Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Thomas Molnar (1921-2010) argues that modernity, which begins with Occam and Descartes, has influenced the “concept of man,” through the subjectivism and exaltation of the “self,” what’s Molnar calls “individual consciousness.” In this process, education was affected, and what was sought to educate in the Greek Paideia and which was perfected, according to Molnar, in the education of the liberal arts of medieval Christianity. All of this is blurred in the middle of the individualism of the modern world. What begins to educate, with greater or lesser awareness, is the individual for the work with the “education for life.” This phenomenon, according to the author, has its turning point with the Industrial Revolution, where not only the process is accelerated, but it also ends up affecting the ethos of modern education. For Molnar, in this process the purpose of building a free man is lost, and in the statute of the same freedom is reduced rather than realized.