Johann Bernhard Basedow's Method Book for Fathers and Mothers of Families and Nations (1773) and Friedrich Samuel Bock's Textbook of the Art of Education for the Use of Christian Parents and Future Teachers of Youth (1780) were key texts used by Kant in his lectures on education during the 1770s and 1780s.Now translated into English for the first time, Robert Louden explores how both works not only served as the basis for Kant's Lectures on Pedagogy (1803...

Best known for the progressive school he founded in Dessau during the 18th century, Johann Bernhard Basedow was a central thinker in the German Enlightenment. Since his death in 1790 a substantial body of German-language literature about his life, work, and school (the Philanthropin) has developed. In the first English intellectual biography of this influential figure, Robert B. Louden answers questions that continue to surround Basedow and provides a much-needed examination of Basedow's i...