Find in Library

This chapter deals with the innovating initiatives in the teaching methods taken by authors such as Hoole and Comenius in the sixteenth century. The innovations introduced not only represented a rework on ideas from remote ages but also contributed to reconfigure politics and the rise of the modern state. Focused on the parallel of modern schooling and the modern state, David Hamilton fosters as critical view on the evolutionary readings from a cultural history that provides him with support to assert the idea that modern schooling did not have institutional ancestors. As a supportive argument to his assumption, Hamilton operates a dual movement: a preliminary historiographical critique, based on original sources but subjugated by a Darwinian interpretative framework and a subsequent exposition of complex pathways through which disorderly ideas and practices intermingled to give birth to modern schooling.