Discussants' Reactions

Extract

Frank Klassen's paper is not a dramatically novel interpretation but, nonetheless, a very substantial and well-documented treatment of eighteenth century American educational thought and practice. Basically, of course, Klassen is reasserting and supporting the claim that American education in the eighteenth century was dominated by Renaissance and Reformation views—which is to say, in Klassen's words, by the classics and by religion. Religious humanism in American education, Klassen reminds us, persisted throughout the eighteenth century despite the fact of some rather remarkable and far-reaching changes in the contemporaneous culture. Klassen's essential claim, then, is that until toward the end of the eighteenth century, the social and scientific innovations of the Enlightenment influenced American education only peripherally and then in a somewhat limited way at the level of higher education.