LIBERAL EDUCATION VS. ANIMAL TRAINING
In a sense no living person is yet educated, for the learning process
is never completed. But there must come a time when the process results
in some differences in behavior. Often these differences seem to be
small and irrelevant, amounting merely to added social grace or more
correct use of language. Something more than this must differentiate
the educated from the uneducated or so much human energy would not be
expended in the effort to get education.
When we inquire what the difference is, we find there is much
confusion. In the process of education knowledge is acquired. Many a
person’s education consists of what he has learned. May one possess
much knowledge or information and remain uneducated? I know a physician
who has great skill and wide professional information, yet he is
essentially vulgar in his tastes and enjoyments and bigoted in his
human relationships, and his judgments concerning most things are
narrow and hasty and are determined largely by passion and prejudice.
You feel that his learning has never become integrated with his
personality. It is a property annexed to his estate over which he is
an absentee landlord. It has made no changes in his general habits of
thought and behavior.
There are people whom no one would think educated, who yet have an
astounding amount of information. They know all about race horses, or
bridge, or baseball scores, or stocks and bonds. Many have a knowledge
of such things which may be greater both in range and accuracy than
that which some professional scholars have of their special subjects.
Shall we say then that some kinds of knowledge have educational value
and that others have not? But why should not all knowledge be equally
education? Is there a psychological reason for the alleged difference
or is the exclusion of some kinds of knowledge the result merely of a
conventional attitude? Our discussion of education resolves itself into
a philosophical problem.
The issue of practical education versus the so-called cultural comes
up whenever people are interested in the subject. Partisans of the
latter type of learning are inclined to look down upon the former. They
say it is not education but only skill and efficiency. They hold that
education is scholarship and properly has to do with such subjects as
the classics, the humanities, philosophy, etc., which discipline the
mind and ennoble the spirit. This is the traditional view.
Those who take the opposite view ask what earthly purpose can useless
and sequestered learning serve? They are suspicious of education for
“refinement” or the “genteel tradition.” Is it not the aim of the
pursuit of knowledge to enable one to do something, to attain mastery,
to equip the mind to function well in an environment which demands
activity of us all? Is not anything well learned culture? An excellent
statement of this point of view can be found in Huxley’s lectures on
education.
There has been much discussion of this question in the universities
and colleges. There are those who deplore the decline of interest in
the classics and philosophy. They say that institutions of higher
learning are becoming mere “intellectual cafeterias,” that the change
from classical education to an elective system embracing all sorts of
vocational courses is a distinct loss, inasmuch as the knowledge so
acquired lacks coordination and balance, while specialization crowds
out the general and cultural subjects that form the foundation of
education.
On the other hand, why should not a University teach anything
that people wish to know? There was once resistance to including
the sciences, chemistry and physics and biology. The liberalizing
effect and cultural value of these subjects is now recognized, and
their usefulness is a social gain. Then why not domestic science,
agriculture, mechanics, business methods? What is wrong with the
schools of business at Harvard and Columbia?
A similar issue exists in secondary education. It is often said that
high schools pay too much regard to college entrance requirements,
since only a small portion of graduates expect to continue their
education. The students have gained only a most superficial
introduction to the classics and have learned nothing practical.
Schools of trade, commerce, and of technology are increasing in number
and the movement for such training is guided by principles of education
very different from those of the classical tradition.
Those of us who are interested in adult education meet the same
problem. Writing of worker’s education Dr. Horace M. Kallen says,
“... The complexity of the tasks of any union official has grown so
great, their variety so considerable, that it is no longer possible
for an official merely to pass from the worker’s bench to the
official’s desk and completely discharge his duties.... Schools
would have to be provided analogous to the schools of business
administration maintained in the colleges.... Out of the instruction
there would in the course of time emerge a communicable permanent
record, on which the necessary accessories of books could be built.
Such a school of officials would be a nucleus from which the
educational process could ultimately radiate into every shop.
“Labor education would finally thus become conversant with control
rather than escape. In such a conversancy more and more of the
energies now seeking relief in the vapors of the social mechanisms
of escape, would find satisfactory enchannelment in the technique of
control.
“It is the essential function of labor education to envisage, to
forecast and to enable this transition. The various arts would then
develop no longer as compensations against, but as expressions
and prophetic fulfillments, as criticisms and mitigations of,
the processes of this movement; they too would more largely be
coterminous with industrial life.”
Dr. Kallen would probably not go so far as to say that the sole aim
of Labor Education is to equip the members of the working class
with such knowledge as will enable them to master the industrial
environment and change the social system. But there are those who hold
such a view, just as there are those who hold that the worker should
receive only such education as will make him a more competent workman.
Both views, one held by extreme radicals, the other by conservative
capitalists, have in common the belief that education for workers is
purely practical training. “Cultural” subjects are sometimes studied,
and there is a lively demand for them, but the tendency is to regard
this interest as an “escape” from reality into a world of fanciful
contemplation and mere verbal exercise. It is an intellectual luxury,
a form of entertainment or inspiration to which a worker is entitled,
but it is an interest which is a little under suspicion of being
“bourgeois.”
Hence in all phases of education, this issue is debated. The issue
is inevitable in a time like the present, with a classical tradition
surviving in an industrial civilization. Have we any need in the modern
world of cultural traditions which have their origin in antiquity?
Should we or could we dispense with all educational values except those
which are coterminous with the present industrial situation?
Wherever such an issue arises, I have learned to suspect both sides. As
a rule both are based upon a common presupposition which is an error.
Here the presupposition is that the important factor in education is
the question what is to be taught, rather than the spirit of learning
itself. Education is conceived of as knowledge acquired. Attention is
fixed not on the learning process through which an individual becomes
reoriented to his world, but upon the end result, something fixed
and done, a certain amount of information stored up. Is this what we
mean by learning? Is it receiving and memorizing a given something
either cultural or practical? Or is it an adventure in any kind of
truth-seeking which changes the quality of one’s future experience
and enables one to behave not merely efficiently but wisely, with a
broad view and a sympathetic understanding of the many ways in which
men have striven to create meaning and value out of the possibilities
of human life? If this last is correct, the real question is not what
shall be learned but how and why and to what end. Is learning a venture
in spiritual freedom that is humanism, or is it a routine process of
animal training? Both cultural and practical knowledge may be reduced
to animal training--and they generally are. It is there that the issue
between them arises.
To my mind, an educated person is not merely one who can do something,
whether it is giving a lecture on the poetry of Horace, running a
train, trying a lawsuit, or repairing the plumbing. He is also one who
knows the significance of what he does, and he is one who cannot and
will not do certain things. He has acquired a set of values. He has a
“yes” and a “no,” and they are his own. He knows why he behaves as he
does. He has learned what to prefer, for he has lived in the presence
of things that are preferable. I do not mean that he is merely trained
in the conventions of polite society or the conformities of crowd
morality. He will doubtless depart from both in many things. Whether
he conforms or not, he has learned enough about human life on this
planet to see his behavior in the light of a body of experience and
the relation of his actions to situations as a whole. Such a person is
acquiring a liberal education and it makes little difference whether he
has been trained in philosophy or mechanics. He is being transformed
from an automaton into a thinking being.
The antithesis of liberal education and practical training arises in
part out of a misunderstanding on both sides of a principle stated
in Aristotle’s “Politics.” In this book there is set forth the
philosopher’s theory of education. He is seeking for his times just
what our practical educators seek for ours--to train youth to deal
masterfully with existing conditions. Unlike many moderns he sees
that such training applies to the whole personality. This is evident
for example in his discussion of music where he considers the general
psychological effects of various kinds of rhythm.
There were three important facts in the environment of the Greek youth
to which the educator had to assist the student to adapt himself.
The way in which the intelligent person faced these facts was the
meaning of liberal education in Aristotle’s time. There was first
a psychological fact. Popular myth was ceasing to function as an
explanation of the processes of nature and as a basis for the control
of behavior. Fortunately for the Greeks, no priestly class had gained
control of their spiritual life. Stories of the doings of the gods
were coming to be regarded as mere poetry, in the modern sense of the
term. Philosophers did not hesitate to subject religious beliefs to
the judgment of reason. The assertion had been made that “Man is the
measure of all things.” A spirit of intellectual freedom prevailed
that was unique in ancient times, I might say in any time. There was a
disposition to investigate, to classify natural phenomena, to speculate
upon their nature and causes. Men were faced with the necessity of
thinking their experience through to find meanings which elsewhere were
a matter of myth and folkway. Thought must be clarified and made exact
if behavior was to be guided by reason. Philosophy, which included the
beginnings of science, and education were almost the same thing,--the
search for the good life. I will discuss this point further in a later
lecture.
The second fact concerning which the Greek youth must learn to behave
intelligently was political in its nature. It was the existence of an
aristocratic democracy in which as a citizen he must participate with
important results for both himself and the state. The free citizen must
have learned to judge what is good.
The third fact which challenged the educator was sociological; it was
the existence of slavery. This institution, which in the end was one
of the causes of the breakdown of ancient civilization, seemed to be
perfectly natural to the philosopher. Aristotle thinks that some people
are slavish by nature. He has no thought of educating such persons,
though they may be trained to perform their tasks well. All should be
so trained that they may live happily and well in the stations in life
where they are. As most mechanical labor was performed by slaves, and
by hirelings whose social status was not very different from that of
the slave, the Greeks candidly despised mechanic arts. Knowledge of
them was thought to be a slavish kind of skill. Aristotle likewise
looked down upon trade and commerce as debasing the mind, just as hard
labor was thought to demean the body. The free man must be so trained
that his privileges, his leisure and authority over others would make
for general human happiness. This education of the free man was called
“Liberal Education.” It was the education of a leisure class. It was
a training for leadership and responsibility: not a mere initiation
into the idealogy of an exploiting class, together with the passwords
current in exclusive circles. Neither did it mean--at least for the
ancient Greek--the accumulation of dead and inconsequential knowledge
the only purpose of which was a pedantic display of erudition. In ages
that followed, the study of the classics tended to become something of
this sort. But this tendency marked a decline, a loss of the spirit of
liberal education as it had once existed. Athenian education, in spite
of the institution of slavery, developed men of wisdom and nobility
of spirit and civilization of interest in such numbers that ancient
Greece became the pioneer of western civilization and has remained the
inspiration and guide to men in most of their efforts to attain a life
of reason and beauty.
The fact that the liberal tradition had its origin in a society in
which slavery prevailed has left traces in education which persist
even to the present time. It is one of the things that cause people
to believe that there are different types of education proper to
different social strata. Education becomes a mark of distinction. It is
for the privileged few. It is itself a privilege and a kind of vested
interest. There is a higher knowledge and a lower knowledge. In part
this distinction goes back to primitive times. In early civilization,
everyone learned to do everything which the people of the tribe could
do. There was no specialization; all alike learned to fish, to hunt,
to fight, to dance. The primitive magic was associated with every
human interest and every form of activity, and for every type of
performance there was a magic formula. In time it became the special
function of the elders and medicine men to remember the formulae and
pass them on to their successors. Knowledge of the formulae became the
special privilege of the priestly class. Knowledge of labor processes
remained with the mass. The former was higher knowledge and developed
into ancient wisdom. In certain religions it led to an esoteric
intellectualism. The distinction gains emphasis among peoples like the
Hebrews, Moslems and Christians whose religion is the “Religion of the
Book.” The “Higher Knowledge” is now a divine revelation preserved
in the Sacred Book. With each of the peoples mentioned religious
scholarship becomes the basis of all learning, and dominates education.
Any accretions of general culture which are acquired and added to
theology, become tinctured by it. A priestly tradition is mingled with
the classic culture as the philosophy of Aristotle becomes elaborated
first by the Arabs, and then by the Rabbis and Christian scholars of
the Middle Ages. What Aristotle meant simply as the training of the
free man in self-mastery, in time became a professionalized “higher
learning,” a sequestered scholarship largely unrelated to the existing
environment.
Mediæval education became scholasticism. It was still a higher
knowledge set apart from other interests: it did not include
proficiency in the arts of industry, but rather in book learning and
in disputation. Liberal it was not, though it still in a sense had to
do with leisure. The good life had become one of pious contemplation.
Aristotle’s free citizen was displaced by the cenobite and the
candidate for holy orders. The life of Reason became one of skill
in the formal logic with which a given system of life and thought
was elaborated. Scholastic education made possible a high type of
scholarship; it carried very far its training in the subtleties of
argument. But it exhausted itself in a world of abstractions which it
mistook for realities. It was a discipline, not a voyage of discovery.
It was a matter of routine learning by memorizing. Its aim was to
mold the mind of the student to a fixed type. It placed him in an
environment so manipulated as to determine his habits of thinking once
for all, to give support to required beliefs. It was education by
indoctrination. It developed a type of mind which could be depended
on to do and say the expected thing on the expected occasion, one
which would hold certain desired convictions and no others. For such
an educational system, learning was accepting and retaining something
provided in advance. In this sense it was passive. Mentality was the
product of environment. Scholastic education though it dealt with
“things of the spirit” was from one point of view “animal training.”
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the scholars of the
Renaissance turned from theological education to human letters. A
revival of interest in the literature of antiquity became a sort of
passion. Those who sought through the study of Greek and Latin poets,
essayists, and philosophers to revive the spirit of the lost pagan
civilization were called Humanists. They had a philosophy of education
very different from that of scholasticism which was at that time on
the decline. There was the promise that education might again become
liberal, in the sense I use the term. Wherever the “New Learning”
was carried it had a liberalizing influence. It roused the hostility
of “obscurantists” and created a jolly row in many institutions of
learning. It awakened pagan ideas throughout Italy, even in high
ecclesiastical circles. It was bringing “refinement” to France. It
was receiving something of a triumph in Northern Europe under the
leadership of Erasmus, when the Reformation again turned general
interest to theology. What the result of this humanistic movement in
education might have been had it gone on unchecked no one can say. No
one now believes it could have been what its leaders expected. They
tried to produce an imitation in their own times of the manners and
ways of men who had lived centuries earlier in a wholly different
environment. Such an attempt of course is futile. But it is conceivable
that as larger and larger numbers of people achieved freedom in the
modern world a liberal education might have done in our day what the
Greeks sought to do in theirs--lay the foundations of freedom in a
well-considered basis of philosophy. In that event the whole of modern
education might have been vitalized by a cultural tradition which could
take into account the conditions under which modern men live and work
without degenerating into narrow utilitarianism and mere mechanical
efficiency.
What chiefly survived from the Renaissance--at least in Protestant
countries--is the traditional education, in which the ancient classics
are taught as tedious drill in language with the aim of improving the
student’s literary style, also of disciplining his soul by compelling
him to do something disagreeable, and finally so that he may be able
to repeat a few Latin or Greek phrases, remember the names of a few
ancient writers and perhaps if he has been very diligent, retain a
sufficient number of vague memory traces to enjoy a book like Professor
Erskine’s “Private Life of Helen of Troy.”
But to call this liberal education requires both humor and imagination.
Little attempt is made to get behind the language into literary
appreciation, or back of the literature to the ways and values of
ancient life and the wisdom of the ages, or to see the relation of
such wisdom to the problems of living in the modern world. Traditional
education has again become an artificial thing, aloof from reality,
a higher knowledge set apart by itself. That is, if one may call it
knowledge at all. Most college graduates after a few years do not
remember enough Latin to enable them to translate their own diplomas,
so badly are the classics taught, even as mere language drill.
Much of the spirit of scholasticism, though little of its thoroughness
and subtlety, persisted in the later Protestantism. Its influence
necessarily tended to make this teaching of the humanities formal and
innocuous. After the Renaissance, members of the nobility and gentry,
and later an increasing number of the middle class, sought higher
education for its refining influence, as an adornment rather than as a
way of life. The result is a culture that is for the most part external
to the sphere of our activities and interests, something borrowed, not
won; seldom an expression or valuation or glorification of modern life.
This also is a routine and a moulding to type. It is again a form of
animal training.
* * * * *
The development of science in the nineteenth century led to a demand
for the education requisite for modern life. The application of science
to industry created a new environment. New knowledge was required and
new mental habits must be formed if there was to be effective control.
Natural science gave men a new intellectual discipline and a new
world-view. With it came a new hope for the race. Mankind need only
learn the laws of nature and obey them to become wise and happy and
good. The new knowledge dispelled ignorance and superstition and set
the mind free. There was much criticism of traditional education, and
much faith in the liberalizing effects of scientific training as well
as in its practical results. Today scientific research occupies a most
important place in education. In many colleges and universities it has
almost supplanted the classical studies. No modern person can be really
educated without some training in scientific methods.
But science also may become mere animal training. Each science is a
profession, acquired as a technical training like learning a trade. Of
things outside his own trade the scientist may be quite ignorant and
lacking in curiosity. He is often unable to see the significance of his
specialty for knowledge as a whole. Within his chosen field of study
he may come to resent new discovery--especially if it fails to confirm
some favorite theory. In some of the sciences, notably psychology,
biology, medicine and the social sciences, there are intense partisan
divisions, often rivalling in dogmatism and bitterness, those of
theology. Each “school” develops its cult ideas, its jargon credo, and
ritual. Herd opinion holds sway over scientists as over other men.
Certain phrases and mannerisms are adopted, just as among Rotarians,
because they show that one belongs to the crowd. The psychologist
today, for instance, must boast his ignorance of philosophy and make a
noise like a biologist. The advancement of knowledge is by no means the
sole motive in scientific training; there is also much molding to type
even though this latter objective is in conflict with the spirit of
science itself.
Much contemporary educational philosophy is openly and avowedly a
technique of animal training; so much so that it quite properly
borrows its pedagogical principles from animal psychology. It would be
difficult to over estimate the importance of animal experimentation
for modern theories of education. Schools of education are deeply
interested in the psychology of the learning process. Education is
learning, and learning is habit formulation. Habits are the acquired
modes of response of men and animals. They may be organized in the
nervous tissue by any environmental factors which “condition” certain
reflexes; that is, chain certain responses to given stimuli. It is
possible for an animal experimenter or an educator of children to
organize the environmental situation in such a manner that definite
systems of desired responses may be regularly obtained whenever a
stimulus of a certain kind is given. A simple and well-known experiment
which will serve to explain what we mean by the conditioned reflex is
that of Pavlov. A hungry dog when shown meat secretes saliva. At the
time the dog sees the meat a bell is rung. This is repeated a number
of times until the dog will secrete saliva at the sound of the bell,
without the presence of the meat stimulus. The saliva response, induced
by the bell stimulus, is the conditioned reflex.
It is said that all learning takes place after this fashion. An animal,
a cat, may be placed in a cage, the door being so arranged that escape
is possible only when the cat strikes a certain latch. After a period
during which the cat makes all sorts of frantic random movements, the
successful movement finally occurs and the cat escapes. The experiment
is repeated and perhaps the period of futile activity will not be so
long as at first. After a number of trials the cat will give up the
random movements and at once unlock the door. The gradual shortening of
the interval of time required for the desired response may be plotted.
It is then called the animal’s “learning curve.”
Such curves may also be made of human learning processes. It is said
that there is no essential difference between this animal learning and
our own learning whether it be to swim or play tennis, or to memorize
a poem, or solve a problem in algebra, or to master the technique of
a profession. One’s education thus consists wholly of one’s organized
systems of responses, or habit patterns. We speak of education
as the development of personality. But from this point of view
personality is nothing but the sum total of an individual’s conditioned
reflexes:--that is, it is merely the manner in which the organism has
been taught to work. One eminent Behaviorist among the psychologists
compares personality to the running of a gas engine.
I will not enter upon a psychological discussion of this view of
education, except to say that the method of animal training which is
taken for granted is open to serious criticism. The theory proceeds
on the assumption that _insight into the situation_ is not necessary
to learning. The cat in the cage hits upon the successful gesture as
a matter of pure chance. After a number of experiments, each said to
place the animal in an identical situation, the successful action
becomes “over determined,” and fixed as a habit. It is doubtful whether
such training is learning at all. The animal--and conceivably the human
being--need never take in the situation. The successful art, the more
this learning process is perfected, degenerates into a mere gesture,
related to the event in a purely external and arbitrary manner. It is
difficult to see how educational methods guided by such a theory could
do much to train the student in habits of independent judgment.
Professor Wolfgang Köhler spent four years studying the intelligence
of apes at the anthropoid station in Tenerife. His experiments with
these animals followed a procedure quite the reverse of that we have
been discussing. He arranged his experiments so that there could be
no chance and no routine, so that the situation as a whole implied a
definite action on the part of the animal, an action which would be
natural to it once it gained insight into the situation. From simple
tasks he moved to more complex ones, always keeping the moment of
insight as the crucial factor in the experiment. An ape is placed in a
cage and fruit is put outside beyond the animal’s reach. A stick has
also been placed within reach. After vain attempts to reach the fruit
with its hand, the ape suddenly sits quietly looking the situation
over: it looks from the fruit to the stick, then seizes the latter and
pulls in the fruit. Later the animal is required to choose between a
long stick and a shorter one, then two sticks are put within reach
which must be joined before success may be attained.
From such tasks the animal is led on to those which finally test the
limitations of its insight. So far as I know no use has yet been made
of such psychological study of animal learning by our educators. But
if we must resort to animal psychology in order to understand the
processes of human learning it would seem that Köhler’s methods would
be more suggestive to the educator than those which assume that the
learner is throughout an automaton without understanding.
The so-called “new psychology” has filled modern education with
confusion. Fads and fancies of all sorts prevail, each with its
psychological jargon. “Progressive” experimental schools everywhere
give voice to “modern ideas.” In many such schools there is a minimum
of discipline, pupils are encouraged to take the initiative in all
things, to study what they like, and when they choose. Everything
is made as easy and as interesting as possible, and there is much
talk about permitting the student to express himself and develop
his personality. So long as we confine our attention merely to the
methods of teaching we have the impression that this “new” education
is anything but standardized. We get a different impression when we
turn to examine the ideals of scholarship, the valuations, and general
outlook on life which the newer philosophy of education accepts
uncritically. In fact very little thought is given to these matters.
The prevailing interests and trends of a democratic, industrial age are
taken as the ultimate criteria. It might almost be said that education
has come to be regarded merely as a function of the environment.
Now it is one thing to train a mind to deal effectively with its
environment and to achieve some value in the modifications which it
makes in that environment. It is a different thing to hold that mind
is the product of the environment. A well-known psychologist says that
the aim of his science is to predict and control behavior. He offers
us the conditioned reflex as the means to any desired result, and says
that if he could have full control of the environment of a given number
of children, he would permit some one to select by lot the future life
and career of each child, and he would form the mind of each according
to the chosen pattern. Our modern environmentalists have more in common
with mediæval scholasticism than they think. The aim of both is to
produce an individual who will react under all circumstances according
to a prearranged pattern.
Scholasticism, as we have seen, consisted chiefly of memory drill and
training in logic and disputation. Law and theology were sometimes
studied, but proficiency in such subjects does not in itself mean
that a man has acquired a liberal education. He may only have learned
to do the conventional trick when the expected signal is given,
much like a trained dog in a circus. The same must be said of much
modern professional training. The scholastic spirit haunts the legal
mind to this day. Also it is possible--perhaps usual--for one to
study medicine, and never once get an idea of what medicine means to
the scientist. Most people educated by school teachers and college
professors are in fact trained in this way. Think of what passes for
moral and religious training. With respect to the most important
questions in life, people have been so “conditioned” that they do not
try to solve problems as they arise, but to say and do the expected
thing on occasion. I once heard a professor in a theological seminary
instruct his class in the art of visiting the sick. The students were
busy copying in their note books the speeches which it is correct for
a pastor to make on such occasions. The following is typical of such
instruction. “As you enter the sick-room it is well to say When God
puts a man down on his back, it is so that he may look up into Heaven.”
In such habit formation, learning is mere repetition. There is nothing
of independence of judgment, no reflection on ends, no development of
the capacity to deal with new situations. The better one is trained the
more automatic one’s behavior becomes. And here we see the limitations
to much so-called practical education,--“education for work and for
life.”
Yes, but do we live simply to do things and to serve, to perform,
however well, the tasks required by our times? Is all the world a
stage, and are men merely actors who have learned well or poorly the
lines written for them by someone else or dictated by necessity? And
is there to be no understanding of the meaning of the part we play, or
of the drama as a whole? Is no one through his education to contribute
something original to the drama of life?
It seems to me that the animal training theory rests upon two
presuppositions, both of which are wrong. The first is that the mind
consists of what it has learned, that is, that it is the product
of environment. This is really not a psychological doctrine, but a
metaphysical assumption. It is the mechanist theory; an idea which
works well as scientific method, but which leads to false conclusions
when taken as a description of ultimate reality.
The second presupposition is a by-product of present-day industrial
democracy. It is that education is a means to efficient service, with
its rewards, getting on, general prosperity, etc. But is industry
the end and aim of our existence? It is said that man if he is to
be happy must be able to express himself in his work. I would not
dispute this statement, but it is important to consider what it is
that finds expression in one’s work. If work, in addition to being the
means to some material end or bodily good, is also to be a form of
self-expression, then the point of interest is the kind of selfhood, or
quality of experience expressed. Then work exists for education, not
education for work.
Something is possible to mankind, which transcends work and by which
work itself is valued. As mere craftsmen we lose the sense of what
good workmanship is and become the blind slaves of necessity or of
desire the moment that education ceases to be the goal of labor. I
do not mean merely that we learn by doing. That is the way animals
learn and it is all they learn. By repeated performance an individual
learns how to do a task, but he does not thereby learn what to do, nor
why it is done. Education has to do with insight, with valuing, with
understanding, with the development of the power of discrimination,
the ability to make choice amongst the possibilities of experience and
to think and act in ways that distinguish men from animals and higher
men from lower. The ancients thought of education as the attainment of
the virtues, wisdom, courage, temperance, justice. It is the pursuit
of that knowledge which gives self-mastery. It is an interest which
is never exhausted, but grows always broader and richer. It consists
not in learning tricks but in developing ourselves. It is a victory
won in some secret chamber of the mind which gradually transforms the
whole personality and reveals itself as an indefinable quality in
every word and act. It is a spiritual awakening; and if this awakening
does not come, a person is not being educated however much he knows.
I think it is the inability to win this psychological victory, or the
disinclination to make the effort necessary to it, that accounts for
the fact that some people cannot be educated. Though the change in
the quality of the personality is indefinable, it is a very concrete
fact in human life. Its presence is evident in the work of writers as
different otherwise as Sir Thomas More, Galsworthy, Anatole France,
Jonathan Edwards, Henry Adams, etc. There is a quality of the educated
mind which may best be described as a kind of sincerity, and conversely
the outstanding trait of ignorance is that of clever insincerity. The
pathetic thing about the wrongly educated,--those who are trained
merely to produce an effect, or get results, is that in the deeper
human relationships they seldom know what sincerity is. Education is
the antithesis of vulgarity.
Directly and immediately, it is useless. It is a kind of living which
is of value for its own sake, a personal achievement which possesses
intrinsic worth. It is not _for_ anything. To subject it to an ulterior
end--citizenship, efficiency, the economic emancipation of the working
class, increased income; or to educate people for “character,” or to
perpetuate a religious faith, or any other purpose however good, is to
make education a means to something quite irrelevant. Such misuse shows
that people are not interested in their education but in something
else. Education, the development of people, is not a means, it is
itself the true end of civilization.
While education is not _for_ anything, indirectly it improves
everything that people do. Make education the aim and meaning of
living, and all becomes different. Experience has a new center of
gravity. Facts fall into new and more significant perspective. Objects,
distinctions, relationships, qualities, are seen which before passed
unnoticed. And as personality does not exist in a vacuum but in
the relationships established between organism and environment, no
improvement of it can fail to make itself felt in the quality of one’s
work. Animal training may give one the means to make a living; liberal
education gives living a meaning.