ABSTRACT
In this chapter we focus on the historical and symbolical extension of the contributions of Cartesianism and Calvinism. The symbolic meaning is highly significant in that in education the choice of content and methods, for instance, invariably reflects some valuespheres; education is essentially a moral and political enterprise where, arguably, even the most concrete or ‘objective’ plans and actions may symbolize something beyond themselves. Additionally, the boundaries between ideological ‘isms’ might prove permeable. For instance, when we speak of an educational agenda of Calvinism we have at the same time to admit that there might be similar elements in ideological rivals: the Catholicist paradigm of the 16th and 17th centuries, the Ratio studiorum, exercised by the Jesuits, shared the same disciplined outlook on education as its Calvinist counterpart: “the Jesuits established, for the first time in history of Western education, an instrument of potentially farreaching control” (Bowen, 1981, p. 24). However, the Jesuit system lacked the same cultural strength due to the success of Protestantism among the rising new bourgeois classes. By the same token, Cartesianism-arguably a symbolic curriculum of modernism with its body-mind distinctions, its preference for reason over other modalities of existence, and its thrust to a quasimathematical blueprint of reality as a guiding image for the politics of knowledge-has maintained its ideological status quo through the varied phases of history-and despite the obsolescence of Cartesian theories of knowledge and nature as such.
