Thinkers Timeline

Confucius (551-479 BCE) was a Chinese thinker, teacher, and social philosopher. His Chinese name was Kong Qiu, and he is also known as Kongzi, meaning Master Kong. He was born in the state of Lu, in what is now Shandong Province in eastern China, during a period of political disorder known as the Spring and Autumn period, when the Zhou dynasty was fragmenting into competing states. He came from a family that had once been aristocratic but had fallen into genteel poverty. He worked as a teacher for most of his life, believing that education and moral cultivation could transform both individuals and societies. He also worked for a time as a government official, hoping to put his ideas into practice, but became disillusioned and eventually left to travel and teach. He never wrote a book himself: his ideas are preserved in the Analects, a collection of his conversations and sayings compiled by his students after his death. He died in 479 BCE, probably believing that he had failed to influence his world. In fact, his ideas went on to shape the culture, governance, and social life of China and much of East and Southeast Asia for two and a half thousand years.

The Buddha was a teacher who lived in northern India around 2,500 years ago. His personal name was Siddhartha Gautama. 'Buddha' is a title. It means 'the awakened one' or 'the one who is awake'. Most scholars now think he lived from about 480 to 400 BCE, though older tradition gives earlier dates. He was born a prince of the Shakya clan, in what is now southern Nepal. The traditional story says his father tried to keep him from seeing suffering. The young prince lived in palaces full of beauty and pleasure. He married and had a son. Then, around the age of 29, he saw four things outside the palace: an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a wandering holy man. These sights changed him. He left his family and his comfortable life. He spent six years living as a wanderer. He tried very strict self-denial, eating almost nothing. This nearly killed him. He gave up extreme practices. He sat under a tree at a place now called Bodh Gaya and meditated. He said he reached awakening, a deep understanding of how suffering works and how to end it. He spent the next 45 years teaching across northern India. He gathered followers and built a community of monks and nuns. He died around the age of 80. His teachings became one of the world's major religions and philosophies.

Origen was an early Christian scholar and teacher. He was born around 184 CE in Alexandria, in Roman Egypt, and died around 253 CE. He is one of the most important thinkers of the early Church, and also one of the most argued about. He grew up in a Christian family during a time when Christians were sometimes persecuted by the Roman state. When Origen was a teenager, his father was killed for his faith. Origen wanted to die with him but was stopped. This early loss shaped his whole life. He became a serious, hard-working, and intense person. While still young, he began teaching Christian students in Alexandria. He read widely, including Greek philosophy and the work of the Jewish thinker Philo, who had lived in the same city long before. Origen wrote a huge amount: commentaries on the Bible, defences of the faith, and works of theology. Later he moved to the city of Caesarea, where he set up a school. During a wave of persecution under the emperor Decius, around 250 CE, Origen was arrested and tortured. He did not give up his faith. He survived the prison but his body was broken by the treatment, and he died a few years later. The Church never officially named him a saint, partly because some of his ideas were later judged to be mistaken.

Savitribai Phule (1831-1897) was an Indian teacher, poet, and social reformer who is widely recognised as the first female teacher of India and one of the founders of girls' education in the country. She was born in Naigaon, a small village in what is now the state of Maharashtra. Her family were farmers from the Mali caste — a community that faced social restrictions in the caste system but was not among the most oppressed. She was married at the age of nine to Jyotirao Phule, who was thirteen. This was normal for the time, when child marriage was widespread. What happened next was not normal. Jyotirao recognised that his young wife was intelligent and deserved an education, which was denied to almost all women and all lower-caste people in the India of that period. He began teaching her at home. She was a quick student. Within a few years she was literate in Marathi and beginning to read English. In 1848, when Savitribai was seventeen and Jyotirao was twenty-one, they opened a school for girls in Pune. This was an extraordinary act. Girls of any caste were not supposed to be educated. Lower-caste children were particularly forbidden from learning. Savitribai was the first woman in India to teach in a formal school. On her way to teach each day, people threw stones and cow dung at her. She reportedly carried a second sari so she could change when she arrived at school. The couple later opened schools for Dalit children (the community then called untouchables), a well for drinking water open to all castes at a time when lower-caste people were denied clean water, and a home for pregnant women who had been abandoned. Savitribai wrote poetry in Marathi. Her collections Kavya Phule (Poetry's Flowers, 1854) and Bavan Kashi Subodh Ratnakar (1891) are considered among the earliest examples of modern Marathi poetry. She adopted the son of a widow she had helped and raised him as her own. After Jyotirao's death in 1890, she continued their work alone. She died in 1897 while caring for patients during a plague epidemic in Pune; she caught the disease from a boy whose life she had tried to save.

Maria Montessori (1870-1952) was an Italian educator and doctor whose method of teaching young children has spread to thousands of schools around the world. She was born in Chiaravalle, in central Italy, to a middle-class family. Her father worked for the government; her mother was well-read and encouraged Maria's ambitions. At that time, few women in Italy went to university. Maria wanted to study medicine, which was almost impossible for a woman. She faced strong opposition but did not give up. She entered the University of Rome in 1890 and became one of the first women in Italy to earn a medical degree, graduating in 1896. Her early work as a doctor focused on children with learning difficulties. She worked at a clinic in Rome where she observed these children closely and developed teaching materials that helped them learn. When many of her students then passed the same state exams as children without special needs, she began to wonder whether her methods might work for all children. In 1907 she opened her first school, the Casa dei Bambini (Children's House), in a poor neighbourhood of Rome. The children were aged between three and seven. The results surprised everyone. Children who had been thought wild or undisciplined became focused, calm, and eager to learn. News of the school spread rapidly. Within a few years, schools using her methods opened across Europe, then in the United States and Asia. She wrote many books, including The Montessori Method (1909) and The Absorbent Mind (1949). She was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize because of her work on education for peace. During the Second World War she was trapped in India for seven years, where she continued teaching and developed her ideas about the education of older children. She died in the Netherlands in 1952 at the age of eighty-one. Her schools now educate more than a million children in more than a hundred countries.

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) was a Brazilian educator and thinker. He grew up during a time of great poverty and saw how many poor people could not read or write. He believed that education was not just about learning facts — it was about understanding your world and changing it. His most famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, has been read by teachers and activists all over the world.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith is a Māori scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is one of the most important Indigenous thinkers on research and education in the world today. She was born in 1950 in Whakatāne, a town on the east coast of New Zealand's North Island. Her family belongs to two Māori iwi (tribes): Ngāti Awa on her father's side and Ngāti Porou on her mother's side. Her father, Sir Hirini Moko Mead, is himself a famous Māori scholar and anthropologist. As a teenager, she lived in the United States while her father completed his PhD. It was the late 1960s, a time of huge social change: the civil rights movement, anti-war protests, American Indian activism. These years shaped her political awareness. Back in New Zealand in the 1970s, she joined Ngā Tamatoa, a young Māori activist group that campaigned for te reo Māori (the Māori language) in schools. She became an educator and a scholar. She worked for many years at the University of Waikato, where she held senior leadership roles. She is now a distinguished professor at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi, a Māori university. Her 1999 book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples made her internationally famous. It has been translated into five languages and cited hundreds of thousands of times. In 2023 she won the Rutherford Medal, New Zealand's highest scholarly honour. In 2016 she was appointed to the Waitangi Tribunal, which hears Māori claims against the New Zealand government. She is still active today.

Scott Thornbury is a teacher and writer who works in English language teaching. This field is often called ELT for short. He was born in 1950 in New Zealand. Thornbury has spent over thirty years teaching English and training other teachers. He has worked in many countries, including Egypt, the United Kingdom, and Spain. He still lives in Spain. He earned a master's degree from the University of Reading in England. Today Thornbury is an Associate Professor at The New School, a university in New York. He teaches on an online course that trains English teachers. He is also the editor of a well-known series of handbooks for language teachers. Thornbury is famous for his books. He has written more than a dozen, many of them aimed at helping teachers do their job better. Well-known titles include 'How to Teach Grammar' and 'How to Teach Vocabulary'. His writing is clear, practical, and often funny. He is best known for one big idea. With another teacher, Luke Meddings, he helped create an approach called Dogme ELT. This approach asks teachers to rely less on textbooks and more on real conversation in the classroom. Thornbury also writes a popular blog and speaks at conferences around the world.

bell hooks (1952–2021) was an American educator, professor, feminist theorist, and cultural critic. She was born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, into a working-class Black family in the American South, and chose her pen name — deliberately written in lowercase — to honour her maternal great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks and to signal that it was the ideas that mattered, not the person behind them. She taught at several universities including Yale, Oberlin, and City College of New York, and wrote more than thirty books across education, feminism, race, love, and culture. She was one of the most widely read and accessible public intellectuals of her generation, equally at home in academic conferences and community conversations. She died in Berea, Kentucky, in December 2021.

Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani education activist. She is the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She was born on 12 July 1997 in Mingora, a city in the Swat Valley of northwestern Pakistan. Her family is Sunni Muslim and Pashtun. Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, is a poet and teacher who ran a chain of private schools. He believed his daughter should have the same education as his sons. He named her after Malalai of Maiwand, a Pashtun folk heroine who fought against the British Army in 1880. Malala's childhood was peaceful until 2007. In that year, a group called the Pakistani Taliban took control of the Swat Valley. They banned girls from going to school, destroyed over 100 schools, and killed people who disagreed with them. Malala was 10. Her father kept his schools open in secret. In 2009, aged 11, she began writing an anonymous diary for the BBC under the name 'Gul Makai'. She described daily life under Taliban rule: the fear, the empty classrooms, the limits on women going outside. Her diary was read around the world. After the Pakistani army pushed the Taliban out of Swat, Malala continued speaking publicly for girls' education. She became famous in Pakistan. On 9 October 2012, when she was 15, Taliban gunmen stopped her school bus. A man climbed on, asked for her by name, and shot her in the head. She was flown to Birmingham in the United Kingdom for emergency treatment. She nearly died. Her recovery took months. She stayed in the UK with her family. In 2013, she co-wrote a bestselling memoir, I Am Malala. In 2014, at age 17, she won the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the Indian activist Kailash Satyarthi. She studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University from 2017 to 2020. She founded the Malala Fund to support girls' education worldwide. In 2021, she married Asser Malik. She continues to work and write in 2026.