The Enlightenment was cosmopolitan in its effort to spread the light of reason, but from the very beginning of the age there were nationalistic tendencies to be seen in varying shades. Although Rousseau himself was generally concerned with universal man in such works as The Social Contract and Émile, his The Government of Poland (1782) did lay out a proposal for an education with a national basis, and generally his ideas influenced the nationalistic generation of the French Revolution of 1789. The real starting point, generally speaking, of national pedagogic movements was in France. It perhaps began with the philosophes, the rationalists and liberals such as Voltaire and Diderot who emphasized the development of the individual through state education—not as a means, of course, of adjusting to the state and its current government but as a means of creating critical, detached, responsible citizens. The marquis de Condorcet was closely connected with this line of thought. For him man was by nature good and capable of never-ending perfection, and the goal of education should be the “general, gradually increasing perfection of man.” He drafted a democratic, liberal, and at the same time ... (200 of 123,993 words)The influence of nationalism
France
Education
Written by Robert Browning
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