From the Greek paideia, meaning "education" or "child-rearing" (from paidos meaning "child"), FreedomPedia aims to educate others, children or adults, about freedom (eleutheria, in case you were wondering) and a variety of freedom-related topics. The main goal is to document how the Voluntary Society has worked in the past, works in the present and will continue to work and generally benefit all its participants in the future. A secondary objective is to contrast how the Coerced Society fails to benefit but a few of its members.
Today's Featured Article
- John Locke:
John Locke (1632-1704), English philosopher, was born at Wrington, 16 km W. of Belluton, in Somerset, on the 29th of August 1632, six years after the death of Bacon, and three months before the birth of Spinoza. His father was a small landowner and attorney at Pensford, near the northern boundary of the county, to which neighborhood the family had migrated from Dorset early in that century. The elder Locke, a strict but genial Puritan, by whom the son was carefully educated at home, was engaged in the military service of the parliamentary party. "From the time that I knew anything", Locke wrote in 1660, "I found myself in a storm, which has continued to this time". For fourteen years his education, more or less interrupted, went on in the rural home at Belluton, on his father's little estate, a kilometer from Pensford, and 10 km from Bristol. In 1646 he entered Westminster School and remained there for six years. Westminster was uncongenial to him. Its memories perhaps encouraged the bias against public schools which afterwards disturbed his philosophic calm in his Thoughts on Education. In 1652 he entered Christ Church, Oxford, then under John Owen, the Puritan dean and vice-chancellor of the university. Christ Church was Locke's occasional home for thirty years. For some years after he entered, Oxford was ruled by the Independents, who, largely through Owen, unlike the Presbyterians, were among the first in England to advocate genuine religious toleration. But Locke's hereditary sympathy with the Puritans was gradually lessened by the intolerance of the Presbyterians and the fanaticism of the Independents. He had found in his youth, he says, that "what was called general freedom was general bondage, and that the popular assertors of liberty were the greatest engrossers of it too, and not unfitly called its keepers". And the influence of the liberal divines of the Church of England afterwards showed itself in his spiritual development.