Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects (Illustrated)

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Spencer’s theory inspired Andrew Carnegie and William Graham Sumner's visions of unbridled and unrepentant capitalism of the United States in late nineteenth-century. Carnegie interpreted Spencer's social theory as justifying merciless economic competition.

Spencer's reputation was not recovered for many years from the interpretative caricatures of many scholars, thus marginalizing him to the hinterlands of intellectual history. Fortunately, recent scholarship has begun restoring and repairing his legacy and theory.

Hebert Spencer famously coined the famous expression “survival of the fittest”.  However, he is also a good visionary about education based on this book. The first of Spencer’s convictions in the book is that all education, physical, intellectual, and moral, must be authoritative, and need take no account of the natural wishes, tendencies, and motives of the ignorant and undeveloped child. The second dominating conviction is that to teach means to tell, or show, children what they ought to see, believe, and utter.

This is a must book for readers who are interested in studying Spencer’s theory of a modern education system.