Includes bibliographical references and index.

Confucius -- Socrates -- Plato -- Aristotle -- Jesus of Nazareth -- Saint Augustine -- Al-Ghazzali -- Ibn Tufayl -- Desiderius Erasmus -- Jan Amos Comenius -- John Locke -- John Wesley -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- Immanuel Kant -- Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi -- Mary Wollstonecraft -- Johann Gottlieb Fichte -- Wilhelm von Humboldt -- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel -- Johann Friedrich Herbart -- Friedrich Wilhelm Froebel -- John Henry Newman -- John Stuart Mill -- Charles Darwin -- John Ruskin -- Herbert Spencer -- Matthew Arnold -- Thomas Henry Huxley -- Louisa May Alcott -- Samuel Butler -- Robert Morant -- Eugenio María de Hostos -- Friedrich Nietzsche -- Alfred Binet -- Emile Durkheim -- Anna Julia Haywood Cooper -- John Dewey -- Jane Addams -- Rudolf Steiner -- Rabindranath Tagore -- Alfred North Whitehead -- Emile Jaques-Dalcroze -- William Edward Burghardt Du Bois -- M.K. Gandhi -- Maria Montessori -- Bertrand Russell -- E.L. Thorndike -- Martin Buber -- José Ortega y Gasset -- Cyril Lodovic Burt.

Why and how people should be educated has, throughout history, preoccupied some of civilization's greatest minds. This work summarizes and analyzes the thinking on education of fifty individuals drawn from a time span covering 500 BC to the nineteenth century. Each essay gives biographical information, an outline of the individual's principal achievements and activities, and assessment of his or her impact and influence, a list of their major writings and suggested further reading.

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