Publisher's Synopsis
This new study of modern educational thought relates the selected thinkers and theories to a profound change in the way in which men have come to understand themselves and the world. The theories of Rousseau, Kant, Froebel, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche contemporary English-speaking philosophers and schemes of education, Sartre, Helvetius and B.F. Skinner, are shown, in separate studies, to be variations upon the theme of man as a self-defining and self-legislating subject in a world that does nothing to present him with any Law or Way. Education therefore becomes a problem, a matter of arbitrary selection of what the young are to be taught and to do.;For there is no authoritative pattern for adults to follow and to pass on to them. The selected theories each provide a different attempt to avoid or to resolve this problem. The book ends with a critical comparison of the theories and concludes that there can be no rational selection of what the young should be taught while we adhere to the assumptions behind these theories.
