Knowledge and virtue: re-ordering humans in Robert Grosseteste’s Philosophy of Education

This chapter attempts to explore Robert Grosseteste's philosophy of education. He did not write a 'philosophy of education', but 'Grosseteste was an educator; he had been eminent in the schools with which he retained his links throughout his life'. The breadth of Grosseteste's reading is hard to overstate, both in terms of the quantity of material and the geographical origin of texts, combining 'Neoplatonic concepts with Christian concepts from Augustine or Basil, Aristotelian and Arabic concepts, and mystical concepts, from Pseudo-Dionysius, for example, to form a new and original philosophy'. Grosseteste's beliefs about human potential and flourishing, and the role that education might play in this, are developed from assumptions about the disordered state of human experience. Grosseteste views wisdom as something that is hard to acquire and involves humans reordering themselves in order to gain knowledge: it does not come 'naturally'