How do we know what we should teach? And how should we go about teaching it? These deceptively simple questions about education perplexed Tolstoy. Before writing his famous novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy opened an experimental school on his estate to try and answer them. His experiences there incited his life-long inquiry into the meaning and purpose of religion, literature, art and life itself.

In this text, Daniel Moulin tells the story of the course of Tolstoy's educational thought, and how it relates to Tolstoy's fiction and other writings. It...

Plato was the first and most formidable thinker to recognize that education is a fiercely contested concept, and to point out what great social and personal issues are at stake in education. He articulated a compelling argument for a liberal arts education as something peculiarly befitting free and autonomous beings. He understood the centrality of education for human well-being and flourishing. And he was the first to set forth a systematic theory of education.

In this text, Robin Barrow concisely and convincingly establishes the continuing relevance of Plato's views to debates on...

Best known as author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), if not also as mother of Frankenstein's author Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft survived domestic violence and unusual independent womanhood to write engaging letters, fiction, history, critical reviews, handbooks and treatises. Her work on coeducational thought was a major early modern influence upon the development of a post-Enlightenment tradition, and continues to have vital relevance today.

Celebrated as an early modern feminist, abolitionist and socialist philosopher, Wollstonecraft had little...

Michel Foucault's influential work spanned a wide array of intellectual disciplines, his writings having been widely taken up in philosophy, history, literary criticism and political theory.

Focusing on the implications of Foucault's theories for education, whilst characterizing them as provocative, problematizing, poetic and playful, Lynn Fendler describes the historical context for understanding Foucault's ground breaking critiques. Including a discussion of his major theories of disciplinary power, genealogy, discourse and subjectivity, this text provides generative explanations...

Paulo Freire is one of the most influential thinkers in education. This text is a thoughtful and thorough introduction to Freire's work, situating this in the context of his life, intellectual journey and the reception of his thinking around the world.

Daniel Schugurensky's text offers a coherent and accessible account of Freire's educational thought, looking at its contribution to educational theory and practice and exploring the legacy of Freire for contemporary education and the relevance of his thought for today's students.

Jerome Bruner is the vanguard of "the cognitive revolution" in psychology and the predominant spokesman for the role of culture and education in the making of the modern mind. In this text Olson encourages the reader to think about children as Bruner did, not as bundles of traits and dispositions to be diagnosed and remediated, but as thoughtful, keenly interested, agentive persons who are willing and indeed able to play an important role in their own learning and development.

Through the unique approach of combining commentary and conversation with Bruner, the author provides an...

Jean Piaget was one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. His influence on developmental psychology, education and epistemology has been enormous. This text undertakes a reconstruction of the contexts and intellectual development of Piaget's numerous texts in the wide-ranging fields of biology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, child psychology, social psychology, theology, logic, epistemology and education.

Richard Kohler reconstructs the often overlooked theological basis of Piaget's theories and analyses the influence this had upon the various areas of his research and...

Rudolf Steiner is one of the most controversially judged educational reformers of the twentieth century. Although he received little recognition within his field, his educational thought has had a sustained and profound influence, not only in the development of the Waldorf Schools, but also in healing, socially therapeutic work, psychosomatic medicine, biological-dynamic agriculture, corporate organisation, fine arts, and architecture.

Heiner Ullrich paints a concise and well-grounded portrait of the creator of the anthroposophic doctrine and Waldorf pedagogy. The text describes a...

Aristotle is often underrated in educational circles but the impact of his philosophy and his actions are evident in the schools and universities around us today. Aristotle developed the first proper university that had different departments and vast collections of texts and artefacts. His philosophy has also influenced the greatest minds since his time, from Aquinas to today's logicians, rationalists, and empiricists. The influence of his educational thinking and his philosophy in general helped underpin the Renaissance and the modern era. In a nutshell, Aristotle took our thinking and...

This text offers a major reassessment of the life and thought of the distinguished 19th century industrial philanthropist and educational reformer, Robert Owen. In a period when Owen's radical new visions for learning and teaching, adult and vocational pedagogy and social transformation are receiving fresh and global attention, Robert Davis and Frank O'Hagan place Owen's thought right at the heart of the Enlightenment advocacy of popular, democratic mass education. Tracing both the ancestry and the legacy of Owen's reforming spirit, they also offer a critical appraisal of the relevance of...