The chief exponent of the view that times have changedand that our conception of the best education must changewith them is that most misunderstood of all philosophers ofeducation, John Dewey.

the manner in which knowledge is acquired, communicated and shared is internal to the nature of knowledge itself, and that the metaphysics of personhood needs to countenance the formation of reason if we are to understand how rationality and animality are united in the human person.

education is not a merely contingent addition to the human life-form. Education is reason’s vehicle.

why exactly education should matter to philosophy. The reason is that education makes us what we are. Human beings do not enter the world with their rational powers ‘up and running’. Those powers are actualised in the child in a process of formation, or education in the broadest sense

Rousseau’sheretical view was that anything which was outside children’s experience wouldbe meaningless to them, much as Plato, Comenius, and others had warned. Hisinsights had condensed principally out of the prevailing intellectual atmosphereat the time—empiricism, explicated by philosophers such as John Locke. We’lllook at Locke and Rousseau in more detail in Chapter 2.

Competition exists when there is comparison, and comparison does not bring about excellence.