Education towards a reasonable humanism

Abstract

Education is twice over concerned with human nature, most extensively as it is presupposed in the pursuit of diverse aims, and more specifically, as understanding it and applying such understanding are themselves made objects of study and teaching. The latter was a principal concern of ancient, renaissance and enlightenment humanists. These and others who focussed on the human condition have tended to arrive at one of the three attitudes: the celebratory, the gloomy and the condemnatory. Recent decades have seen tyrannies, global wars, campaigns of genocide, economic crises, seemingly irreconcilable political polarisation, man-made environmental degradation and other evils. Besides posing practical challenges, these put in question ideas of historical progress, of social harmony and of personal flourishing, and thereby have implications for an understanding of the human condition and for what to teach concerning it, and what qualities of character to seek to inculcate.