ABSTRACT
Many authors have highlighted the question of education in Adam Smith’s works from different points of view. Conventionally, distinction could be made between scholars attentive to an education in moral terms, others more sensitive to a public education in political, economic, or legal terms, and others again involved in an historical reconstruction of Smith’s conception of education. In the framework of Smith’s common idea of education (two different kinds of education related to the common and the wise human being), this chapter discusses the hypothesis that in Smith would mainly prevail a natural self-education based on the natural tendency of the human nature to relate with others in order to gratify the natural desire of a human being to be deservedly beloved in society. More particularly, the expression “natural education” in Smith would refer to: (1) the self-correction by the human being in terms of a spontaneous self-command that would be the natural consequence of the sympathetic consideration of the judgments of others by the human being; (2) the condition of possibility itself of the moral judgment by the imaginary impartial spectator; (3) a dimension between a theory of history and a theory of nature underlying Smith’s conception of education.
