In our foregoing talk we were led to frame a very simple conception of
what an education means. In the last analysis it consists in the
organizing of _resources_ in the human being, of powers of conduct which
shall fit him to his social and physical world. An 'uneducated' person
is one who is nonplussed by all but the most habitual situations. On the
contrary, one who is educated is able practically to extricate himself,
by means of the examples with which his memory is stored and of the
abstract conceptions which he has acquired, from circumstances in which
he never was placed before. Education, in short, cannot be better
described than by calling it _the organization of acquired habits of
conduct and tendencies to behavior_.
To illustrate. You and I are each and all of us educated, in our several
ways; and we show our education at this present moment by different
conduct. It would be quite impossible for me, with my mind technically
and professionally organized as it is, and with the optical stimulus
which your presence affords, to remain sitting here entirely silent and
inactive. Something tells me that I am expected to speak, and must
speak; something forces me to keep on speaking. My organs of
articulation are continuously innervated by outgoing currents, which the
currents passing inward at my eyes and through my educated brain have
set in motion; and the particular movements which they make have their
form and order determined altogether by the training of all my past
years of lecturing and reading. Your conduct, on the other hand, might
seem at first sight purely receptive and inactive,--leaving out those
among you who happen to be taking notes. But the very listening which
you are carrying on is itself a determinate kind of conduct. All the
muscular tensions of your body are distributed in a peculiar way as you
listen. Your head, your eyes, are fixed characteristically. And, when
the lecture is over, it will inevitably eventuate in some stroke of
behavior, as I said on the previous occasion: you may be guided
differently in some special emergency in the schoolroom by words
which I now let fall.--So it is with the impressions you will make
there on your pupil. You should get into the habit of regarding them
all as leading to the acquisition by him of capacities for
behavior,--emotional, social, bodily, vocal, technical, or what not.
And, this being the case, you ought to feel willing, in a general way,
and without hair-splitting or farther ado, to take up for the purposes
of these lectures with the biological conception of the mind, as of
something given us for practical use. That conception will certainly
cover the greater part of your own educational work.
If we reflect upon the various ideals of education that are prevalent in
the different countries, we see that what they all aim at is to organize
capacities for conduct. This is most immediately obvious in Germany,
where the explicitly avowed aim of the higher education is to turn the
student into an instrument for advancing scientific discovery. The
German universities are proud of the number of young specialists whom
they turn out every year,--not necessarily men of any original force of
intellect, but men so trained to research that when their professor
gives them an historical or philological thesis to prepare, or a bit of
laboratory work to do, with a general indication as to the best method,
they can go off by themselves and use apparatus and consult sources in
such a way as to grind out in the requisite number of months some little
pepper-corn of new truth worthy of being added to the store of extant
human information on that subject. Little else is recognized in Germany
as a man's title to academic advancement than his ability thus to show
himself an efficient instrument of research.
In England, it might seem at first sight as if the higher education of
the universities aimed at the production of certain static types of
character rather than at the development of what one may call this
dynamic scientific efficiency. Professor Jowett, when asked what Oxford
could do for its students, is said to have replied, "Oxford can teach an
English gentleman how to _be_ an English gentleman." But, if you ask
what it means to 'be' an English gentleman, the only reply is in terms
of conduct and behavior. An English gentleman is a bundle of
specifically qualified reactions, a creature who for all the emergencies
of life has his line of behavior distinctly marked out for him in
advance. Here, as elsewhere, England expects every man to do his duty.