Paradoxes of Mill’s liberal education: the crisis of anguish and the awakening from intellectualist sleep

Abstract

Taking the Autobiography as the reference text, the essay investigates some aspects of John Stuart Mill’s (1806-1873) educational history, considering it as a paradigm of the liberal education that comes up against its own limits and, at the same time, seeks to overcome them. The text deals with his educational trajectory in two moments. The first one is marked by the influence of the paternal education. James Mill (1773-1836) wanted to make his son the great liberal leader of his time and, to this end, he closely followed the principles of Jeremy Bentham’s (1748-1832) utilitarian philosophy. Such purpose incurred in several paradoxes, once the required autonomy of thought and action was denied by the educational reductionism proposed. Centered on the formation of only a few intellectual capacities, it left aside the education of certain feelings which were indispensable to the formation of the ethical beauty of human sociability from a democratic perspective. The second moment deals with the incompleteness of the paternal intellectual formation, revealed by the crisis of anguish experienced by Mill. Such crisis showed the young student the necessity of broadening the idea of education, including the formation of certain feelings, whose reference was initially obtained in the poetic-musical dimension. Finally, the essay concludes that including social feeling in the idea of education, taken as the formation of human capacities, that allows Mill to overcome the apathy and indifference related to the rational (calculating) individualism underlying his paternal education.