Abstract
It is commonplace to speak of education as a right. Yet it has been seldom defended as a natural right. Natural rights are pre-social, while education is social intrinsically. This analysis attempts to show how Aristotle’s concept of education can be conceived as a natural and necessary process to fulfill individual autonomy. In this sense it approaches Locke’s conception of a natural right. To the degree that it succeeds, the firmest possible basis for education in modern constitutionally premised social order is established. It will stand on a par with life, liberty and property and will be equally resistant to tyrannical inroads of either government or majoritarian politics. Moreover, it will refocus society on its absolute duty to treat its citizens justly, that is, will full regard for their inalienable rights.
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Notes
The brilliant critic of modernity, Bauman, often employs the concepts of ‘gardening’ and ‘engineering’ to indicate the anti-human social and political tendencies: ‘The Holocaust was an outcome of a unique encounter between factors by themselves quite ordinary and common; and that the possibility of such an encounter could be blamed to a very large extent on the emancipation of the political state, with its monopoly of the means of violence and its audacious engineering ambitions, from social control—following the step-by-step dismantling of all non-political power resources and institutions of social self-management’. [Bauman 1991, p. Xiii, original emphasis]
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Vasillopulos, C. The Natural Rights Basis of Aristotelian Education. Stud Philos Educ 30, 19–36 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-010-9204-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-010-9204-9