A wish to live well, and a reformer at Paris

The notes begin from a wish to live well — a wish, they write, that people have always had, and that now extends to a longing for a happy school. That thought is not in itself unusual: school should aim at a life that is happy and well lived. Behind it sits a common sense that established schooling does not always help, because knowledge has long held the central place in the course, and an education without knowledge is hard to imagine. Into that concern they bring Petrus Ramus (1515–1572). He is little known to modern readers, they write, but in his own age he won a wide name by urging a reform of Aristotelian dialectic and of the way universities taught, and he left a mark on the philosophy of education. He was born into a poor family, went to Paris at a young age, and, despite economic hardship, took a doctorate at the University of Paris.

Living well as the restoring of an image

For Ramus, they write, “living well” is the restoring of the image of God. He argued for a way of teaching that would serve that restoring, held that education is needed to give shape to the mind of God, and pursued education for an inward end, through knowledge taken as a whole. The notes say they meant to consider the relation of education and living well from Ramus’s standpoint and from White’s, in order to clarify what living well means as an aim of education, but they do not identify White, and that comparison is left unused here.

His view of education, they write, was built on a belief in God’s sovereignty, in human fall, and in God’s absolute rule. Among the marks they list: he strongly stressed the wholeness of a life; he strongly stressed a cultural calling for human beings as creatures of God; his principle of education is a thought centered on God, who is father and creator, and the starting point of education is a recovery of faith in the creator. In a Ramist education, they say, a God-centered thought is the beginning and the end. Education also looks for an answer to the human being as an existing creature. Humans were made in the image of God, then fell by failing to obey, but God, they write, does not abandon them, and by grace leads them toward justice and salvation. Nature and inborn gifts can carry out the task entrusted in the world only with the help of that grace; that is the ground of culture, and of every human task, including education. On this view, Ramus placed the ground of education’s work on the grace of redemption by God’s sovereign power.

Scripture at the centre, and home and school

He developed his thought, they write, on the basis of his theology: authority is recognized in every field, and the ground of the whole program of education is Scripture. He lectured on Scripture in sermons, and offered principles and methods of interpretation — a ground, they say, that later became a basis for Reformed faith and for a right teaching of Scripture in education. He once studied humanism, then went beyond it and used it to understand and interpret Scripture. The heart of his teaching, they write, is faith in God; to believe in God and to know God go together, and eternal life by faith is a knowing of God. That belief has knowledge as its source, so to know God by Scripture is for faith in God to increase. For that reason he took God himself as the first object of education, and strongly urged Scripture as the one way to know God. Education as a whole, they write, works as an extension of the church’s teaching and as a supplement to it. Home and school each have their own character, in place and in capacity, but in a broad sense they stand in a line from the church, as institutions entrusted by it, and they take the church’s teaching as both starting point and end. The notes leave the subject there, before a later recap. The same Korean report, at fuller length, sits on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Student notes on Petrus Ramus (1515–1572) and on education as living well.

Last updated 15 November 2026