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Maritains's Philosophy of Education for Freedom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Leo R. Ward
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Extract

Jacques Maritain began his theory of education by supposing that the child is made for freedom, that formal education on all levels, rightly conceived, is essentially aimed at truth and that the achievement of truth in areas such as philosophy, science and art progressively helps to make us free. The child is made to know. This means that he is made for a spiritual conquest of all nature. He is made also to love God and man, and this means that he is made for a conquest of himself. These simple statements were basic.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , October 1978 , pp. 499 - 513
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1978

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References

1 Notably in these three: Education at the Crossroads (New Haven, 1943)Google Scholar; “Themist Views on Education,” in Education Yearbook (Chicago, 1955)Google Scholar; and “Sur quelques aspects typiques de l'éducation chrétienne,” Nova et Vetera, 31 (1956)Google Scholar. This second article was published in translation in The Christian Idea of Education, ed. Fuller, Edmund (New Haven, 1957), pp. 173–98Google Scholar. For his philosophy of education in general and not merely “of education for freedom,” see Ward, Leo R., “Maritain's Philosophy of Education,” in Jacques Maritain, The Man and His Achievement, ed. Evans, Joseph W. (New York, 1963), pp. 193–214Google Scholar.

2 Roy Wood Sellars said philosophy is “a persistent attempt to understand the universe in which we find ourselves and of which we are a part.”

3 Tamquam ignotum.

4 Christian philosophy as used is everywhere in Maritain's works. The idea of it, expressed first in 1931 and later in many passages, has a small book given to it: De la philosophie chrétienne (1933), translated as An Essay on Christian Philosophy (New York, 1955)Google Scholar. The previous quotations are from the translation (pp. 3–28).

5 The Social and Political Philosophy of Jacques Maritain, eds. Evans, Joseph W. and Ward, Leo R. (New York, 1955), pp. 270–71Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., pp. 220–21.

7 Ibid., pp. 164–65.

8 Maritain, , Essay on Christian Philosophy, p. ixGoogle Scholar.

9 Maritain, , Pour une philosophic de l'éducation, rev. ed. (Paris, 1969), pp. 117–20Google Scholar.

10 For Maritain's influence in North America, see Collins, James, “Maritain's Impact on Thomism in America,” in Maritain: Man and His Achievement, ed. Evans, , pp. 25–45Google Scholar; for Maritain's influence in South America, see Caldera, Rafael, New Scholasticism, 46 (1972), 10–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Hofstader, Richard and Smith, Wilson, eds., American Higher Education, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1961)Google Scholar.

12 Maritain's treatise on “The Conquest of Freedom” is available in Social and Political Philosophy of Jacques Maritain, chap. 2.

13 Maritain, , “Vers une idée Thomiste de l'évolution,” Nova et Vetera, 42 (1967), 87–100Google Scholar.

14 Rom. 8:15, and II Cor. 3:17.

15 Aquinas, ThomasContra Gentiles 4Google Scholar. c. 22. The bracketed words are in Maritain.

16 Education at the Crossroads.

17 Ibid., pp. 12–13.

18 Maritain, , “Sur quelques aspects typiques de l'éducation chrétienne,” pp. 17–18Google Scholar.

19 Education at the Crossroads, pp. 73–74.