Diderot began the Plan with several powerful maxims that reflected his view that the function of education was not to produce a better-educated aristocracy; it was a weapon to be deployed against superstition, religious intolerance, prejudice, and social injustice. “To instruct a nation,” Diderot writes in the first line of the Plan, “is to civilize it.”15 Education, as he went on, not only “gives man dignity”; it has a necessarily emancipatory or transformative effect on both the enslaved and the ignorant: “the slave [who is instructed] soon learns that he was not born for servitude” while
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