ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapters we saw how, at the time of the Renaissance and as a consequence of changes in economic and political organisation, all the peoples of Europe came to feel the need of a new educational system. This resulted in an awakening of educational thought which was hitherto without precedent. The most enlightened minds of the age, in order to meet the needs which public opinion experienced as pressing and which they themselves had been the first to feel, posed the problem of education in all its generality and undertook to solve it, using all the methods and the whole corpus of knowledge available at the time. Hence arose the great educational doctrines whose principal features we have tried to delineate and which, all of them, set themselves the goal of determining those principles according to which the educational system should be reorganised so that it could enter into harmony with the demands of the age.
