Although Kant was involved in the education debates of his time, it is widely held that in his mature philosophical writings he remained silent on the subject. In her groundbreaking Kant’s Conception of Pedagogy, G. Felicitas Munzel finds extant in Kant’s writings the so-called missing critical treatise on education. It appears in the Doctrines of Method with which he concludes each of his major works.

In it, Kant identifies the fundamental principles for the cultivation of reason’s judgment when it comes to cognition, beauty, nature, and the exercise of morality while subject to the passions and inclinations that characterize the human experience.

From her analysis, Munzel extrapolates principles for a cosmopolitan education that parallels the structure of Kant’s republican constitution for perpetual peace. With the formal principles in place, the argument concludes with a query of the material principles that would fulfill the formal conditions required for an education for freedom.

"In Kant’s Conception of Pedagogy Felicitas Munzel offers an impressive articulation and defense of Kant’s account of the necessary (inner) conditions for human freedom and specifies what the attainment of these conditions mean for education. . . . Munzel’s work here is to be celebrated both for its ambitious scope and the incisiveness with which it hones in on questions that are central for Kant scholarship in particular and educational philosophy in general." —CChristopher Martin, The University of British Columbia