Hegel and Philosophy of Education (II)

Hegel’s contribution to education has been largely overlooked by those in philosophy and in educational theory. This is astonishing because Hegel’s philosophy, of all Western philosophical systematic and nonsystematic critiques, is arguably the one which is most clear about its educational foundations. Before Hegel became a university lecturer, he was for 8 years (1808–1816) the headteacher of the Nuremberg Gymnasium or grammar school. In that time not only did he write his Science of Logic(1812, 1816), he thought through issues of pedagogy and of learning and teaching in many of his letters which are still current nearly 200 years later. These letters written between 1808 and 1816 contained reflections on discipline, on the problems and advantages of student-centered learning, on the contradictions of independent learning, on the bad practice of “spoon-feeding,” on the part that the classics can play, and many other aspects of educational theory and practice. I cannot, in what...