Chapter 3: Universal Education in Kant: Ethical and Political Grounds

Immanuel Kant extends his critical philosophical system to education through ethics. The principle of philosophy which is "entering to the reliable path of science" also applies to education. Accordingly, education is the process of enabling individuals to adapt moral maxims, and its ultimate end is the moralization of human beings through the stages of cultivation and civilization. Within the same rationality, the institution of the university (the concept of universitas) aims to transform the faculties of knowledge into a school and to establish the principled unity of the sciences. The systematic unity of ends can only be achieved through the idea of the ultimate end. The concept of purposiveness leads us, in the historical social context, to the ideal of perpetual peace in which the final end of nature or the moralization of man can be fully realized. This is only possible through a genuine university education in a cosmopolitan political structure.