One of the aims of Finnish comprehensive school education, as emphasised in the 2004 National Core Curriculum for Basic Education, is to produce a person who “as a participatory citizen promotes a democratic society.” I don’t know whether Finnish schools have succeeded in this task. Nevertheless, it is clear that in the early-modern age – i.e. in the 16th and 17th centuries – such aims were not set for our few schools. As was demonstrated by a history of Finnish education and schools published in 2010, schools of that period were governed by values connected to subservience.

Nevertheless, the situation was not thus everywhere in Europe. According to Thomas Hobbes, the fact that his countrymen had fought two civil wars in the 1640s and beheaded their king and founded what remains England’s only republic in 1649 could largely be attributed to school teachers. They had taught their pupils to read the “the books of celebrated men of the Classical Greek and Roman republics which dealt those republics’ politics and great deeds.” In those books “democracy was praised in the honourable name of freedom and the monarchy denigrated in the name of tyranny.”

In my book Rhetoric, politics and popularity in pre-revolutionary England (Cambridge University Press, 2013), I offer an answer to why Hobbes might have thought this way. In the book, I demonstrate how the aim of school teaching was above all to raise active citizens. In order to achieve this, school boys had to learn to discuss such things as legislation, war and peace, foreign trade and foreign policy. Boys were to appreciate that speaking and writing were formidable weapons in a political struggle and that the aim was to refute the views and arguments of their opponents. The best way to attain this sort of skill was to learn to argue both for and against any issue whatsoever.