Description
Book SynopsisAddresses a broad array of topics in education, the natural world, and medieval intellectual history. This book examines a philosophy of education that originated with the ancient Greeks and that reached its culmination in the late-medieval and early-Renaissance periods.
Trade Review"In an era when people speak constantly of the reform of teaching, when old-fashioned principles of education are often called into question, a reading of this book is very useful. The author, a professor of English who has been involved in battles for education reform in the United States for many years, invites us on this journey toward wisdom from the time of the Greeks to the Renaissance. . . . The reading of this beautiful book, written more by a philosopher than a historian, is helped by extremely learned notes and an excellent index."—Pierre Riché,
Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale"This study presents a visionary argument about "the journey to wisdom" that commences with Plato and ends with Kepler: it is learned, wide-ranging, lucid, and inspirational, and it is the kind of big book intellectually . . . that forces us to think about what we are teaching and why and about the history of that what and why. Olson is an accomplished medievalist. . . . [whose] scholarly, pedagogical and ecological passions inform this remarkable study."—Michael J. B. Allen,
Renaissance Quarterly"This is an important, complex, and wide ranging interpretation of significant aspects of Western educational theory and practice from Socrates to Kepler. . . . [This is] a work impressive in the breadth of its learning and intent."—Edward D. English,
Cithara
