Peter Francis Abbs[1] (22 February 1942 – December 2020) was an English poet and academic, born in Cromer, Norfolk.
After leaving St Joseph's School in Sheringham in 1954, Abbs travelled to Liverpool to join Saint Peter's College, a seminary run by the Mill Hill missionary fathers.
Committed to aesthetic education and the potency of Socratic learning, he became increasingly opposed to the dominant pedagogic instrumentalism of the day.
In 1986 he began editing The Falmer Press Library of Aesthetic Education, a series of twelve volumes on the theory and practice of teaching the arts.
In later work, Viva la Vida (2005), The Flowering of Flint (2007), and Voyaging Out (2009), these elements found a further union, both sparse and wide-ranging.
This sets out his critique of the encroaching managerialism in the organisation of schools and, drawing on both seminal principle and good practice, posited a bold alternative: education for wholeness of being and the creative life.
Related essays on Augustine, Dante, Petrarch, Montaigne, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud and Jung have already appeared in recent issues of The London Magazine.