This article presents both practical tips for, and explores theoretical considerations related to, teaching the Enlightenment in the twenty-first century college classroom. It begins by reviewing some of the many resources instructors today can use as they guide their students through the Enlightenment. It then explores how scholars’ understanding of the period has changed over time, before examining what students learn about the Enlightenment before they come to college, and then considers the politics of teaching the Enlightenment today. The article then pivots back to the practical and explores the many things we can do with our students as we engage with the Enlightenment. However the Enlightenment may be conceived—whether as one or many, reformist or revolutionary, a movement or a series of debates—this article argues it is vital we keep teaching it in these times.

Until the late seventeenth-century, French women had limited access to education. This article explores the openings that the Enlightenment provided for reconceptualizing women’s education, and how women used their roles as salonnières and novelists to challenge gendered educational limits. Using the lenses of education and gender norms, we highlight women’s intellectual contributions to the French Enlightenment and the history of ideas and emphasize the role of critical thinking in creating gender equality. With this scholarship, we encourage students to reflect on the history of the Enlightenment and the importance of reading, writing, and critical thinking for tackling present issues of discrimination. Furthermore, for educators, we challenge them to see the benefits of centering marginalized voices in the history of the Enlightenment for what those voices offer, engaging students in critical thinking and education and addressing equity and social justice for both individuals and society at large.

The eighteenth century French Enlightenment writers—Voltaire and Montesquieu especially—were cited in American textbooks as the thinkers who most influenced the founding generation of America until at least the 1970s. They still are, throughout much of the world. And rightly so, as studies of colonial periodicals and pamphlets have largely shown. When and why did they disappear from our high school textbooks? When Voltaire is mentioned at all, it is only as the author of Candide. This essay focuses on Voltaire as a sort of “missing link” in our understanding of American history and government. It includes discussions of his other works, considered far more consequential in his own day, and of his ubiquitous use of critical thinking. The case of Voltaire closely parallels the more recent efforts to erase Thomas Jefferson from U.S. schoolbooks: the author of the first bill for religious freedom and its leading champion in America.

Ideas about education and its power to transform people’s intellectual, social, political, and personal lives were central to Enlightenment thought. They were also central to the Enlightenment belief that new ways of thinking engendered new ways of living (and vice versa). Taken together, these points placed education at the heart of early modern debates over the constitution of society, the organization and administration of the polity, the nature and purpose of civil society, and the relations that govern everyday life. To understand this view of education and the Enlightenment debates to which it gave rise, this essay highlights the role of skepticism and uncertainty in Enlightenment thought, the philosophes’ interest in education as an instrument of moral and social improvement, and their commitment to the idea that both individual and collective progress stemmed from critical forms of social intercourse. As a result, we see that the Enlightenment’s educational legacy is not a particular platform or pedagogy, but an ongoing experiment in how the critical and collective pursuit of useful knowledge might reform or remake human society.