ABSTRACT
The historical study of educational theory can contribute to intellectual culture as a corrective to the parochialism of the present and at the same time elucidate current admonitions and practices. Modern educational philosophy would appear to be deeply imbued with a commitment to the centrality of mind and knowledge through the acquisition of concepts and their deployment in critical assessment of the environment, human and physical, as a mark of individual autonomy. To be specific, we might be led to question this current stress on 'autonomy' as a desirable educational aim and see it merely as the outcome of a specific tradition of disengagement from traditional norms in the spirit of the Enlightenment. In the perspective of the profound cultural achievements of the Renaissance and of the conditions which nurtured these triumphs of the human spirit the peculiar emphasis on autonomy can be seen as a prescription for cultural catastrophe.
