Educating Kings and Citizens

Professor Siobhan Moroney
Lake Forest College
moroney@lfc.edu
Politics 356

Aristotle wrote that ideas about education most properly belong to the discipline of political theory. In America alone, in the last few decades, we have seen how political and politicized schooling has become, from which books and topics a school should adopt to the content of the local elementary school's holiday program.  But this is not new; societies and philosophers in them have been devoting attention to what and how and by whom children and young adults should be taught since Plato wrote the Republic over 2,000 years ago.  Today's debates over feminism, traditionalism, ethnocentrism, religion, etc., in education, merely echo what has come before.  We will explore treatises on education to see how past thinkers answered these essential questions:  which members of society should be educated and what do they need to know?