ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the key historical, rhetorical, and aesthetic features of the humanist legacy in education and elucidates how they have come to be pervasive in education and educational thought. It traces a line from Plato in Ancient Greece, through Cicero and Quintilian in Ancient Rome, to the humanists of the European Renaissance, and towards the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where the civic ideologies of education took hold in the form of compulsory schooling. Using the example of the anarchist educational thinker, Herbert Read, the chapter concludes with the suggestion that even much radical educational thought is underpinned by the abstractly redemptive, hierarchically imposed, and socially stratifying and harmonising impulses and logic of the humanist legacy.
