Introduction

This book collects together specially commissioned chapters which cover a series of political philosophical theories of education: Plato and Socrates, Aristotle, the Roman Stoics, the Scholastics Hugh of St Victor and John of Salisbury, Erasmus and More, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, the Scottish Enlightenment, Macaulay and Wollstonecraft, Fichte and Schleiermacher, the Utopian Socialists, Owen and Fourier, Martineau and the Unitarians, J. S. Mill, nineteenth-century British feminists, the Idealists, Symonds and Carpenter, and Dewey. The initial intellectual impetus for our project was the observation that political and social theories and philosophies inevitably are imbricated with some theory of or, more modestly, ideas about, education. So we asked contributors to place accounts of pedagogy, curriculum, socialisation, schooling, university and scholarship into the context of political and social philosophy and theory, considering the relationships between education and the concerns about public and private life, political and personal power, as they had been understood by prominent thinkers and groups of intellectuals.