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History and Educational Theory

This is the first of two volumes of studies (the second not yet published) in the history of educational thought. There were, of course, educational thinkers before the chosen starting date of 1350, some of whom, like Plato, have profoundly influenced subsequent thought and practice; but to have included these would have required at least another volume. Moreover, the midfourteenth century makes a convenient starting-point for a survey of this kind, marking a cultural watershed between mediaeval scholastic culture and that of Renaissance humanism. In fact none of the major figures whom Professor Bantock considers in detail belongs to the fourteenth century (Erasmus, born c1466, is the earliest); but in an introductory chapter he examines the general character of humanist thought which, through such men as Vergerius, Guarino and Vittorino da Feltre, rejected mediaevalism and initiated "a changed image of the educated man and an altered purpose for education" (p. 11). The book is not a history of educational thought within the stated period, but a study of educational theory in two contrasting phases; it thus divides into two Parts, "The Humanists: 'Words'" and "The Empirics: 'Things'''titles which themselves express the contrast and indicate the fundamental difference of outlook in which it lies. (The phases are not as sharply distinguished as this division might suggest; Professor Bantock makes this clear: just as humanism has roots in the mediaeval past, so too there are "adumbrations of a new approach to knowledge ... in the period when humanism still constituted the recommended educational ideal" [po 135]). Each Part has an introductory chapter in which are expounded the principal features of the phase, the conception of reality from which they derive, and the educational beliefs and practices which they imply. There follows a detailed examination of major representative writers, in Part One, Erasmus, Castiglione, Elyot, Vives and Montaigne, in Part Two, Bacon, Comenius, Locke and Rousseau. Part Two contains an additional explanatory chapter on the Enlightenment. Professor Bantock does not aim to examine all the theorists within each phase nor each theorist in his entirety, but rather to use each to illustrate the character of the phase to which he belongs and to demonstrate the underlying themes of the book, which "relate primarily to the interplay of notions of 'nature' and 'artifice' ... and to the curricular and behavioural objectives implicit in [them]" (pp. 6-7).