ABSTRACT
‘Liberal’ education is a highly influential, but deeply contentious, educational model. Richardson shows that liberal education is not a fossilised heritage of Antiquity but has constantly been reinvented and recast in different contexts and to meet different needs. Educational practices and content were translated between radically different cultures, and reinterpreted. More than once, the whole concept of liberal education has been ‘appropriated’ by a different ethnic, religious or cultural group. Initially, the ‘liberal’ in liberal education merely described the status of those who received it: free male citizens of high status. But what developed was a model of liberal education as actually liberating – a sense that it transformed those who received it in such a way as to set them free. Richardson leads us to question what is meant by ‘a liberating education’, and whether all children would benefit from learning in such a way. The development of liberal education from its beginnings in Ancient Greece up to the Enlightenment is explored in this chapter, with a focus on its influence on education in England.
