Nostalgia rightly elicits suspicion, even derision, for to give oneself up to longing for something from the past runs the risk of compromising one's capacity to act effectively in the present. But this does not make nostalgia, "by definition," either sentimentally reactionary or wistfully unreflective. On the contrary, in the education…

Although the French Renaissance sceptic Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) is a much-admired thinker among many literary historians and some philosophical ones, his oeuvre hardly features in critical surveys of ideas in education. This is strange given that Montaigne offers modern educators an exemplary form of communicative discourse which anticipates…