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다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article sheds new light on Adam Smith’s discourse on education in Chapter 1 of Book 5 in < Wealth of Nations >. According to dominant interpretation Smith’s discourse on education was focused on proving that private schools at which education customer (students or their parents) bear education expenditures guarantee better education quality than public schools and that practical vocational education as investment in human capital contributing to enhancing productivity is important than literary education. Such a interpretation neglects that it was due to negative effect of division of labor, namely deterioration of moral and social judgement of common people that Smith found government’s education policy necessary. Here two points deserve attention. First, Smith described in detail the historical change of moral philosophy from ancient Greece to his own time. Second, Smith’s proposal that geometry and mechanics should be taught as introduction not only to the most useful sciences but also to “the most sublime sciences,” hints that he meant more than practical vocal education. Both points allude to Smith’s concern for moral philosophy in his discourse, which previous studies have not yet given its deserving attention to. This article tries to make up for this interpretative deficiency.
It was at first discovered that “the most sublime sciences” meant in the circle of the European intellectuals natural and moral philosophy which investigate into connecting principles of various phenomena in the physical and human world. And geometry and physics (’mechanics’) which Smith described as introduction to the most sublime sciences deemed in the Western philosophical tradition as instruments for deduction and induction. They were synthesized by Newton into a scientific method which stressed observation and experiment and served as important basis also for moral philosophy. In this tradition Smith expected that by means of geometry and physics children of common people would be trained in deductive and inductive thinking which prevented them from falling into ascetism which relied on abstract speculation without observation of concrete human reality as well as into casuisty which, overwhelmed by complexities of reality, prescribed too many moral rules without coherent principles. By applying methods of careful observation and systematic inference developed in natural philosophy, to moral philosophy young people should learn to observe carefully human interactions in society and infer from the observations general moral rules, which take also peculiarities of human interactions into consideration, and apply these to various situations. In short Smith was not concerned only for practical vocational education of common people but also for educating them to persons with reliable moral character and social and political insights. This article finally derives from this new insight into Smith’s educational concerns some implications for contemporary education.

참고문헌 (Reference)

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