Vives on Education

Abstract

The history of pedadogy and the history of thought are inseparably bound together. Educational reformers are thinkers in their own right, or at least they crystallize into a pedagogic scheme the world-views of fashionable philosophers. Bacon’s realism was the inspiration of Comenius; Cartesian rationalism lived for years in the schools of Port-Royal; L’Emile of Rousseau led the way in romantic approaches to education; German idealism was brought to bear in Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man; John Dewey’s writings on education are at the same time a summary of his pragmatic theory of knowledge. By the same token, the history of European thought in the seventeenth century remains a puzzle without a thorough knowledge of such educational reformers as Vittorino da Feltre, Guarino da Verona, Rudolph Agricola, Erasmus, Philip Melanchthon, John Sturm, Thomas Elyot, Peter Ramus, Montaigne, Roger Ascham, Richard Mulcaster, and last but not least, Juan Luis Vives.

“Tota reliqua vita ex puerili educatione pendet” From Introductio ad Sapientiam