Education

Education

Any regular practice, for example, agriculture, craft production, navigation, or scholarship, requires learning opportunities for novice practitioners, which have often been provided in workplaces, or through informal instruction and self-directed study. This survey, however, will be limited to formal education, that is, to teaching and learning in institutions such as colleges and universities established exclusively for these purposes.

A broad historical account (to be elaborated below) of scientific and technical education in relation to ethics runs as follows.

Science and ethics initially were intimately related in ancient education, while technology was explicitly excluded. Medieval Christians were ambivalent about ancient pagan science, because they held an opposing notion of moral perfection. Greek science nonetheless retained a minor place in medieval education, though its intimate association with ethics was weakened insofar as morality was religiously based. When classical learning was recovered in Western Europe by the mid-thirteenth century, and the scholastics sought to render it consistent with church teachings, natural philosophy (science) and moral philosophy were added to the curriculum as standard, but distinct, university subjects.

Renaissance scholarship facilitated the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the start of the eighteenth century, however, modern science had become divorced from teaching in the English universities, and had forged new institutional links with technology and commerce.

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