Is Spinozism a Form of Libertarian Education?

Abstract

The present article intends to discuss whether the philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza may be regarded as a form of libertarian education. Spinoza, a thinker of the seventeenth century, placed human freedom as the great ethical and political problem of his work. Contemporary pedagogies, which are seen as libertarian, emerged in the nineteenth century and proposed a form of education that stood out for fostering children’s freedom, as well as teachers’ freedom of teaching. By conducting in-depth bibliographical research on this general thematic similarity between libertarians and the Spinozan philosophy, we conclude that Spinozism can be seen as a form of libertarian education in that its writings agree with and provide foundations (from a philosophical viewpoint) to theses that are valid for this type of practice, as advocated by educators such as Paul Robin, Sébastien Faure and Franscesc Ferrer, among others. Our arguments take into account the historical contexts in which the theories in question were created, and involve, by their nature, the historical and philosophical dimensions of education.