11
The Nineteenth-Century Prussian School of Idealists
Although philosophical idealism can be traced back to Plato, its main proponents, Kant, Fichte and Hegel, all lived in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Prussia. The idealists wished to combine the lessons learned from this period (see Chapter 8) with the Greek concept of reality as an organic whole. A distinguished predecessor, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (1646-1716), drawing on the writers of the British and French Enlightenment, set out the principles of importance in determining human knowledge and proposed a plan of universal harmony.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Konigsberg and is best known for his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) (1781) which subsequently permeated much of the philosophy of the British Idealists. Kant was greatly influenced by the writings of Locke, Hume and Rousseau in his search for a secular morality. All perception, he believed, was interpreted in terms of mental concepts, though without being applied to experience they would be useless. On the one hand was the natural world of phenomena perceived by man's senses and on the other, a transcendental reality that is the basis of this reality but which is not accessible to the senses. Knowledge of ideas, therefore, can be achieved by pure reason independent of sense experience.
Kant's theory of education drew heavily on those of Rousseau though he did not share the latter's belief in the 'noble savage'. In a collection of lectures entitled Pädagogik (On Education) published in 1803, a year before his death, Kant set out his beliefs. The rational nature of man was important in bringing up the child. Moral and cognitive aspects of education and discipline were the two important features. A child's experiences should be controlled in order to shape his or her organic growth. Discipline would restrain the animal nature and by giving appropriate knowledge, lead to good social conduct. Moral education was essential as part of the educational process, as the child is born morally neutral and it was only through education that the child would develop his or her humanity. 'Is man by nature morally good or bad?' asked Kant. 'He is neither, for he is not by nature a moral being. He only becomes a moral being when his reason has developed ideas of duty and law.'
The mental faculties were to be developed by intellectual learning; at the same time Kant believed that this should be balanced by physical education, which would help the mental faculties by developing quickness and self-confidence as well as presenting opportunities to learn cooperation. A third element was practical education which should follow formal education and which would fit the person for a vocation in life, training in the arts and citizenship and character training. The end product would be a person of temperance, cleanliness and truthfulness; reverence and respect for fellow citizens would be the main duties. Kant wrote:
Children will understand - without abstract ideas of duty, of obligation of good and bad conduct - that there is a law of duty which is not the same as ease, utility or other considerations of the kind, but something universal, which is not governed by the caprice of man.
The ultimate aim of education, according to Kant, is a moral and socially better world which leads to the perfectibility of man.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) had been dismissed from his post as professor of Philosophy at Jena University in 1799 because of his alleged sympathy with atheism. Like his contemporaries, he had been deeply influenced by the humiliation which Prussia had experienced after the Battle of Jena (1806) during the Napoleonic Wars. In his Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation), delivered in Berlin in 1807 and 1808, he envisaged a corporate state based on a new moral order with individuals acting as agencies for the 'sublime Will' to achieve its purpose. Education was seen as the main vehicle for achieving this end. It was to be made available to the whole of society and taught to a high standard. As Fichte wrote, 'By means of the new education, we want to mould the Germans into a corporate body which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individuals and members by the same interests.' His aim was to develop a moral order and produce citizens who would promote the good of the whole community. Teachers were to be an important element in the system and were seen by Fichte as advisers of individuals on moral and ethical problems.
Fichte was influenced by the ideas of Rousseau, particularly the view that society is corrupt whilst man is innately good. Following Plato, he advocated that as well as promoting universal education, the State should select from the system those of high intellectual ability for more scholarly study; they would, in due course, become the leaders of the new State though still subordinate to the central moral purpose. Fichte's idealist philosophy sprang from the need for a stronger Germany in which the citizen would bend his or her free will to the greater good of the State. Fichte, unlike Hegel and Kant, propounded a fully worked out theory of education which profoundly influenced his famous pupil, Johann Friedrich Herbart. However, the latter went further than Fichte in addressing the pedagogical and psychological aspects of how students learn.
Perhaps the most influential of the three idealist philosophers discussed here was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) who at one time was professor of Philosophy at Heidelberg University. Hegel wished to combine the Greek concept of an organic whole with the idea of individual autonomy as expressed in Kant's ethics. If the Enlightenment programme of freeing the individual was taken to it ultimate point, Hegel stated, society would dissolve into a series of atoms with the destruction of institutions and customs - the French Revolution provided an excellent and recent example. In his posthumously published Lectures Philosophic der Geschichte (Philosophy of History (1837)), Hegel posed the question of the ultimate purpose of the world. He concluded that it was necessary, in order to obviate injustice and violence, to impose a corporate state as the best expression of a moral whole. The study of history showed that it was a cumulative record of the spiritual development of mankind; the freedom of the spirit can only be assured when the State has reached its highest point, that is, when political and social conflict is eliminated and harmony exists.1
Hegel developed Plato's concept of dialectic. The study of the history of different civilisations showed that there were high and low points in their development which led to success or at their worst, disappearance. In every situation (thesis) there is conflict (antithesis), and progress is only ultimately achieved in synthesis. Hegel's view was that the State should, as an instrument of divine will, be the driving force towards dialectical progress. The individual's task was to assist in that development of the Geist (spirit) by understanding the metaphysical view of history and as a result becoming free. Education should be directed to this end by studies which included the scriptures, classics and literature and philosophy.
Although Hegel's writings are dense and difficult to understand, some interesting points for educational theory emerge. Hegel postulated the notion of education as the science of the ideal development of the spirit. By showing that the individual is part of a larger social whole which is in itself part of a wider metaphysical reality, the spirit can make mankind realise its power of creative thought in art, religion and in particular philosophy. His philosophy, in which the rational whole had greater claim to reality than its separate parts and the group was more important than the individual, was subsequently used to justify totalitarian regimes of both right and left. Karl Marx, for example, using a dialectical approach, stood Hegelianism on its head by making matter, rather than reason or spirit, the ultimate reality. Ironically, Marx's version was directly evolved from idealism.
T.H. Green and the English Idealists
An attempt to translate into action some of these principles can be found in England from about 1870 onwards. The movement can be said to have centred round the philosopher T.H. Green and a group of men from Balliol College, Oxford, most of whom were teachers in the University of Oxford. It included individuals such as A.C. Bradley and his brother, F.H., Bernard Bosanquet, D.G. Ritchie, Arnold Toynbee, Edward Caird and William Wallace. Not all stayed within the confines of the university. Some entered politics, as Liberals, such as James Bryce, A.H.D. Acland, and R.B. Haldane, and others into the Church, such as William Temple, later Archbishop of Canterbury.
Thomas Hill Green's own short life - he died when he was only 46 (1836-82) was spent at Oxford, the last five years of which he was professor of Moral Philosophy, the first recognised lecturer in this subject at the University. His own writings bore a strong Hegelian imprint, though it has been said of him, as the son of an evangelical clergyman, that he 'preached Hegel with the accent of a Puritan.' His main writings are contained in his two posthumous works, Prolegomena to Ethics (1883) and Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (1895).
Briefly, it can be said that this version of Idealism was a reaction to Utilitarianism. Green and his followers were convinced that Utilitarianism was barren as a political creed and that no further progress could be made in an understanding of politics until a new philosophic basis was found for Liberalism. If democracy was to grapple successfully with the many new problems which were rising, a way had to be found for reconciling a true individualism with the new functions which were being given to the State. But before an adequate political theory could be constructed, a proper conception of human nature and action was required In fact, politics were to be the outcome as a view of human nature and of the world.2
Two characteristics of Green's philosophy emerge from this. First, it is an amalgam of Hegel and Kant. From Hegel, he took the notion that individuals cannot be what they are, have their moral and spiritual qualities, independently of their existence as a nation. From Kant, Green incorporated the insistence on autonomy:
The moral duty to obey a positive law, whether a law of the State or church, is imposed not by the author or enforcer of the positive law, but by that spirit of man which sets before him the ideal of a perfect life.
An individual's good cannot be treated as something apart from the good of others within his community. And the 'good' therefore cannot be identified with pleasure, as the Utilitarians believed: it is nothing less than the spiritual perfection of man.
Green argued that one index of the moral progress made by humanity is the gradual extension of the range of persons to whom the common good is conceived as 'common.' This was an important part of Green's philosophy, and stressed the need to mediate communities between the individual and the larger social wholes - in particular, the family, the town one lives in, and the nation-state. How should the spiritual capacities of all the members of one's community be best developed? The Church was not particularly favoured by Green. Social reform, working for the good of the community and extending the benefits of citizenship, was a noble pursuit.3
Here we come to the second characteristic of Green's philosophy, which differentiates him from other Idealists: his worked-out general philosophy included a philosophy of education, which, as we shall see, also had considerable influence on the development of educational practice. Green's concept of God, like others of his school, is equatable with Thought or Reason. The more an individual's consciousness is raised above the animal level, the more he becomes a vehicle of God. So as men become educated, as their minds expand and grow, reality is progressively infused with reason and the divine end becomes realised. Green believed that it is the individual's moral duty to raise human consciousness, not in isolation from one another but to promote consciousness-raising in general within his or her community. Education was an obvious vehicle for such a programme.
Green, like others of his followers, became involved in everyday matters which would promote the aims of Idealist philosophy. He became a member of the Oxford School Board, promoted secondary education in the town, started a coffee house and evening school in the poorer part of Oxford and successfully stood for election to the City Council in 1875. In his election address he proposed greater expenditure of rates on health and education and greater opportunities for poor boys to go to grammar schools. Green realised the awesome task he was setting himself and his followers. 'No one doubts,' he wrote, 'that a man who improves the current morality of his time must be something of an Idealist.' R.G. Collingwood, a philosopher himself, stated that Green's former students, convinced of the philosophy, felt that it was their vocation to put it into practice, in brief, simple, religious citizenship.4 Some aspects of this movement will now be considered.
Co-operation
Arnold Toynbee, the economic historian, who arrived at Oxford in 1873 and became a close friend of Green, argued that if true citizenship was to be achieved, a start could be made with existing voluntary associations. He saw in the co-operative movement of the time the spirit of the medieval guilds, which aimed at ending competition and possessing high ideals. To this movement should be given the task of the education of the citizen, which included knowledge of political, industrial and sanitary education, that is, the laws of health. Toynbee hoped that teachers could be recruited from the ranks of co-operators themselves, but he added that there were many from the universities who had studied political and social questions and had reached practical conclusions.5 He looked to Oxford for assistance and drew together an informal society of young contemporaries, each of whom selected a special study. In January 1880, Toynbee delivered the first of a series of popular addresses in Yorkshire and during the following years, lectured on political economy to classes of working men in Oxford.
Toynbee's early death at the age of 30 in 1883 inspired others to respond to the call for continuing his work. Among the notable followers were Arthur Acland, later to become Gladstone's education minister. He in turn formed a small club called the Inner Ring where discussions of important issues of the day took place. Members included Cosmo Lang, later Archbishop of Canterbury, J.A. Spender, Michael Sadler and Anthony Hope Hawkins, better known as Anthony Hope, the novelist.
From his own experience of teaching co-operative classes, Acland advocated life-long education. In addressing a conference of working men he said:
I speak to those who feel more and more assured every day they live, that while the period of instruction may cease before we are 20 years of age, the work of education is the work of our lives, and that education in the true sense ends when our lives end. All I can say is that if young men come to us and go back in any sense ashamed of that from which they came, we in the universities ought to be ashamed of ourselves.6
Acland, like Toynbee, believed that the practical and systematic education of co-operators as English citizens should be open equally to men and women if future generations were to become reasonably and rationally educated.
University extension
The co-operative movement with its aim of adult education was only one channel into which some of the followers of Green and Toynbee expended their energies. Another, which had wider implications, was the field of university extension. It was envisaged that as it was impossible in the mid-nineteenth century to bring the masses requiring education to the university it was therefore a good plan to try to carry the university to the people. A 'peripatetic university' for the working classes in large towns was conceived. Both Green and Acland were concerned with such a scheme at Oxford, the former saw that the dissemination of knowledge would act both as a unifying force for all grades of society and as a means to the moralisation of the people. Michael Sadler became secretary in place of Acland in 1885 and led a distinguished team of tutors including W.A.S. Hewins, who became the first director of the London School of Economics, William Ashley, the economic historian, H.J. Mackinder, the geographer, R.G. Collingwood, the philosopher and Cosmo Lang, the theologian. John Marriott, a politics tutor at Oxford, calculated that he had delivered over 10,000 lectures for the movement over a career spanning 53 years.
Another related scheme was suggested by another of Green's followers, Samuel Barnett, an East End vicar, with whom Toynbee often stayed. Barnett suggested a settlement of university men in the midst of a great industrial centre, with the director being a teacher who would supervise the work of the settlement. It excited the attention of many young men, leading in 1885 to the establishment of Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel. Generations of educationists were among those who participated in the work of the settlement, including Cyril Jackson, Robert Morant, Acland, Sadler, Sir John Gorst, J.A. Spender and later, Clement Attlee, R.H, Tawney and his brother-in-law, William Beveridge.
Though the movement rapidly spread and was a success not all academics were satisfied with what had been achieved. A.E. Zimmern, an early New College, Oxford, recruit, writing at the end of the First World War on 'The Evolution of the Citizen', considered that more adult education of itself was not a sufficient answer:
The two spheres, that of education and that of religion, not only overlap but interpenetrate one another. The tendency to divide them, to classify our moral and intellectual life into separate and watertight compartments, is precisely one of the curses of our present dissatisfaction and malaise. The life of the spirit is a seamless garment, not a miscellaneous patchwork composed of Sunday services and week-night committees, of sermons and lectures and evening classes, spiced with a dash of 'advanced' sociology and fiction. This incoherence, this undiscriminating and irregular appetite, this insensitiveness of the intellectual palate, constitutes a substantial aggravation of our condition.7
However, Zimmern's pessimism was unfounded at the time, though not in the long run. These organisations fitted well into the framework of Idealist thought. They provided exceptional opportunities for breaking down barriers between universities and the cities in which they were located. They also enabled many young men in the Balliol-Toynbee Hall tradition to combine effectively the political and scholarly aspects of their moral commitments.
University Reform
We have already noted that Green and a number of his contemporaries stressed the importance of forging links between the university and the local community. The growing demand for higher education in the 1860s and 1870s provided an opportunity to re-examine this issue. Green told a Royal Commission on Oxford University in 1877 that there was a need to democratise the election of Fellows and to appoint more Readers to promote the attainment of a higher standard of learning; the study of new subjects would thus be facilitated.
The admission of women on an equal footing with men was another reform which was sought. James Bryce, then professor of Law at Oxford, had played an active part in the founding of Girton College, Cambridge in 1873 and John Percival, headmaster of Clifton, was one of the prime movers in the establishment of Somerville College, Oxford. The main campaign, however, was fought in Scotland by a group of Idealists at Glasgow University. Edward Caird, shortly after his appointment to the chair of Moral Philosophy, campaigned in 1868 for the full admission of women to degree courses. Nine years later, he presented the University Senate with a petition from the recently formed Association of the Higher Education of Women, asking for the institution of examinations. In 1892, a year before Caird left Glasgow for Oxford, women were for the first time admitted as matriculated students to the university.8
New colleges followed the spread of extension teaching, such as those at Exeter, Reading, Leicester and Southampton and more ambitiously, at Sheffield, Nottingham, Manchester and Liverpool. One of the more interesting ones was Reading, whose first Principal was Halford Mackinder. Mackinder, a close friend of Sadler, was a keen exponent of the 'new geography' and a former Oxford extension lecturer.9 He condemned the teaching at the new university colleges, stating that it was based on that of the old universities, and was not directed towards the education of citizens. The success of Reading College was due largely to Mackinder's far-sightedness in providing an institution which was, in Mackinder's words, 'the focus of local patriotism'. It provided facilities for adults as well as for students fresh from secondary schools, and a training college was established for student-teachers. The university extension system which had flourished in the town for five years was combined with science and art classes. This co-ordination of educational agencies within a town was especially praised by the Bryce Commission on Secondary Education which reported in 1895.
A much more thorough and philosophical approach to the question of higher education was successfully implemented by Richard Burdon Haldane (1856-1928). Haldane studied at Gottingen University in Germany, completed his studies at Edinburgh University and came to know Hutchison Stirling, the author of the Secret of Hegel. Inspired by the writings of Green, he edited and contributed to Essays in Philosophical Criticism (1883), which he dedicated to Green's memory.10 A second book, containing his lectures, The Pathway to Reality (1903), contains an exposition of Hegel's doctrine of God and man as well as his own philosophy.
Taking Germany as the model on which educational reform should be based, Haldane believed that State-controlled elementary, secondary and technical schools and universities, should be brought into close relationship to each other by the State. Universities, he believed, ought to be permeating our education system in Geist, 'I mean the larger intelligence and culture without which education not only can be interesting, but can be sufficiently comprehensive to take on practical business'." Educational reform would break down class barriers and create a new class structure founded on achievement. Another way of influencing events was by entering politics. Later, Haldane did this to good effect, becoming secretary of state for war and eventually Lord Chancellor in Liberal and Labour ministries.
With the Webbs, he was responsible for setting up the London School of Economics in 1895 in order to advance the study of social sciences. He also cultivated Robert Morant, the influential permanent secretary of the Board of Education for his most ambitious scheme - to launch a higher technological institute in London, a 'British Charlottenberg'. This culminated in the establishment of the Imperial College of Science and Technology. Besides becoming chairman of two Royal Commissions on University Education in London (1909-13) and in Wales (1916-18), he headed a small group whose deliberations eventually led to the creation of the University Grants Committee, a national body which recommended the allocation of money to universities.
Haldane's achievements were impressive. He followed Green's precept of entering wholeheartedly in serving society in order to attain self-realisation. Perhaps his view of society and it educational needs was oversimplified; his vision of the world as objectified reason and of knowledge as the remedy of societal ills proved to be over optimistic. The Hegelian strain of Idealism is seen in Haldane in a purer form than in many of his English contemporaries.
The Decline of Idealist Influence
Between the two World Wars, the influence of Idealism on British educational thought and practice diminished. It is important to try and account for this decline.
The first main reason was Idealism's decline as an educational force following its removal from the dominant position it had earlier held in academic philosophy. In 1903 G.E. Moore wrote an influential article in the journal Mind entitled 'The Refutation of Idealism' and realists, such as his fellow Cambridge philosopher, Bertrand Russell, grew rapidly to philosophical prominence towards the end of the nineteenth century. Oxford Idealism had appealed to religious young men who were perplexed by the influence of science, especially Darwinism, on their beliefs. To an increasing number of philosophers, the metaphysical foundations of Idealism were now less than compelling. New philosophical systems more congenial to empirical science, such as pragmatism, logical positivism and linguistic philosophy, emerged in the first half of the twentieth century to challenge Idealist assumptions.
The second reason was that from the First World War onwards, Idealism was closely linked with Hegelian or post-Hegel philosophy. L.T. Hobhouse's book, published in 1918, The Metaphysical Theory of the State, was an attack on the view that individuals only realise themselves as members of a state, which itself is seen as a supra-personality. Individuals, Hobhouse argues, would thus be powerless to attempt to remodel society under such a system. The philosophy was linked with hatred of all things German, and the rise of Hitler ensured that Hegelian influence remained an object of intellectual and moral contempt until long after the Second World War. This can be seen clearly in Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) and other attacks on historicism.
A third reason for the decline was the reaction to the Idealist's call for a cohesive, organically related, national system of education. Attempts were made to demarcate more clearly different kinds of schools, their objectives, the ladders and paths connecting each to each. Green and his followers also envisaged a national network of universities and associated network of adult education institutions, both of which were to be interconnected with the schools below them, providing for wider needs of the communities and regions which they served. After the First World War, interest in systematisation waned with the move towards institutional autonomy. Universities began to insist on academic freedom, university extension classes gradually lost their function as an instrument of working-class education and became centres of culture in middle-class suburbs. Educational theory in schools, especially the primary sector, looked more towards child-centred approaches and methods. Educational theory and practice under the European totalitarian states spelt out a message which deterred others from following the same path.12
Conclusion
Given this reaction to Idealist philosophy, it might be asked what, if any, was its contribution to educational thought today. There are several interesting legacies of this tradition to be found. We are constantly reminded that the whole ethos of a society and its institutions is an educative force. Schools and universities have their own social ethos which could and can be harnessed to educational ends. The Idealists hoped to be as practical as possible, such as the commitment to change within universities through breaking down social exclusiveness by encouraging links with the working classes, and the campaign to break down sexual exclusiveness by campaigning for the better education of women.
It is taken for granted now that schools and colleges teach by institutional example as well as by direct instruction; concern for the ethos of an institution is now an important aspect of education. The ideology behind comprehensive education, for instance, is that by learning together, children from different social classes will see themselves as belonging to the same co-operative community, all very much in line with the thinking of the Idealist reformers. Another example is the post-war interest in strengthening the links between schools and the local community, not least by the introduction of community schools which serve and cater for the wider needs and interests of an area. There have also been new ways of extending adult learning opportunities, through institutions such as the Open University and the University of the Third Age as well as new methods of distance learning. Idealists such as Green would no doubt applaud such examples of communitarianism.
At a different level, the education system itself, once visualised by the idealists as a rationally interlocking whole, has in recent times, changed from a series of theoretically autonomous parts into a more organic whole. From the mid 1970s, when the so-called 'Great Debate' took place, questions about the schools' autonomy over aims and curricula were raised and the need for an integrated national system gradually took shape. The introduction of a national curriculum might be seen as a recognition of this change. Similarly, in higher education there has been a move away from autonomy of institutions to a much greater central control over, and interference in, many aspects of their day-to-day working on the grounds of national need.
As the pendulum swings back from autonomy to accountability, the work of the Idealist reformers, it could be claimed, acquires new relevance. It brings up in an acute form the question, given that we require a more cohesive educational system, what role should the State play in providing this cohesion? There is always the fear that State direction is a form of totalitarianism. So far as the Idealist philosophers were concerned, their interest in the State was the reverse of totalitarianism. The idea that all intiatives should come from the centre and that other institutions should simply carry out orders from above was anathema to them. They conceived of the State not as something imposed on and in conflict with, free institutions, but as developing and remaining in harmony with them. It was important that such institutions should work with each other but to ensure that this happens, the State, representing the desire to promote the good of the whole society, must necessarily be something standing above these separate institutions. Though this raises questions such as the need for having a political community activated by a common desire to promote the good of the whole society; to what extent the State represents the whole of the political community; and whether the 'State' itself is undeniably an ideal, it may be claimed that the Idealist legacy is an important element in modern educational thought.
References
1. J. Bowen, A History of Western Education. Vol. 3. The Modern West: Europe and the New World (Methuen, 1981), p. 263.
2. A.D. 'Lindsay, T.H. Green and the Idealists', in F.J.C. Hearnshaw (ed.), The Social and Political Ideas of some Representative Thinkers of the Victorian Age (Harrap, 1933), pp. 155-6.
3. M. Richter, The Politics of Conscience. T.H. Green and His Age (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p. 14.
4. R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford University Press. Oxford, 1944), p. 17.
5. A. Toynbee, 'Progress and Poverty.' A Criticism of Mr Henry George. Being two lectures delivered in St Andrew's Hull. Newman Street, London (Kegan Paul, 1883), p. 53.
6. A.H.D. Acland, The Education of Citizens (Central Co-operative Board, Manchester, 1883), p. 8.
7. A.E. Zimmern, "The Evolution of the Citizen,' in O. Stanley (ed.). The Way Out: Essays on the Meaning and Purpose, of Adult Education (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1923), pp.33-4.
8. B. Bosanquet, 'Edward Caird, 1835-1908' (Proceedings of the British Academy, 1908), p. 8.
9. E.W. Gilbert, 'Sir John Halford Mackinder', Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1959), p. 556.
10. R.B. Haldane, An Autobiography (Hodder & Stoughton, 1929), p. 7.
11. E. Ashby and M. Anderson, Portrait of Haldane at Work on Education (Macmillan, 1974), p. 163.
12. P. Gordon and J. White, Philosophers as Educational Reformers. The Influence of Idealism on British Educational Thought and Practice (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 201-6.
Further Reading
Butler, J.D., Idealism in Education (Harper, New York, 1966).
Cacoullos, A.R., Thomas Hill Green: Philosopher of Rights (Twayne, New York, 1974).
Goldman, L., Dons and Workers: Oxford and Adult Education since 1850 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995).
Mackenzie, M., Hegel's Educational Thought and Practice (Swann Sonnenschein. 1909).
Turnbull, G. H., The Educational Theory of J. G. Fichte: A Critical Account Together with Translations (Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 1926).