Who is João Lopes?

Haven’t you ever heard of the Portuguese philosopher and pedagogue João Lopes? To be honest, we hadn’t either. In our interview with the Waldorf teacher Leonor Malik in the last edition, entitled “Music is just as important as maths“, we slipped a little error in for you. Were you as unaware of that as we were?

Quote: (…) At the start of the 20th century, the 19th-century industrial revolution had left a legacy, with a completely mechanistic vision of human beings. Children were a kind of clean slate – incidentally, João Lopes said that – and then we fed things into them, just as logs were fed into a steam engine for it to operate. (…)

We are of course talking about the famous English philosopher John Locke, who said in 1693 that, at birth, humans are like a blank sheet of paper. It is only as they grow up that it begins to fill with letters. (…)

We hide at least one slip for you in each edition. Then we hope that you’ll help us out. Write to us if you’ve already found the mistake in this issue. Thank you.