Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
- Mortimer Adler's
- Syntopicon
Essays
Education:
Editor's
1-minute essay
The great teachers of the Western tradition, strangely, have little to say about
education per se. Not one of the writings in the Great
Books directly speaks to this topic, with the exception of Montaigne's essay, Of
the Education of Children.
- Education, for the teachers of antiquity, is not itself so
much a subject matter as it is an underlying theme to which the great ideas are
relevant.
Rather than a single subject to which they at times expressed themselves,
education, for the great teachers, seems to have been all-pervasive, almost ever-present,
to their minds, a motif in which they lived. This is so because, as exemplified by their
lives, education, a life-long pursuit, seeks as its final goal the prize of wisdom.
Education, never of the cloistered life, as Adler asserts, "is a problem
which carries discussion into and across a great many subject matters -- the liberal arts
of grammar, rhetoric, and logic; psychology, medicine, metaphysics, and theology; ethics,
politics, and economics. It is a problem which draws into focus many of the great ideas --
virtue and truth, knowledge and opinion, art and science; desire, will, sense, memory,
mind, habit; change and progress; family and state; man, nature, and God."
Education, a vast area of discussion, will, in this short essay, and only in a
most introductory sense, be explored in terms of essential essence, especially, as
conceived by Adler's great teachers of history.
Often playing the handmaid to other forces, education has meant different things
to different people:
Rousseau, one denying the supremacy of individual rights in favor of the state,
sees education as a tool by the latter to achieve its ends: citizens, through public
education, must be "early accustomed to regard their individuality only in its
relation to the body of the state, and to be aware, so to speak, of their own
existence merely as a part of that of the state."
If the purpose of mortal life is viewed primarily as preparation to enter heaven,
then, education, probably controlled by the church, will be used to direct the minds of
the faithful to otherworldly aspirations -- a fine sentiment in itself but not, in tacit
pronouncement, as a defeatist declaration that little can be accomplished in this
world but to suffer, pay, and pray.
And one for our modern world: if we, like the proverbial deer caught in the
headlights' glare, are so mesmerized by the accumulation of materialism's trinkets,
widgets, and gadgets (not to mention the inner-child's obsession to prove to dad that we
can hold down a real and high-paying job) that, for us, life and success become synonymous
with the size of our houses and the make of our cars -- then, it shall not be surprising
to find that "education" has devolved into a flim-flam intellectual pursuit
after whatever college program offers the biggest bucks on pay-day.
Education, in all of these examples, becomes, more or less, either a tool of
oppression or an anaesthetizing drug to silence the inner-person; both types are efforts
to minimize, perversely channel, or otherwise censor the full-strength floodlights of
knowledge and personal growth.
- Resident within all of these bastard-forms of
"education" lives a diseased view of the nature of humankind (see Editor's essay
on Man).
If some men, according to Aristotle, by nature are fitted for slavery, then
"education" is reduced, for this class of unfortunates, to mere training;
they are offered instruction to perform various tasks -- not for their own sakes,
not for their own development -- but for the pleasure of either another or
something of lesser value. The history of education, from one perspective, is also the
chronicle of man oppressing others or himself -- in either case, that glorious human
potential that might have been is delivered stillborn.
- Commenting on this tragedy, Adam Smith laments that "a
man without the proper use of the intellectual faculties of a man, is, if possible, more
contemptible than even a coward, and seems to be mutilated and deformed in a
still more essential part of the character of human nature." Further,
according to Smith, "the torpor of his mind renders him, not
only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of
conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just
judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life."
What is "liberal education"?
As mentioned above, slaves in ancient times were treated as chattel, as things,
belonging to a master. Instruction for a slave was limited to training, the
acquiring of skills in relation to tasks to be performed for the benefit of a master.
However, the education of this latter was very much different in kind; his was the
education of a free man and, as such, was "liberal" (pertained to freedom)
in nature and centered upon developing the mind -- for its own sake, as an
end in itself and not as a means to something else.
"Liberal education," despite its unbecoming master-slave history, takes
us on the right path toward a view of education. This kind of education acknowledges the
high dignity of what it means to be a person, what Shakespeare called, "the
beauty of the world, the paragon of animals."
Too much might be said on this subject; however, to buttress the point just made
on the dignity of humankind, I shall conclude with a comment made by Socrates regarding
the nature of teaching.
Teaching, rightly viewed, similar to "education," takes its life from
the glory of what it means to be a person. Socrates compared the art of teaching
to the cooperative work of a midwife in relation to a mother-to-be: the student,
like the mother in labor, is the focus of the enterprise at hand -- not the teacher nor
the midwife -- both of these can act only as helps. At the end of the day, the
pregnant woman alone must give birth to the child; and the student alone must
choose to learn -- this is his or her right and glory as a person.
Yes, of course, teachers, for most of us, are necessary in terms of efficiently
directing students to the important issues of intellectual life. But the fact remains,
perverse and wasteful as it is, that the unwilling and uncooperative student will
frustrate the efforts of even the best teacher 100% of the time.
- Wisdom -- that combination of the practical, the moral, the
intellectual; skillfulness at the business of life -- the ancients, along with
many moderns, agree, is the true aim of education.
Wisdom requires more than book learning but also years of thoughtful questioning
and diligent searching; if achieved at all, it will likely not be won by the young; as
such, education must be a life-long process with our years of formal schooling seen as
mere preparation for education's fullest expression, that grandest of quests -- the
pursuit of wisdom -- something only a mature mind can properly engage.
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