Concept of education in the naturalistic humanism of the enlightenment

The Enlightenment epoch never fails to attract the attention of researchers, who study various sides of this unique and multifaceted cultural-historical phenomenon. At the first stage of studying this period, the researchers were mostly concerned with the matters of visual art and culture philosophy of the epoch. Today attention is also paid to the less researched problems. The author of this article studies the phenomenon of education in the Enlightenment period. The specific feature of the period is the eclectic combination of new world view - materialism - and old idealistic beliefs. The enlighteners used new «precise» knowledge about the world, especially about nature, to oppose them to religion, theology and scholastics. This was the source of naturalism, which is an eclectic «cocktail» of materialism and idealism. Thus, the enlighteners view human as a natural and historical being. In the second case a human is the product of education.