Jacques Maritain
As to the principal stages in education, let us note that there are three great periods in education. I should like to designate them as the rudiments (or elementary education), the humanities (comprising both secondary and college education), and advanced studies (comprising graduate schools and higher specialized learning). And these periods correspond not only to three natural chronological periods in the growth of the youth but also to three naturally distinct and qualitatively determinate spheres of psychological development, and, accordingly, of knowledge.
The physical structure of the child is not that of the adult, shortened and abridged. The child is not a dwarf man. Nor is the adolescent. And this is much truer and much more crucial as regards the psychological than the physical structure of the youth. In the realm of physical training, of psychophysical conditioning, of animal and experimental psychology, contemporary education has understood more and more perfectly that a child of man is not just a diminutive man. It has not yet understood this in the spiritual realm of knowing: because, indeed, it is not interested in the psychology of spiritual activities. How, therefore, could it do anything but ignore that realm? The error is twofold. First, we have forgotten that science and knowledge are not a self-sufficient set of notions, existing for their own sakes, abstracted and separate from man. Science and knowledge do not exist in books, they do exist in minds, they are vital and internal energies and must develop therefore according to the inner spiritual structure of the mind in which they have their being.
Second, we act as if the task of education were to infuse into the child or the adolescent, only abridging and concentrating it, the very science or knowledge of the adult —that is to say, of the philologist, the historian,  » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2025/03/stages-education-crossroads-jacques-maritain.html