The Age of Enlightenment and Education

Abstract

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that took place in Europe in the 18th century, whose main characteristic was criticism. For the Enlightenment theorists, it was assumed that the idea of reason should be the basis of all actions taken in every sphere of social life. The aim of the present study is to investigate the entanglement between Enlightenment and education. In order to do so, we first resort to Kant’s thought. Kant characterizes the Enlightenment as man’s emergence from his own immaturity, defining immaturity as the inability to use one’s own understanding. One can say that the Enlightenment has an intrinsic pedagogical dimension. The enterprise of Diderot’s Encyclopedia consisted of a project that could be regarded as pedagogical, since it aimed at spreading the new breakthroughs of knowledge in all fields to an increasing number of people. The belief of the Enlightenment was that progress in science and technology did not only depend on advances in accumulated knowledge. The achievements of science would also—beyond the new discoveries in the various fields of knowledge—be furthered through the irradiation of that knowledge. The expansion of access to the achievements of science for an increasing number of people was one of the main objectives of the Enlightenment theorists, and particularly of the Encyclopedia. It should be noted that these pedagogical projects were based on the thesis that the schooling of society was a strategy with which to secure and consolidate the path of reason, and to protect it against dogmas and prejudices against it. For this reason, the Enlightenment consisted of organization of the intellectual world, whereby the activity of thought effectively became a struggle in favor of freedom of reasoning and freedom of belief. In the Enlightenment ideas of education as set out in Diderot’s Plan of a University or of a Public Education in All Sciences, written while he was under state guard, one can see how the idea of instruction is linked to the concept of civilization. It was believed that, through education, the nation could be enlightened, and the people would also be better prepared to live as good citizens. In addition, it was believed that school education would give people the opportunity to develop the talents nature had endowed them with. The idea was that allowing everyone to have free access to the instruments of rationality and freedom of judgment would bring about the possibility of a fairer, more egalitarian society in which distinctions between its citizens were based on merit rather than inequalities of fortune. Finally, Condorcet’s proposal for the organization of the public education undoubtedly constitutes the matrix of our contemporary idea of the state school. To develop reason presupposes, from the point of view of the Enlightenment, using the instruments of that reason so it can be expressed. This implied the formation of public opinion, which was, per se, a pedagogical task. Also, and most importantly, this implied the necessity of the creation of schools.