In understanding philosophy and education this way, we run counter to the professionalizing currents that have so marked twentieth-century culture. Education has become something that is done to the many by complex teams of specialized teachers and administrators; and philosophy has become something that equally specialized professionals do among the very few who count themselves their peers. Persons don't change in such an educational environment and philosophy rarely sustaines a prolonged encounter. We think networked digital information resources will enable people to reverse this ever-narrowing professionalism. This study place exists for persons who wish to engage in philosophy and education because both have value for them, quite apart from their professional responsibilities.

Such hopes call for new types of educators, or different types of educators, than the well-trained professional. Professional competence is indeed important, but however good and fine, it is not sufficient. Yet such hortations easily become empty phrases. The hard truth needs to be faced -- it is difficult to speak to the deepest issues without the results of such reflections becoming the object of professional discourse. Misplaced professionalism is an enduring, ineradicable temptation. Nietzsche provides us with an observation that helps resist the temptation -- "To educate educators! But the first ones must educate themselves! And for these I write." The first ones, in a world of eternal recurrence, are not a select few at some point of historical origin. The first ones reside in each and everyone of us, who must as educators educate ourselves.

Hence, the works offered here are works that people who are aware of themselves as "first ones," people at any age ready to think fundamental views for themselves, have found sustaining and provocative. These take many forms -- dialogue (for example, Plato), essay (Montaigne, Emerson, Locke), dialectic (Hegel), treatise (Hume, Montaigne) deduction (Aristotle, Kant), verse (Wordworth), and narrative (Rousseau). Such forms are the forms of our literary, textual heritage consisting primarily in written manuscripts and printed books. We, now, in this study place and in related realms of our electronic information enviroment, enjoy a great privilege, that of inventing new forms for writing for those educators of educators, for those first ones in every person who would educate themselves.