduce mind to a subjective illusion. In education, accordingly, the tendency was to treat the sciences as a separate body of studies, consisting of technical information regarding the physical world, and to reserve the older literary studies as distinctively humanistic. The account previously given of the evolution of knowledge, and of the educational scheme of studies based upon it, are designed to overcome the separation, and to secure recognition of the place occupied by the subject matter of the natural sciences in human affairs. http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/dewey/d_e/chapter21.html

Irving Babbitt (August 2, 1865 – July 15, 1933) was an American academic and literary critic, noted for his founding role in a movement that became known as the New Humanism, a significant influence on literary discussion and conservative thought in the period between 1910 to 1930. He was a cultural critic in the tradition of Matthew Arnold, and a consistent opponent of romanticism, as represented by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Politically he can, without serious distortion, be called a follower of Plato and Edmund Burke. His humanism implied a broad knowledge of various religious traditions.

He was born in Dayton, Ohio, and moved with his family over much of the USA while a young child. He was brought up from age 11 in Madisonville, a neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio. He entered Harvard College in 1885. On graduation in 1889 he took a post teaching classics at the College of Montana. After two years, he went to study in France, at the École Pratique des Hautes-études linked to the Sorbonne. There he studied Pali literature and Buddhism, for a year. Then he took a master's degree at Harvard, including Sanskrit.

At this point he moved away from a career as a classical scholar, taking a teaching position at Williams College in romance languages — just for one year, as it turned out. He then was offered in 1894 an instructor's position, again at Harvard, in French. He was to stay at Harvard, rising from the ranks to become a full professor of French literature in 1912. He is credited with introducing the study of comparative literature there.

It was in the early 1890s that he first allied himself with Paul Elmer More in developing the core doctrines that were to constitute New Humanism. In 1895 he gave a lecture What is Humanism?, which announced his attack on Rousseau. At the time Babbitt had switched out of classics; he would later clarify his position on the contemporary textual and philological scholarship demanded in that area, in the Germanic tradition, as a finite task, which he was unhappy to see placed above teaching based on 'eternal' content. His ideas, and More's, were characteristically written as short pieces or essays,and later gathered into books. Babbitt's Literature and the American College (1908) caused a stir, but it was assembled from writings already circulated.

He continued to publish in the same vein, often derogatory of figures from the French literature that was his avowed specialism. He also singled out Francis Bacon, and denounced 'naturalism' and utilitarianism. He met with increasing controversy down the years: those provoked into announcing their opposition included R. P. Blackmur, Oscar Cargill, Ernest Hemingway, Harold Laski, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Joel Elias Spingarn, Allen Tate, and Edmund Wilson. In the case of Mencken, at least, Babbitt gave as good as he got; he branded Mencken's writing as "intellectual vaudeville", a criticism with which posterity has had some sympathy.

He had an early influence on T. S. Eliot, a student of his at Harvard. Eliot in his 1926 essay The Humanism of Irving Babbitt, a review of Democracy and Leadership, had become equivocal, finding Babbitt's humanism too secular; his position vis-à-vis religion is still debated.

The identifiable figures of the New Humanist movement, besides Babbitt and More, were mostly influenced by Babbitt on a personal level and included G. R. Elliott (1883-1963), Norman Foerster (1887-1972), Frank Jewett Mather (1868-1953), Robert Shafer (1889-1956) and Stuart Pratt Sherman (1881-1926). Of these, Sherman moved away early, and Foerster, a star figure, later reconsidered and veered towards the New Criticism.

More peripherally, Yvor Winters and the Great Books movement are supposed to have taken something from New Humanism. Followers at a distance include Milton Hindus, Russell Kirk, Nathan Pusey, Peter Viereck, Richard M. Weaver and George Will. Some relationship has been traced between Babbitt and Gordon Keith Chalmers, Walter Lippmann, Louis Mercier, Austin Warren; claims in cases where such influence are not acknowledged are not easy to sustain, and Babbitt was known to advise against public tributes.

From a position of high prominence in the 1920s, having the effective but questionable support of The Bookman, New Humanism experienced a rapid drop from fashionable status after Babbitt died in 1933. By the 1940s it was being pronounced nearly extinct. A revival in interest was seen in the 1980s, and Babbitt is often name-checked in discussions on cultural conservatism.

The position of Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature was endowed by Harvard University in 1960. The National Humanities Institute runs an Irving Babbitt Project.

Mortimer Adler is an American professor, philosopher, and educational theorist. Born in 1902 in New York City, the son of an immigrant jewelry salesman, Adler dropped out of school at age 14 to become a copy boy for the New York Sun. He hoped to become a journalist, and decided a few years later to take some classes at Columbia University to improve his writing. While there he became interested in philosophy after reading the works of English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Upon learning that Mill had read Plato at age five, Adler decided to broaden his philosophical knowledge. He was so absorbed in his studies that he failed to fulfill the physical education requirement for graduation. However, Columbia soon awarded him an honorary doctorate because of the quality of his writings. Adler went on to become a psychology professor at Columbia, where he worked throughout the 1920s. As a professor at Columbia, he wrote numerous books about Western philosophy and religion, as well as his own works of philosophy. In his philosophical works, he avoided academic-sounding language in order to make his thoughts accessible to all readers. This practice is consistent with his belief that “philosophy is everybody’s business.“ He has written more than 50 books over the course of his life.
In the 1930s Adler became a professor at the University of Chicago, where he advocated the adoption of the Classics as a main part of the curriculum. The faculty was reluctant to follow his ideas, and reassigned Adler to the Law School. In later years, Adler helped to found the Institute for Philosophical Research at the University of North Carolina, the Aspen Institute, and the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas.
At his institutions, Adler focuses on making the study of Philosophy available to all people, not just specialists and the university-educated. At the Aspen Institute, for example, he teaches philosophy to business executives. He is currently a chairman of the Board of Editors at Encyclopedia Britannica and the director for the Institute for Philosophical Research in Chicago, as well as a senior associate at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies.

Philosophical/Educational School of Thought
Mortimer Adler is Perennialist who believes that philosophy should become part of mainstream public school curriculum. He believes that education should be basically the same for everyone, because children’s “sameness as human beings...means that every child has all the distinguishing properties common to all members of the species.” (Paideia, p.43) In his Paideia Proposal, which sets out his vision for American public schools, Adler says that children must acquire three different types of knowledge: organized knowledge, intellectual skills, and understanding of ideas and values. For each of these types of knowledge, there is a different teaching style. Organized, or factual, knowledge is to be taught through lectures, intellectual skills are to be taught through coaching and supervised practice, and understanding of ideas and values are to be taught through the Socratic method of discussion and questioning.

Adler believes in liberal, non-specialized education without electives or vocational classes. For him, education should serve three purposes: to teach people how to use their leisure time well, to teach people to earn their living ethically, and to teach people to be responsible citizens in a democracy. He believes that each person has the innate ability to do these three things, and that education should above all prepare people to become lifelong learners. Education never ends, in his view -- age 60 is the earliest that anyone can claim to be truly “educated”, and only then if they have devoted their life to learning. Philosophy and the arts are central to Adler’s educational vision. While he believes that every child should study math, science, history, geography, measurement, and other subjects in the lower grades, his plan for upper secondary school and college centers on students gaining insight into works of fiction, poetry, drama, art, and the like. This, way, Adler believes, students will gain an understanding of their own minds as well as the minds of others. Philosophy and art are for everyone, in his view. No one should be allowed to avoid them. College students, in Adler’s view, should be required to take a core of classes dealing with Western philosophy, politics, and religion. In short, everyone should be educated in the same way, towards an understanding of truth based on Western philosophy.

Although Mortimer Adler has written a plan for all public schools in the United States, his ideas have had the most impact at the college level. During the 1920s and 1930s, Adler’s belief in the importance of Classical education led a significant number of American colleges and universities to adopt “Great Books” programs -- cores of required classes that focus on key works of Western philosophy and literature. Columbia University, Adler’s alma mater, adopted a form of this program that endures today: all undergraduates are required to take one year-long class in “Masterpieces of Western Literature” and one more year-long class in “Masterpieces of Contemporary Civilization”. In addition, students must take one semester in “Masterpieces of Western Art” and one semester in “Masterpieces of Western Music”. Many other colleges use some form of the Great Books program, inspired by Adler‘s ideas.

In primary and secondary education, Adler’s ideas about great books of Western Philosophy seem to have influenced the education of prior generations more than the education of today’s children. Any literature curriculum that involved reading great works of Western literature and/or philosophy can be said to be influenced somewhat by Adler’s type of ideas.

Paideia is a focus on the art of teaching and what happens in the classroom for all students; it is not a plug-in program. Paideia requires teachers to use three different teaching modes to convey significant ideas, skills and facts within the curriculum. Paideia was developed by Dr. Mortimer Adler and the Paideia Group, Inc.

Paideia can make you, your students or your children think. Paideia focuses on helping all students to acquire, remember, and understand basic ideas, skills, and facts.

One of the Paideia teacher's skills is the use of the Socratic dialogue. The Socratic dialogue is a discussion developed by the teacher through the use of one question that is followed by further questions that focus on students' responses. This is to identify the students' logic, reasoning and understanding. Some examples of follow-up questions are: "Why do you say that? . . . What do you mean? . . . What is your support?"

All teaching modes can be used for different lengths of time. The Socratic dialogue can occur in five-minute interaction or be an hour and a half session. It can occur in the middle of a lecture or a coaching session or be developed into a full-length seminar. Consider the following examples:

The lecture: When the teacher is giving information. No student should have to sit in a bell-to-bell lecture. It is boring, nonproductive and yields poor results in learning. The lecture is biologically demanding for students making it difficult to maintain interest and attention. The Socratic dialogue can be inserted after a short period of time lecturing (e.g. ten minutes) to interrupt the pace and focus attention. For example the teacher can say, "What was most important in what I just said? . . . Why do you say that?".

The coaching session: When the teacher is getting the student to do something. The coach helps the student over hurdles of difficulty. As a result, the coach needs to know what is not clear or confuses the student. The Socratic dialogue yields information about the student progress in understanding the skill. For example, the teacher can ask in a math session, "How did you solve the problem? ... Why did you use that strategy?".

The seminar: When the teacher is facilitating an educationally oriented discussion focused on a primary source. The Socratic dialogue is the heart of the seminar as the teacher focuses the students on the important words, points, and ideas in the primary source. There maybe several Socratic dialogues or one that is developed over a period of time. For example, Mortimer Adler once led a seminar on Hamlet for an hour and a half that was developed from an initial question, "Do you like Hamlet?." This was followed by "Why? . . . Where in the play do you see that? . . . Who else agrees or disagrees and Why?'.

The Socratic method utilizes the Socratic dialogue which is but one of the teacher's repertoire of skills. It demonstrates the teacher's skill in teaching and knowledge of the material. It can be used in all settings of teaching and with all material. It is integrated with other teacher skills -- such as, the art of the lecture and the art of coaching.

Seminars focusing on observation topics provide rich opportunities for teachers to coach students in their ability to examine and evaluate information acquired through viewing. Objects selected for these seminars include paint-ings, sculpture, architecture, maps, science experiments and math manipulatives.

As in any seminar selection, careful consideration of the merits and worth of the observation topic is necessary. Reasons for selection can be to explore a period of art history or culture, the intrinsic value of art throughout history, significant artists, significant works of art or the relationships among art, history, science and math. Some seminars may compare two works. For example, two illustrations for a fable or two different types of maps provide a chance to examine two different point of view. Others might compare a work of writing and an illustration.

As in all seminars, setting the stage is crucial to its success. In this case, observation time is added, Setting the stage for observation seminars includes:

* Arranging the group in a circle.
* Using name cards with either first or last name.
* Establishing seminar rules and a positive climate.
* Identifying group and individual goals for participation.
* Conducting a silent time for the first time viewing.

The initial observation time is set by the teacher for a specific short period of time (e.g., one minute). It is always conducted in silence. An example of what the teacher may say to the group is:

Today I am going to show an object to you and I want you to just look at it for one minute in absolute silence, At the end of that time, please write what you saw first and what question you have about the object. Remember, no talking, because once someone talks it disrupts and alters the others' thinking.

A response technique to use to gather information is the round robin. Go around the circle and ask what caught their eye first, and then, what question they have about the piece. This can provide information and questions for an entire seminar. This technique works well for any observation topic used as a focus for a seminar.

Teachers need to be aware of how student understanding of some readings may be affected by student observations of other work.

For example, in one seminar on Washington's Inaugural Address, a student commented that he thought, "Washington was stupid!"

Upon being questioned about how he could support this idea, -- the student pointed -- to the picture, accompanying the text; it was a famous picture of George Washington standing up in a boat crossing a river.

This sixth grade student, who lived in an area of the country with many rivers, then replied, "Anyone who stands up in a boot when crossing a river in a storm -- is not bright! Why anyone would follow him, I have no idea!"

The seminar leader tried to convince the boy that it was not a photograph, and that there might be merits of Washington noted in the text, but it was to no avail.

I. Theory of Value What Knowledge and Skills are worthwhile learning? What are the goals of education?

Ideal education is one that develops intellectual power. It is not one that is directed to immediate needs; it is not a specialized education, or a pre-professional education; It is not a utilitarian education. It is an education calculated to develop the mind. I have old fashioned prejudices in favor of the three R's and the liberal arts, in favor of trying to understand the greatest works that the human race has produced. (IRE192)

...without the intellectual techniques needed to understand ideas, and without at least an acquaintance with the major ideas that have animated mankind since the dawn of history, no man may call himself educated (IRE193)

...education should concentrate on developing the rational faculty (EF93), children should be taught certain basic subjects that will acquaint them with the world's permanencies, both spiritual and physical (EF93), "Great Books" (EF93), The chief purpose of education is to cultivate the use of reason. (EF95),

Education is not an imitation of life but a preparation for life. (EF95), English, languages, history, mathematics, the natural sciences, the fine arts, and philosophy (EF96),

...it is self evident that subjects that require maturity cannot be taught to the immature (LS101), liberal education (GB22)

Leaming at the elementary level should consist of the basic fundamentals such as reading, writing and arithmetic to enable educational pursuit later in life. (Dzuback, 85).

I have assumed that the duty of an educator is to change things from the way they are to the way they ought to be. (Dzuback, IX).

The purpose of higher education is to unsettle the minds of young men, to widen their horizons, to inflame their intellects. (Hutchins, 1936, 48).

The faculty dealing with general education must be independent of and, perhaps, isolated from the university. (Hutchins, 1936, 10).

The purpose of the University is nothing less than to procure a moral, intellectual and spiritual revolution throughout the world. (Dzuback, 196)
II. Theory of Knowledge. How is it different from belief? What is a mistake? A lie?

Knowledge is everywhere the same. (If it where not, learned men never could sit down together and agree upon anything.)(EF94), To acquire knowledge is the essence of education. (EF94),

There is no virtue in encouraging immature minds to waste time in discovering for themselves the kind of knowledge that they can can be taught in a few minutes. (EF94), knowledge is not fragmented but unified, since reality itself, which it reflects, is a whole. (EF54), Opinion, of course, is different; here men may disagree. But when they do agree, opinion becomes knowledge. (FE95)

One can only determine truth by faith in human reason which must come to him by Grace. (Dzuback, 214.)

The social scientists have little or no training in the precise thinking and expression required by logic, mathematics, and physics, their work is a mess. (Dzuback, 95)

The single-minded pursuit of intellectual virtues is to be sharply distinguished from scholarship. (Hutchins, 1936, 32).
III. Theory of Human Nature

The function of man as man is the same in every society, since it results from his nature as a man. (EF94) The aim of the educational system is the same in every age and in every society where such a system can exist; it is to improve a man as a

man.(CT42) What is distinctly human in man remains the same everywhere(EF93) human nature is constant(EF93)

Since rationality is man's highest attribute, he must use it to direct his instinctual nature in accordance with deliberately chosen ends. Men are free, not determined.(EF94) the universality of human nature is revealed most clearly in literature and history(EF94)

it is his (man's) duty to live by reason and to control the rebelliousness of his instincts. Intelligent self restraint is as important as freedom of expression(EF95)

Rationality may be innate in him, but it also must be educated in order to be used.(EF95)

Human nature does not change but remains essentially the same; so also, do the good life, that is, the life most fit for men to lead, the moral principles that men should observe, and the education that they should receive.(EF93)

The nature of man indicates that he can continue to learn all his life; the scientific evidence shows that he has the capacity to do so.(LS130)

By ordinary mammalian standards he (homo sapiens) is born at least a year to soon. The infant whale is twenty feet long and ready to bound over the billows. The human being has to spend a year or more creeping before he can assume the posture if he is to realize his potentialities, he must learn and relearn all his life long.(LS90)

We should offer preparation for life in the broad sense of completeness as a human being. (Hutchins, 1936,116)
IV. Theory of Learning

Education should seek to adjust the individual, not to the world as such, but to what is true. Adjustment to truth is the end of learning.(EF95)

Since the basic truths taught by education are recorded in these writings, the methods of education will be primarily verbal.(EF97)

Studying these works, the student learns the ideas that have shaped the human mind.(EF96)

Yet, in allowing the child's superficial inclinations to determine what he learns, we actually hinder him from developing his real talents.(EF97)

The approach is to read and discuss the great works of great thinkers, which, in turn, should discipline the mind and cultivate the intellect.(CT43) Wisdom must begin with learning.(LS90)

Learning at the college level should have no vocational aim. It should provide a common stock of fundamental ideas. (Hutchins, 1936, 116).

The development of human intellectual virtues is a means to cultivate correctness in thinking leading to the learning of what intelligent action is. (Dzuback, 106)

Educational standards, no matter how scientific, are culturally derived. (Hutchins, 1968)
V. Theory of Transmission

Education implies teaching. Teaching implies knowledge. Knowledge is truth. The truth is everywhere the same. Hence, education should be everywhere the same.(EF95)

Occupational training is best left to the practitioners of the occupations.(EF96)

Their education fosters a common curriculum, usually liberal arts, and offers little or no opportunity for students to choose electives related to their interests or goals.(CT43)

By studying the great ideas of the past, one can better cope with the future.(CT43)

Admittedly, a great teacher can start anywhere, with anything, as Plato started with old men's dances in the Laws He can emerge, as Plato did, with the most profound reflections.(EF91)

Students should be reading the Great Books. Knowledge of most topics to be learned is contained and taught through these books. (Adler, 72)

Great Books are the classics that have withstood the test of time, as distinct from text books and books without lasting significance. (Adler, 18)

The is no single form of instruction that can reach all equally. (Dzuback, 28 1)
VI. Theory of Society

The family, the neighborhood, the community, the the state, the media of communication, and the great number of voluntary to which a human being may belong all take part, fortuitously, or by design, in making him what he is.school never can be a "real-life situation" or animitation of society - nor should it be. It is a real and valuableinstitution; nevertheless, it remains for the child an artificialsituation...(LS95)

"The educational system does not, I think, have quite the influence on the formation of character that is commonly supposed. The family is the place in which moral training is given."(IRE195)

... the aim of a democratic society. It is not necessary that we should agree. But it is necessary that we should explain ourselves to one another.(IRE199)

.reject the view that the school should instill in its pupils the desire for social reform. It is not the schools's duty to win them over to a particular political program. Democracy will progress because people are educated and not because they have been taught to agitate for social reform.(EF95)

The emergence of democracy as an ideal society can be traced to the liberal education beginning with the Greeks. (Dzuback, 22 1).

To advance the happiness and well-being of the community we need to focus on the needs of the majority rather than on those of the powerful few. (Dzuback, 104)

Too many policies are guided by the love of money including the university's accommodation of practices to the wishes of donors, students and state legislatures instead of its own self-defined mission. (Dzuback, 18)
VII. Theory of Opportunity

When everything is said and done, the ultimate reason for liberal education for all is that everybody deserves the chance to be human. (LS90)

.what is distinctly human in man remains the same everywhere. Hence, education should be the same for everyone.(EF93)

If some children take longer to learn than others, we must not for this reason dilute the intellectual quality of education but, rather, devote more time and effort to helping slow learners acquire the same kind of knowledge obtained by their peers, even if they have to go to school on Saturdays.(EF94) But if everybody is to go to school, some school must welcome him. If everybody is to be educated, the school must in some manner hold on to and interest him.(LS11)

The evidence is that every child who has not sustained some damage to his brain can learn the basic subjects.(LS12) In education, when little is expected little is achieved. The teacher who is unlikely to have been brought up in the slums, will not expect much from children from such neighborhoods ... the prophesy is self-fulfilling.(LS15)

The lack of "ability" ability among the poor that is everywhere lamented is a consequence of the conditions under which they are brought up The school cannot compete with or remedy these conditions.(LS18)

A university cannot talk about the limitations of social tolerance. A university is supposed to lead, not to follow. A university is supposed to do what is right, and damn the consequences. As long as we are a university and not a club, we cannot invoke racial distinctions as a basis for the selection of our students. (Dzuback, 144)

Women participate extensively in the political,m social, and intellectual debates on campus. (Dzuback, 147).

Grouping children according to standardized tests is a means of perpetuating poverty and racial discrimination. (Hutchins, 1968, 263).
VIII. Theory of Consensus

This in a sentence or two is the aim of a democratic society. It is not necessary that we should agree. But it is necessary that we should explain ourselves to one another.(IRE199)

Opinion, of course, is different, here men may disagree. But when they do agree, opinion becomes knowledge.(EF94)

... Hutchins championed freedom of thought. He believed that controversy is the heart of education and that educational institutions should develop patterns of genuine autonomy. Like Jefferson, Hutchins emphasized the importance of discussion so that political decisions can be made on the basis of rationality, rather than persuasion.(IRE192)

To bring order to the chaos of the modem world requires not the teaching of facts by rational inquiry and discussion. (Dzuback, 106)

Opinion, of course, is different, here men may disagree. But when they do agree, opinion becomes knowledge.(Dzuback, 81)

Allen Bloom(14 September 1930 in Indianapolis, Indiana – 7 October 1992 in Chicago, Illinois) was an American philosopher, essayist and academic. Bloom championed the idea of 'Great Books' education, as did his mentor Leo Strauss. Bloom became famous for his criticism of contemporary American higher education, with his views being expressed most forcibly in his bestselling 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind.

In 2000, years after Bloom's passing, Saul Bellow, Bloom's close friend and teaching partner at the University of Chicago, wrote a novel based on his colleague titled Ravelstein. In it, among other personal details previously not disclosed publicly, it was revealed that Bloom was gay and likely died of complications from HIV-AIDS.[1]

Allan Bloom was an only child born to social worker parents in Indianapolis. As a thirteen year old, he read a Readers Digest article about the University of Chicago and told his parents he wanted to attend; his parents thought it was unreasonable and did not encourage his hopes.[2] Yet later, when his family moved to Chicago in 1944, his parents met a psychiatrist and family friend whose son was enrolled in the University of Chicago’s humanities program for gifted students. In 1946 Bloom was accepted to the same program and spent the next decade of his life enrolled at the university in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.[2] This began his life-long passion for the 'idea' of the university.[3]

In the preface to Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960-1990, he stated that his education "began with Freud and ended with Plato." The theme of this education was self-knowledge, or self-discovery -- an idea that Bloom would later write seemed impossible to conceive of for a Midwestern American boy. He credits Leo Strauss as the teacher who made this endeavor possible for him.[4]

After earning his bachelor’s degree he enrolled in the Committee on Social Thought, where he was assigned Classicist David Grene as tutor. Grene recalled Bloom as an energetic and humorous student completely dedicated to reading the classics, but with no definite career ambitions.[2] The Committee on Social Thought was a unique interdisciplinary program that attracted a small number of students due to its rigorous academic requirements and lack of clear employment opportunities after graduation. [2]. Bloom earned his Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago in 1955.

Bloom studied and taught abroad in Paris (1953-55) and Germany (1957). Upon returning to the United States he taught adult education students at the University of Chicago with his friend Werner J. Dannhauser, author of Nietzsche's View of Socrates. Bloom later taught at Yale, Cornell, Tel Aviv University and the University of Toronto, before returning to the University of Chicago.

In 1963, as a Professor at Cornell, Allan Bloom served as a faculty member of the Telluride Association. The organization aims to foster an everyday synthesis of self-governance and intellectual inquiry that enables students to develop their potential for leadership and public service. The students receive free room and board in the Telluride House on the Cornell University campus and run the house themselves, hiring staff, supervising maintenance and organizing seminars. Bloom had a major influence on several residents of Telluride House, including Paul Wolfowitz, one of the founding members of both the Project for the New American Century and the New Citizenship Project.

During 1968, he published his most significant work of philosophical translation and interpretation, a translation of Plato's Republic. Bloom strived to achieve "the first translation of Plato's Republic that attempts to be strictly literal.[5]" Although the translation is not universally accepted, Bloom said he always conceptualized the translator's role as a matchmaker between readers and the texts he translated and interpreted[6]. He repeated this effort while a Professor at the University of Toronto in 1978, translating Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. Bloom was an editor for the scholarly journal Political Theory as well as a contributor to History of Political Philosophy (edited by Joseph Cropsey and Leo Strauss) among many other publications during his years of academic teaching. Bloom also translated and commented upon Rousseau's "Letter to D'Alembert On the Theater," relying heavily upon Plato's Laws.

After returning to Chicago, he befriended and taught courses with Saul Bellow. Bellow wrote the Preface to The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, the book that made Bloom famous and wealthy. Bellow later immortalized his dead friend in the novel Ravelstein. Bloom's last book was Love and Friendship, where he offered interpretations of novels by Stendhal, Jane Austen, Flaubert, and Tolstoy in light of Rousseau's influence on the Romantic movement, of plays by William Shakespeare, and finally of Plato's Symposium.

Bloom's work is not easily defined, yet there is a thread that links all of his published material. Allan Bloom was a philosopher and he was primarily concerned with preserving the philosophical way of life for the future generation. He strived to do this through both scholarly and popular writing. Accordingly, his writings fall into two basic categories: scholarly (e.g. Plato's Republic) and popular political comment (e.g. Closing of the American Mind). On the surface, this is a valid distinction, yet closer examinations of Bloom’s works reveal a direct connection between the two types of expression, which reflect his view of philosophy and the role of the philosopher in political life.

Plato's Republic
Bloom’s translation and interpretive essay on Plato’s Republic was published in 1968. For Bloom, previous translations were lacking. In particuliar, Bloom was eager to sweep away the Christian Platonist layers that had coated the translations and scholarly analysis. In 1971, he wrote, "With the Republic, for example, a long tradition of philosophy tells us what the issues are. [...] This sense of familiarity may be spurious; we may be reading the text as seen by the tradition rather than raising Plato's own questions[7].

Up until the late 20th century, most English language Platonists were following a tradition that blended Christian theology with Plato. This view, named Christian Platonism, interprets Plato as prophet of the coming Christian age, a monotheist in a polytheist world. In this school, Socrates is considered a pre-Christian saint; the tradition emphasizes Socrates' 'goodness' and other-worldly attributes, such as accepting his death like a martyr. In the words of George Grant, "Straussians say that Christianity led to overextension of soul."[8] Yet there developed a different type of Platonism, Pagan Platonism, a type of which Bloom became aware and most certainly adopted from his teacher Leo Strauss (1899-1973), the most important representative of this thought in the past century.[9] Adherents have a significantly different view of Plato’s Republic.

Strauss developed this point of view by studying ancient Islamic and Jewish theorists, such as Al-Farabi (870-950) and Moses Maimonides (1135-1204). Each philosopher was faithful to his religion but sought to integrate classical political philosophy into Islam and Judaism. Islam has a prophet-legislator Muhammad and similarly, Jewish law is a function of its theology. Thus these philosophers had to write with great skill, incorporating the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, many of which contradicted or contravened Islamic or Jewish thought and practice, without being seen to challenge the theology. According to Strauss, Al-Farabi and Moses Maimonides were really writing for potential philosophers within the pious faithful. Strauss calls this the discovery of esoteric writing, and he first presents it as a possibility in Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952). Christianity differed from these faiths in that philosophy was always free to establish a foothold in Christendom, without necessarily being seen as heretical. All one has to do is think of Saint Augustine (354-430) and his City of God and On Free Will.

Strauss took this insight and applied it eventually to Plato’s writings themselves. Bloom's translation and essay of the Republic takes this stance; therefore, it is radically different in many important aspects from the previous translations and interpretations of the Republic. Most notable is Bloom's discussion of Socratic irony. In fact, irony is the key to Bloom’s take on the Republic. (See his discussion of Books II-VI of the Republic.) Allan Bloom says a philosopher is immune to irony because he can see the tragic as comic and comic as tragic. Bloom refers to Socrates, the philosopher par excellence, in his Interpretative Essay stating, "Socrates can go naked where others go clothed; he is not afraid of ridicule. He can also contemplate sexual intercourse where others are stricken with terror; he is not afraid of moral indignation. In other words he treats the comic seriously and the tragic lightly[10]. Thus irony in the Republic refers to the 'Just City in Speech'. Bloom looks at it not as a model for future society, nor as a template for the human soul; rather, it is an ironic city, an example of the distance between philosophy and every potential philosopher. Bloom follows Strauss in suggesting that the 'Just City in Speech' is not natural; it is man-made, and thus ironic.

Closing of the American Mind (ISBN 5-551-86868-0) was published in 1987, five years after Bloom published an essay in The National Review about the failure of universities to serve the needs of students. With the encouragement of Saul Bellow, his colleague at the University of Chicago, he expanded his thoughts into a book "about a life, I've led"[2] that critically reflected on the current state of higher education in American universities. His friends and admirers imagined the work would be a modest success, as did Bloom, who recognized his publisher’s modest advance to complete the project as a lack of sales confidence. Yet on the momentum of strong initial reviews, including one by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times, it became an unexpected best seller, eventually selling close to half a million copies in hardback and remaining at number one on the New York Times Non-fiction Best Seller list for four months.[11]

Bloom's Closing of the American Mind is a critique of the contemporary university and how Bloom sees it as failing its students. Also, Bloom criticizes analytic philosophy as a movement, "Professors of these schools simply would not and could not talk about anything important, and they themselves do not represent a philosophic life for the students." To a great extent, Bloom's criticism revolves around the devaluation of the Great Books of Western Thought as a source of wisdom. However, Bloom's critique extends beyond the university to speak to the general crisis in American society. "Closing of the American Mind" draws analogies between the United States and the Weimar Republic. The modern liberal philosophy, he says, enshrined in the Enlightenment thought of John Locke - that a just society could be based upon self-interest alone, coupled by the emergence of relativism in American thought - had led to this crisis.

For Bloom, this created a void in the souls of Americans, into which demagogic radicals as exemplified by 60's student leaders could leap. (In the same fashion, Bloom suggests, that the Nazi brownshirts once filled the lacuna created in German society by the Weimar Republic.) In the second instance, the higher calling of philosophy and reason understood as freedom of thought, had been eclipsed by a pseudo-philosophy, or an ideology of thought. Relativism was one feature of modern liberal philosophy that had subverted the Platonic–Socratic teaching. The Great Books of Western Thought simply became the ramblings of dead white men rather than beacons leading to the highest calling.

The power behind Bloom's critique of contemporary social movements at play in universities or society at large is derived from his philosophical orientation. The failure of contemporary liberal education leads to the social and sexual habits of modern students, and their inability to fashion a life for themselves beyond the mundane offerings touted as success. Bloom argues that commercial pursuits had become more highly valued than the philosophic quest for truth or the civilized pursuits of honor and glory.

In particular, he looked seriously at the effects of popular music on the lives of students, placing pop music, or the generic term "rock music" in a historical context from Plato’s Republic to Nietzsche’s Dionysian longings. Treating it with great seriousness, he gave fresh attention to the industry, its target-marketing to children and teenagers, its top performers, and its hypocritical pretensions to liberation and freedom. Some critics, including Frank Zappa, denounced Bloom's view of rock music as a form of racist bigotry.[12] Bloom, informed by Socrates, Aristotle, Rousseau and Nietzsche, explores music’s power over the human soul. He cites the soldier who throws himself into battle at the urging of the drum corps, the pious believer who prays under the spell of a religious hymn, the lover seduced by the romantic guitar, and points towards the tradition of philosophy that treated musical education as paramount. He names Mick Jagger as a cardinal representative of the hypocrisy and intellectual sterility of rock. Pop music employs sexual images and language to enthrall the young, and persuade them that their petty rebelliousness is authentic politics, when in fact they are being controlled by the money-managers whom successful performers like Jagger quietly serve. In fact, Bloom claims, Jagger is a hero to many university students who envy his fame and wealth, but are really just bored by the lack of options before them.[13] Along with the absence of literature in the lives of the young, and their fractured erotic relationships, the first part of Closing tries to explain the current state of education in a fashion beyond the purview of an economist or psychiatrist – contemporary culture's leading umpires.

The success of the work attracted a wide spectrum of critics; some scholars made interesting bedfellows. Martha Nussbaum, a classical philosopher and feminist, and Harry V. Jaffa, a conservative disciple of Strauss, both argued that Bloom was deeply influenced by 19th-century European philosophers, especially Friedrich Nietzsche. Nussbaum wrote that, for Bloom, Nietzsche had been disastrously influential in modern American thought.[14] Jaffa went so far as to point out the lack of attention Bloom paid to the moral role gay rights were playing in the lives of current students.[15] According to Jaffa, while Bloom discusses contemporary social movements, particularly those that gained ascendancy in the 1960s, he is virtually silent on the gay rights movement[15]

Some critics embraced Bloom's argument. Thus Norman Podhoretz in his review noted that the closed-mindedness in the title refers to the paradoxical consequence of the academic "open mind" found in liberal political thought – namely "the narrow and intolerant dogmatism" that dismisses any attempt, by Plato or the Hebrew Bible for example, to provide a rational basis for moral judgments. Podhoretz continued, "Bloom goes on to charge liberalism with vulgarizing the noble ideals of freedom and equality, and he offers brilliantly acerbic descriptions of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement, which he sees as products of this process of vulgarization."[16]

In a 1989 article (The German Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 3, Focus: Literature since 1945 (Summer, 1989)), Ann Clark Fehn discusses the critical reception of the book, noting that it had eclipsed other titles that year dealing with higher education (College, by Ernest Boyer, and Cultural Literacy, by E. D. Hirsch), and quoting Publisher's Weekly, which had described Bloom's book as a "best-seller made by reviews."

From the perspective of Huitt's (1995) systems model of human behavior, the primary emphasis of humanistic education is on the regulatory system and the affective/emotional system. The development of these systems is often overlooked in our present education system (Am, 1995). The regulatory system acts as a filter for connecting the environment and internal thoughts to other thoughts or feelings as well as connecting knowledge and feelings to action. The affective/emotional system colors, embellishes, diminishes or otherwise modifies information acquired through the regulatory system or sent from the cognitive system to action. In our present environment of constant change and uncertainty, the development of the knowledge, attitudes, and skills discussed in these systems is especially important.

As described by Gage and Berliner (1991) there are five basic objectives of the humanistic view of education:

1. promote positive self-direction and independence (development of the regulatory system);
2. develop the ability to take responsibility for what is learned (regulatory and affective systems);
3. develop creativity (divergent thinking aspect of cognition);
4. curiosity (exploratory behavior, a function of imbalance or dissonance in any of the systems); and
5. an interest in the arts (primarily to develop the affective/emotional system).

The SCANS report (Whetzel, 1992) as well as Naisbitt (1982), Toffler (1970, 1981, 1990) and other authors (see Huitt, 1997) point to the importance of these objectives for success in the information age. It is important to realize that no other model or view of education places as much emphasis on these desired outcomes as does the humanistic approach.

According to Gage and Berliner (1991) some basic principles of the humanistic approach that were used to develop the objectives are:

1. Students will learn best what they want and need to know
2. . That is, when they have developed the skills of analyzing what is important to them and why as well as the skills of directing their behavior towards those wants and needs, they will learn more easily and quickly. Most educators and learning theorists would agree with this statement, although they might disagree on exactly what contributes to student motivation. Knowing how to learn is more important than acquiring a lot of knowledge
3. . In our present society where knowledge is changing rapidly, this view is shared by many educators, especially those from a cognitive perspective. Self-evaluation is the only meaningful evaluation of a student's work
4. . The emphasis here is on internal development and self-regulation. While most educators would likely agree that this is important, they would also advocate a need to develop a student's ability to meet external expectations. This meeting of external expectations runs counter to most humanistic theories. Feelings are as important as facts
5. . Much work from the humanistic view seems to validate this point and is one area where humanistically-oriented educators are making significant contributions to our knowledge base. Students learn best in a non-threatening environment
. This is one area where humanistic educators have had an impact on current educational practice. The orientation espoused today is that the environment should by psychologically and emotionally, as well as physically, non-threatening. However, there is some research that suggests that a neutral or even slightly cool environment is best for older, highly motivated students.

There are a variety of ways teachers can implement the humanist view towards education. Some of these include:

1. Allow the student to have a choice in the selection of tasks and activities whenever possible.
2. Help students learn to set realistic goals.
3. Have students participate in group work, especially cooperative learning, in order to develop social and affective skills.
4. Act as a facilitator for group discussions when appropriate.
5. Be a role model for the attitudes, beliefs and habits you wish to foster. Constantly work on becoming a better person and then share yourself with your students.

A meta-analysis completed by Giaconia and Hedges (1982) of approximately 150 studies of open education suggest that this approach is associated with

1. improved cooperativeness, creativity, and independence (moderate);
2. increased positive attitudes toward teacher and school, creativity, adjustment, and general mental ability (slight);
3. lower language achievement (negligible) and achievement motivation (moderate);
4. no consistent effect on math, reading, or other types of academic achivement; and
5. no consistent effect on anxiety, locus of control or self-concept.

It would seem, then, that open education, broadly defined in the terms used by Giaconia and Hedges, has not met the objectives and principles normally used to define humanistic education. While it has not been detrimental to basic skills achievement, per se, it has not had the impact on self-concept and locus of control as expected by its originators. In addition, the decline in achievement motivation is especially troublesome in light of the SCANS report (Whetzel, 1992) that highlighted the importance of striving for excellence in order to be successful in a world economy.

One of the models included in the overall review of open education was facilitative teaching developed by Carl Rogers. Aspy and Roebuck (1975) studied teachers in terms of their ability to offer facilitative conditions (including empathy, congruence, and positive regard) as defined by Rogers (1969) and Rogers and Freiberg (1994). Teachers who were more highly facilitative tended to provide more:

1. response to student feeling;
2. use of student ideas in ongoing instructional interactions;
3. discussion with students (dialogue);
4. praise of students;
5. congruent teacher talk (less ritualistic);
6. tailoring of contents to the individual student's frame of reference (explanations created to fit the immediate needs of the learners); and
7. smiling with students.

Notice that all of these actions are congruent with a direct instruction model of teaching.

In a subsequent study involving 600 teachers from kindergarten though 12th grade, Aspy and Roebuck (1977) found that students in classrooms of high facilitative teachers:

1. missed four fewer days of school (5 as compared to 9 for low facilitative teachers);
2. increased scores on self-concept measures;
3. greater gains on academic achievement measures, including both math and reading scores;
4. presented fewer disciplinary problems and commited fewer acts of vandalism to school property; and
5. were more spontaneous and used higher levels of thinking (knowledge versus comprehension through evaluation).

In summary, the purpose of humanistic education is to provide a foundation for personal growth and development so that learning will continue throughout life in a self-directed manner (DeCarvalho, 1991). A lack of cohesiveness with respect to defining the critical components of the humanistic approach has hampered its development. However, the results of Aspy and Roebuck's (1977) study of facilitative teaching in comparison with the Giaconia and Hedges (1982) meta-analysis of open education suggest that Rogers' (1969; Rogers & Freiberg, 1994) approach may be more descriptive of the critical conditions for achieving academic success as well as important affective and volitonal outcomes. This is especially important in terms of the multiple dimensions of the components for success as described by the SCANS report (Whetzel, 1992) and Huitt's (1997) summary of the requirements for success in the information age.