Public Education during Enlightment and Now

Reflection

The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment laid the foundations for independent thought. More than ever before, the fields of medicine, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, physics, and economics underwent significant expansions. The advent of printing brought about an emergence of new knowledge in staggering proportions. The subsequent Industrial Revolution of the 19th century enabled access to this knowledge with the widespread of public education.

The advancement of the Enlightenment undoubtedly transformed the Western world into an intelligent and self-aware civilization. The effects of Enlightenment thought gave rise to improved women’s rights to more efficient technologies, from fairer judicial systems to increased education opportunities, from revolutionary economic theories to a rich array of literature and music.

Nearly every theory or fact that is held in modern science has a foundation in the Enlightenment; many, in fact, remain as they were originally established. The era’s revolutionary approaches to investigation, reasoning, and problem solving made this period so important.

But muffled by the roar of the Enlightenment, the lessons of the Classics began to mute. Attention to the development of eloquence and imagination for the purposes of transcending the mere acquisition of knowledge was dominated by the growth of the predominant Cartesian criticism. Its relenting pursuit of truth was guided (and blinded) by the convictions of theories which lead to its rise.

Scientists like Copernicus, Galileo and Newton have helped to lay the foundations for the enlightenment by revealing that the laws of nature not only go against religious doctrine but also against human intuition. Over the last half century, a ...

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...endency to put the rationality of rules above the rationality of end. And so it is in this context that the 21st century enlightenment project demands a reassertion of the fundamentally ethical dimension of humanism.

The history of the human race has been one of diminishing person-to-person violence. Since the advent of modern civil rights, we have seen a revolution in social attitudes based on race, gender, sexuality. Furthermore, real-time global media have enabled a perspective of the human culture as a whole; and immigration, emigration and foreign trouble all provide us with vivid accounts of diversity.

An empathic capacity is imperative to achieving a world of...

• Stress infinite diversification of subjects and massive growth of information

• Radical change required to achieve complete understanding require for a rhetor.

• A student of the future must be…a