This chapter provides an accessible overview of the wide, diverse and ever-expanding field of classical reception studies. It begins with an overview of the word ‘reception’ and its origins in philosophical hermeneutics, and surveys a series of critiques that have been made of the word’s usefulness. Then the chapter makes three claims. First, allusions to antiquity have frequently occurred within a broader matrix of challenge and contestation, and so the critical analysis of classical reception should pay attention to voices that challenge the values accorded to classical literature, as well as those who embrace them. Second, a focus on the history of education can help us see classical allusion as a social challenge rather than simply a submission to prevailing literary or cultural norms. Third, the study of reception is at its most vital as a mode of communication outside classics, whether to the public, to students or to scholars in other fields. Ultimately, reception studies make up a vital part of the future of classical scholarship, and yet questions remain about whether the word ‘reception’ best communicates the subject’s intellectual range and ambition.

In the seventeenth century there was still no clear distinction between the child’s interiority and the adult’s, since ‘saving’ grace could arrive at any point in the lifespan. However, a rudimentary developmental idea was already defining the category of childhood more sharply by calendar age. This becomes clear in the principles behind the experimental primary schools established by the Jansenist wing of French Catholicism, including figures such as Antoine Arnauld and the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, as an alternative to Jesuit education. The Jansenist schools aimed at preserving the purity of children assumed to be elect (i.e. those of their own families) from contamination by the surrounding mass of reprobates in thrall to the Devil. The educational method was precisely not religious instruction but a secular, humanist curriculum based on reason. This went hand in hand with close control of the children in a panopticon; school discipline switched from physical punishment to moral shaming. The history of education as an academic discipline shows an unwitting bias towards being a history of the elect child.

The themes from this book require extending into other research areas. First, the history of political thought and ideas: psychology itself is an idea, since modern political thought emanated not only from thinking about ‘man’ but also from what the thinker believed himself to be, qua man: that is, his interior religious and/or psychological status. Second is the history of education, where the importance of the German-language tradition (Schleiermacher, Herbart, Froebel) might lead to studying the idea of universal salvation as a founding discourse of modern schooling, and the ‘developer’ as the individual embodiment of social and national progress. Third comes disability history, concerning institutions and asylums, which has encouraged a single reified notion of developmental disability; a critical conceptual history should make it possible to stand outside this. The fourth area is literature. The novel is the classic literary ‘form’ of a linear developmental narrative, but its historical examples reveal it to be a constant subversion rather than reflection of the developmental idea, even in the typical novel of personal formation (Bildungsroman).

Chapter 3 traces the peculiar-and sometimes hands-off-relationship of the mainline social sciences to education research over the course of the twentieth century. The existence of low-status education schools, operating as standalone units on the professional margins of the US university, colored the shape and volume of social scientific inquiry in shifting ways. Into the 1950s, education was typically positioned as a solution for other problems of society, rather than its own focal concern. With the Cold War and the federal government's new mandate to steward economic growth as backdrop, “fixing” the nation's schools took on special urgency, as exemplified in the early 1980s by a policy and political climate increasingly oriented to national competitiveness. Social scientists from the main disciplines move in and out of the education domain, sometimes yielding jurisdiction to “ed school” faculty whose radicalism has tended to marginalize their contributions since the 1960s. From the 1970s on, meanwhile, the policy prominence of economics has increased. The human capital framework, in particular, supplied an individualistic and vocational lens to assess the school system, one that sidelined the stratification and inequality concerns of other social scientists and ed school researchers.

This chapter describes the educational institutions of post-Reformation England and the conflicted role music, theater, and dance played in English life and educational schema. According to English conduct books and prescriptive literature, music and dance were necessary skills for accomplished gentlemen and gentlewomen to possess; they might also be useful for students at charity schools, who sought socio-economic improvement through marriage or the procurement of apprenticeships. Yet, as many scholars have noted, there was also a strong suspicion and overt antipathy toward music-making, playacting, and dancing – some religious thinkers believed that these activities could lead to lasciviousness, decadence, and effeminacy. Others expressed concern that female students might develop inappropriate relationships with their music and dance teachers.