The Aims of Education and Other Essays (Alfred North Whitehead)
Chapter I: The Aims of Education
Culture is activity of thought,
and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling.
A merely well-informed man is the
most useless bore on God’s earth.
It is not what they are at eighteen, it is what they become afterwards that matters.
Education with inert ideas is not
only useless: it is, above all things, harmful.
We enunciate two educational commandments,
“Do not teach too many subjects,” and again, “What you teach, teach thoroughly.”
Let the main ideas which are
introduced into a child’s education be few and important.
If education is not useful, what
is it? Is it a talent, to be hidden away in a napkin?
The only use of a
knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.
In scientific training the first
thing to do with an idea is to prove it.
Education is the acquisition of
the art of the utilization of knowledge. This is an art very difficult to
impart.
The mind is never passive; it is a
perpetual activity, delicate, receptive responsive to stimulus. You cannot
postpone its life until you have sharpened it. Whatever interest attaches to
your subject-matter must be evoked here and now; whatever powers you are
strengthening in the pupil, must be exercised here and now; whatever
possibilities of mental life your teaching should impart, must be exhibited
here and now. That is the golden rule of education, and a very difficult rule
to follow.
There is only one subject-matter
for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations.
You may not divide the seamless
coat of learning.
Style is the ultimate morality of
mind.
Style is the fashioning of power,
the restraining of power.
The essence of education is that
it be religious…A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and
reverence.
Chapter III: The Rhythmic Claims of Freedom and Discipline
The two principles, freedom and
discipline, are not antagonists, but should be so adjusted in the child’s life
that they correspond to a natural sway, to and fro, of the developing
personality.
There can be no mental development
without interest.
The habit of active thought, with
freshness, can only be generated by adequate freedom. Undiscriminating
discipline defeats its own object by dulling the mind.
It must never be forgotten that
education is not a process of packing articles in a trunk.
Without the adventure of romance,
at the best you get inert knowledge without initiative, and at the worst you
get contempt of ideas—without knowledge.
The untutored art of genius is—in the
words of the Prayer Book—a vain thing, fondly invented.
It is the unfortunate dilemma that
initiative and training are both necessary, and that training is apt to kill
initiative.
A certain ruthless definiteness is
essential in education.
The secret of success is pace, and
the secret of pace is concentration.
Education should begin in research
and end in research….An education which does not begin by evoking initiative
and end by encouraging it must be wrong. For its whole aim is the production of
active wisdom.
Unless the pupils are continually
sustained by the evocation of interest, the acquirement of technique, and the
excitement of success, they can never make progress, and will certainly lose
heart. Speaking generally, during the last thirty years the schools of England
have been sending up to the universities a disheartened crowd of young folk,
inoculated against any outbreak of intellectual zeal.
Inaugural Address at
Education, in its larger sense, is
one of the most inexhaustible of all topics.
Whatever helps to shape the human
being—to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is
not—is part of his education.
[Education:] the culture which
each generation purposely gives to those who are to be its successors, in order
to qualify them for at least keeping up, and if possible for raising, the level
of improvement which has been attained.
Their [universities’] object is
not to make skilful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and
cultivated human beings.
What the pupil should be taught
here (…) is to methodize his knowledge: to look at every separate part of it in
its relation to the other parts, and to the whole.
The modes in
which the human intellect proceeds from the known to the unknown.
This question, whether we should
be taught the classics or the sciences….Why not both? Can anything deserve the
name of a good education which does not include literature and science too?
If the inexorable conditions of
human life make it useless for one man to attempt to know more than one thing,
what is to become of the human intellect as facts accumulate?
Experience proves that there is no
one study or pursuit, which, practised to the
exclusion of all others, does not narrow and pervert the mind.
It is this combination which gives
an enlightened public: a body of cultivated intellects, each taught by its
attainments in its own province what real knowledge is, and knowing enough of
other subjects to be able to discern who are those that know
them better.
Government and civil society are
the most complicated of all subjects accessible to the human mind.
It should be our aim in learning,
not merely to know the one thing which is to be our principal occupation, as
well as it can be known, but to do this and also to know something of all the
great subjects of human interest; taking care to know that something
accurately.
No once can in our age be esteemed
a well-instructed person who is not familiar with at least the French language.
It is the habit of mankind to
mistake familiarity for accurate knowledge.
Without knowing the language of a
people, we never really know their thoughts, their feelings, and their type of
character: and unless we do possess this knowledge, of some other people than
ourselves, we remain, to the hour of our death, with our intellects only half
expanded.
Improvement consists in bringing
our opinions into nearer agreement with facts.
The structure of every sentence is
a lesson in logic.
To question all things; never to
turn away from any difficult; to accept no doctrine either from ourselves or
from other people without a rigid scrutiny by negative criticism, letting no
fallacy, or incoherence, or confusion of thought slip by unperceived; above
all, to insist upon having the meaning of a word clearly understood before
using it, and the meaning of a proposition before assenting to it; these are
the lessons we learn from the ancient dialecticians.
Early familiarity with the perfect
makes our most imperfect production far less bad than it otherwise would be. To
have a high standard of excellence often makes the whole difference of
rendering our work good when it would otherwise be mediocre.
We are born into a world which we
have not made; a world whose phenomena take place according to fixed laws, of
which we do not bring any knowledge into the world with us. In such a world we
are appointed to live, and in it all our work is to be done.
The most incessant occupation of
the human intellect throughout life is the ascertainment of truth.
There are but two roads by which truth
can be discovered—observation and reasoning.
In what consists
the principal and most characteristic difference between one human intellect
and another? In their ability to judge correctly of evidence.
The models of the art of
estimating evidence are furnished by science; the rules are suggested by
science; and the study of science is the most fundamental portion of the
practice.
Our first studies in geometry teach
us two invaluable lessons. One is, to lay down at the beginning, in express and
clear terms, all the premises from which we intend to reason. The other is, to
keep every step in the reasoning distinct and separate from all the other
steps, and to make each step safe before proceeding to another; expressly
stating to ourselves, at every joint in the reasoning, what new premise we there
introduce.
All men do not affect to be reasoners, but all profess, and really attempt, to draw
inferences from experience.
Logic lays down the general
principles and laws of the search after truth.
Its [Logic’s] function is, not so
much to teach us to go right, as to keep us from going wrong.
Wherever there is a right way and
a wrong, there must be a difference between them, and it must be possible to
find out what the difference is; and when found out and expressed in words, it
is a rule for the operation.
There is nothing in which an
untrained mind shows itself more hopelessly incapable, than in drawing the proper
general conclusions from its own experience.
Psychology, in truth, is simply
the knowledge of the laws of human nature.
What we require to be taught on
that subject [politics], is to be our own teachers. It
is a subject on which we have no masters to follow; each must explore for
himself, and exercise an independent judgment.
So far as these branches of
knowledge have been acquired, we have learned, or been put into the way of
learning, our duty, and our work in life. Knowing it, however, is but half the
work of education; it still remains, that what we know, we shall be willing and
determined to put in practice.
Among [the Continental nations] it
is even now observable that virtue and goodness are generally for he most part an affair of the sentiments, while with us they are
almost exclusively an affair of duty.
If we wish men to practice virtue,
it is worth while trying to make them love virtue, and feel it an object in
itself, and not a tax paid for leave to pursue other objects.
The mere contemplation of beauty
of a high order produces in no small degree this elevating effect on the
character.
The Beautiful is greater than the
Good; for it includes the Good, and adds something to it: it is the Good made
perfect, and fitted with all the collateral perfections which make it a
finished and completed thing.
In Art, the perfection is itself
the object.
Let us strive to keep ourselves
acquainted with the best thought that are brought forth by the original minds
of the age; that we may know what movements stand most in need of our aid, and
that, as far as depends on us, the good seed may not fall on a rock, and perish
without reaching the soil in which it might have germinated and flourished.
You and your like are the hope and
resource of your country in the coming generation. All great things which that
generation is destined to do, have to be done some like you.