Meditations
By Marcus Aurelius (Loeb Classics, 1916)
Readers might be surprised to see a recommendation for a book by a Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, who lived almost 2,000 years ago. Aurelius’ Meditations are a series of personal writings that essentially captured this Stoic philosophers’ private thoughts. Despite the passage of time, his ideas still resonate for me in my life as an education professor. But what can a Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher offer an educator living in today’s vastly different world?
There are too many themes to highlight in Aurelius’ work, but the most salient for me is that Meditations has a reoccurring emphasis on the importance of maintaining focus and adhering to strong ethical principles. This emphasis, and the idea of logos, which underscores rational thought and a reliance on both inductive and deductive reasoning, I find especially important as a mixed-methods researcher who relies on both qualitative and quantitative data to examine the impact of education policies.
Meditations reminds us to orient ourselves in the service of the public good. In my case, this mean to identify evidence-based policies that improve education systems and the educational opportunities of students around the world.
Finally, one of the distinctive features of Meditations is that it isn’t a book in a traditional sense. Rather, it’s a series of 12 “books” that stem from different periods of Aurelius’ life. Thus, you don’t necessarily need to read it from cover to cover to understand his key messages and find enlightenment.
This article appears in the October 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 106, No. 2, p. 7.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Louis Volante
Louis Volante is a distinguished professor at Brock University, St. Catherine’s, Ontario, Canada, and a professorial fellow at the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance, United Nations University-MERIT, Maastricht, The Netherlands. He is co-author of The Pandemic, Socioeconomic Disadvantage, and Learning Outcomes: Cross-national Impact Analyses of Education Policy Reforms (Publications Office of the European Union, 2024).
