The 18th century entered the history of culture as the age of the Enlightenment. Recent scientific advances, especially the discoveries of J. Newton and J. Locke, prompted philosophers, scientists, and writers to reconsider the former picture of the world radically. The eighteenth century radically changed European thought and brought significant changes in America’s spiritual, intellectual, and social life. Earlier ideas, ideals, and ambitions were not rejected but reinterpreted and reformulated by the scientific and philosophical advances of the Age of Reason. Enlightenment rationalism also found an emotional response among the inhabitants of the North American colonies. It found anomalous refraction even in New England, seemingly antagonistic to it in spirit.
I believe that the Enlightenment era had the greatest impact on education. The new era gave a powerful impetus to education, making society’s social divide a cultural-educational one. Educated people could not always find common ground with the rest of the population. The Enlighteners regarded as true only the knowledge gained by science, their reason, and not the knowledge based on tradition and folk wisdom. People’s beliefs were seen as prejudices and people’s life as a manifestation of backwardness. At that time, an unprecedented number of treatises appeared, which expressed the desire to free the individual, renew through education, and train man’s spiritual nature. Pedagogical problems became one of the priority areas of philosophical works. Social thought sought to turn pedagogy into an independent field of research to find the laws of the pedagogical process.
I believe that without the influence of the Age of Enlightenment, education would still have come to its current form. Progress does not stand still; people are constantly evolving and inventing new gadgets and technology. Man is inherently evolving, so that education could have changed over time and become very important, even without the Enlightenment.