Recovering the First Principle of Education

Transmitting Whole Worlds to the Next Generation

Mar 30, 2026

∙ Paid

Light pours over a woman and a dozen children of different ages standing in small groups near a boxy, red schoolhouse in this horizontal painting. The people all have pale or tanned skin and wear clothing in earthy tones of brown, black, white, and pale yellow. The woman stands at the lower center of the composition on a dirt-packed area in front of the building. She wears a white hat tied with a black ribbon under the back of her hair and a long black dress. Two girls in floppy hats, each wearing ankle-length dresses, and a young boy holding a pail stand around her. The other children wear pants and long-sleeved shirts, and some wear hats. A child stands in the open doorway along the right edge of the schoolhouse. The building has two windows on the same side as the door and a short chimney on the shallowly angled gray roof. On the short side of the building, a child paints the letters “WH” in white on the red boards of the building. A hill rises behind the schoolhouse and off the top right corner of the canvas. A sliver of white clouds against a pale blue sky cuts across the top left corner. The artist signed the painting in the lower left corner, “WINSLOW HOMER.” — School Time, Winslow Homer (c. 1874)

If education, in its most generic sense, is the “process of passing on to the next generation the parents’ understanding of the nature of their world,”1 then what parents believe matters. It also matters who writes the curriculum. It would be silly at best and a betrayal at worst if parents who believed the earth was f…

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