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Interesting to me that the tendency is to skip from millenia old history to the modern era, leaving out the period from 300 A.D. to the Renaissance . . . or whatever they regarded as modern then. I think we have lost a lot of lessons from that gap in historical focus. One of the lessons is the danger of Islam.

You have to understand that the 18th century took a more systematic view of education, at least at this aristocratic level, so that one learns the foundations - and for the Anglo-American philosophes that was primarily the ancient classics before tackling the practical and the modern at university and beyond. A gentleman's education did not end with university, but rather continued with private reading. Much of modern history, Voltaire, Gibbon, Hume, etc. (recall they were all best known first as historians) was being published and was the sort of thing that gentlemen read in their leisure, rather than what students learned in school.

"In the years after Waterloo, scientific invention was of passionate interest to a rapidly expanding British and international public. That was the most important new factor. But it was still possible for a moderately well-educated man or even a woman - a manual on chemistry was specifically written to appeal to ladies - to grasp the latest scientific developments. Indeed, an impiric engineer like Stephenson, who had no schooling, worked at the frontiers of technology alongside scientists like Davy. Physics and chemistry, science and engineering, literature and philosophy, art and industrial design, theory and practise - all constituted a continuum of knowledge and skill, within which men roamed freely. The notion of separate, compartmentalized "disciplines" later imposed by universities, did not yet exist. Indeed, except in Germany and Scotland, where the modern university was just beginning to emerge, universities did not engage in the promotion of discovery. Oxford and Cambridge played virtually no role in the Industrial Revolution. Degrees, certificates, qualifications, all the apparatus of academic trade unionism, were still of little consequence, except in medicine, where they formed barriers to progress. Elsewhere, men sprang from nowhere to take the lead. A priviledged elite might rule in Westminster, but advanced knowledge was a democracy. The opportunities for clever young men were enormous, especially in Britain - one reason why the dynamic of change was so powerful there."
- Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern (pg. 543/544)