EDUCATIONAL IDEALS AND SOCIETY

 

         Permanency of Educational Ideas. Education's relation to Society must remain peripheral. Despite different social environments, despite the change in the function of a citizen or a subject from society to society, human nature remains the same everywhere: man is a rational animal. Since this nature is constant throughout history, and since education is based on universal human nature, then the essence of education does not change depending on societal evolutions. Therefore, there must be certain constant features in every sound educational program, regardless of culture or epoch.

         Humans' behavioral tendencies may change depending on the culture or epoch they are in, but the change is simply the result of the interaction between the constant human nature and the changing external circumstances. Hence, basic principles of education should be the same for everyone; and the aim of an educational system should be the same in every age and in every society where such a system can exist: to improve man as man.

         In an age of momentous social upheavals, permanence is more desirable than change as an educational ideal. In a world of increasing precariousness and uncertainty nothing can be more beneficial than steadfastness of educational purpose and stability in educational behavior. The student should be taught certain basic subjects that will acquaint him with the world's permanencies. He should not be hustled into studies that seem important at the time.

         To argue that "change, not permanence, is the essence of reality," and to modify methods and policies of education in the light of every new knowledge and every change in the environment is to deny the possibility of knowledge and to destroy education. Educational principles must be based on human nature; and human nature, i.e. the fact that man is a rational animal,  remains the same all the time, everywhere. Therefore, the essence of education does not change depending on changes in his environment.

         To argue that "The curriculum must not be too rigid and must take children's individual differences into account" or, to accept the proposal that, in progressive educator Lawrence G. Thomas's words, "A curriculum cannot be more than outlined broadly in advance by the teacher and will consist largely of an array of resources which the teacher anticipates may be called upon as the current activities of the class lead on to new interests and new problems. The actual details of the curriculum must be constructed cooperatively in the classroom from week to week"⁴ is to open the road for the destruction of the whole content of education as what happened by and large to American Education in the second half of the twentieth century.

         The permanence of human nature, hence of education, should govern the curriculum. With the exception of special education for rare cases of genius or mental deficiency, there must be an essentially constant curriculum by which students should study the great works of literature, philosophy, history, and science in which men through the ages have revealed their greatest aspirations and achievements. The message of the past is never dated. By examining it, the student learns truths that are more important than any he could find by pursuing his own interests or dipping into the contemporary scene. The time to pursue one's own interests of knowledge comes mainly after the digestion of proper educational material. 

         Philosophical truths, like the truths of the physical world, are permanent. The great works of literature as well as of philosophy are regarded great throughout many centuries because they touch upon the permanent moral problems of mankind and express the universal convictions of men involved in moral conflicts. Thus, the great books of ancient and medieval, as well as modern times are a repository of knowledge and wisdom. The reading of these books is not for antiquarian purposes. Neither should they be read for traditionalist purposes of belonging to the Western Culture. The interest is not archaeological or nationalistic. Rather such books are to be read because they are as contemporary today as when they were written, and because the problems they deal with and the ideas they present are not subject to change depending on epoch or race. Ancient Greek Philosophy is an objective necessity to modern Greeks as well as to modern Turks -two nations which have found themselves frequently feuding with each other in this century.

         As German educator Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) said, of literature and history, "Periods which no master has described, whose spirit no poet breathes, are of little value to education." The necessity of selecting educational material primarily from the Western culture should be understood in this vein. The fact that Western civilizations have lived under freedom for the longest time immediately preceding our present, albeit intermittently, and that freedom is an objective necessity for man to live as man, created conditions in Western countries for great minds to act unrestrained. Such great minds can flourish everywhere, in every race, but only under freedom; thus arose the masters of science and art of the Western Civilization who inspired men of every race. Their works must be used not because we have found ourselves born into a Western nation, but because they contain truths valid everywhere for every race.

         Liberal Education. An education befitting a freeman is a liberal education, which is an educational ideal designed to meet the needs of man as a rational being. To be a freeman has two dimensions, one political, the other economic. On the political side a freeman has equal rights before law, votes, and can hold public office. On the economic side a freeman is not permanently destined to do menial work.

         The distinguishing aim of liberal education is the cultivation of the intellect since intelligence or reason is the peculiar excellence of man that marks him off from the beasts. Their natural powers having been strengthened by education, men will perform well every activity demanded by the needs of life. In liberal education, no study or activity is useless if, and only if, it provides suitable discipline and exercise of man's natural capacities. The goal of liberal education should not be training directed to any immediate utilitarian goal but the building of mind, body, and character without reference to the use to which one might later put his abilities. By following the ideal of liberal education man not only achieves the best citizenship but also most nearly fulfills the highest aim of life, namely, happiness.

         Vocational, industrial, and similar types of education may be included, provided their instruction is intellectually sound. However, the school does not exist to train for occupational tasks; these are best left to practitioners in the field.

         Mind to be Earned. Proponents of some of the principles defended here have been accused of fostering an "aristocracy of intellect." But, this phrase is a contradiction in terms: while "aristocracy" is perpetuated through inheritance, the flourishing of intellect requires the work of education sometimes to defy the conditions given by inheritance. While the nineteenth century American Education had been able to elevate many a man of naturally high intelligence to be geniuses in science and business, and many a man of naturally average-to-meager intelligence to be productive and decent men in careers ranging from respected professions to menial work, the twentieth century American Education proved the possibility of downgrading many geniuses into whimsical eccentrics, and many average-to-meager-ones into depravities ranging from government handout recipients to criminals. Intellect, like all mental attributes open to development, must be earned.

         Misconceptions on Education. Men are free, but they must learn to cultivate reason and control their appetites. When a child fails to learn, teachers should not be quick to place the blame on an unhappy environment or an unfortunate psychological train of events. Rather, the teacher's job is to overcome these handicaps through an essentially intellectual approach to learning that will be the same for all pupils. Nor should teachers become permissive on the grounds that only thus may a child relieve his tensions and express his true self.

         Education is not an imitation of life but a preparation for it. Education should not be life itself, but a preparation for living. The school can never be a "real‑life situation." Nor should it be; it remains for the child an artificial arrangement in which he becomes acquainted with the finest achievements of his cultural heritage. His task is to realize the values of this heritage and, apply that knowledge to his life.

         The school could not and should not be a replica of life; it is a learning situation that should be made purposefully artificial to perform a function no other social agency or situation can handle. Let alone being an imitation of life; the school must sometimes be the negation of a "real-life situation."

         There are strong forces acting on the growing child emanating from outside the school; and schools must be quite deliberately conceived as a countervailing force against certain social tendencies that are abhorable. Rather than adopting the political tendency of suspecting legitimate authority, which is proper in the context of politics, the school authority must be conceived as a very important function in protecting the child against, say, the authority of the teenage culture or the mass media. Indeed, the finer possibilities of adolescence must be protected against the pressure of an exploitative culture. The child has to be fortified by the school in such a way as to make him impregnable to the temptations and pressures of life "outside."

         There is also no sense in roiling children into constant anxiety by constantly bombarding them about the dangers to the environment, by presenting to them problems of public discourse, by painting to them dreadful contexts of sexually-transmitted diseases, tobacco, alcohol and drugs. Educators should be aware that grade-school‑age children lack the knowledge and experience to reasonably evaluate the worst‑case contexts in which such problems are usually presented.

         Nor should the school stump for social reform. There is no place for social activism in school. Even a lofty ideal as Democracy may not be a reason to stir any activity in school. Democracy will progress because people are properly educated and not because they have been taught to agitate for social change.

         Progressive educators argue that schools must teach democracy, that the school itself must be democratic, that it should promote student government, the free discussion of ideas, joint pupil‑staff planning, and the full participation of all in the educative experience. Democracy is a concept of politics, and schools are not political institutions. As stated earlier, schools are specific institutions designed to perform a specific function: to educate; and education as a science has its own laws and principles, and education's execution is done by educators not by pupils to be educated. Accepting a prerogative of student votes on what they should learn or how teachers should teach is a death-sentence to education.

         As a form of egalitarian social activism some progressive educators argue that the school should encourage cooperation rather than competition, group achievement rather than individual. The truth is an individual, truly intelligent and creative, may on occasion be unable to cooperate, precisely because his ideals are unacceptable to the group; the group may be less clear‑headed than the individual, thus tyrannical when its superiority is challenged. Also, nobody can deny the fact that competition is a motive force for excellence in learning.

         The schools have no major role to play in bringing about changes in the society, in solving the problems brought about by the realities of race, class, ethnicity, and sex. It is true that a child who is hungry, who is psychologically troubled, will find it difficult to study anything attentively. However, he needs that knowledge, for knowledge is the prime means by which he could choose a future different from the circumstances into which he had been born. While schools may do some, and only extra-curricularly, to alleviate such personal problems, students may not be given immunity from learning under any pretext as long as they are under the roof of a school.

         Educators should act within the laws of the science of education, and strive towards the true aim of education as dictated by the universal nature of their subject, man and knowledge, not as dictated by the fashion of the day. They should even look on new hardware with a skeptical eye. They should be aware of the danger that the passion for teaching new hardware -computers for example- may well serve as a means to evade the real and hard tasks of teaching -which usually require almost no hardware at all, besides textbooks, blackboard, and chalk. While a new appropriate hardware must be taken advantage of as a means of teaching, utmost care must be taken not to mistake it for an end in itself.

         Educators should not, as most modern educators do, profess to create ideal citizens, agents of world peace, supertolerant neighbors, flawless drivers of cars, skillful repairers of bicycles, happy family folk who are at once sexually adept, culinarily skilled, and environmentally aware. Otherwise, in the fog of such a smorgasbord of aims, true object of education becomes no longer visible, and education gets brought to a state of total impotence, as has happened to American Education, once the greatest on earth.

         Trapped in the cogs of a broken machinery called schools, American children, faced with a picture of all the complexities of nature and human life, have been left without the means of human survival: a functioning, cognizing mind. At best, they are indignant, angry, and furious. At worst, left without having cultivated that precious gift of nature, that which is the source of true human joys, that which is the tool of understanding of the complexities of the world, that which is the mind, they seek shelter in the abyss of narcotics to find pleasure or to escape the responsibility they can not fulfill of understanding the world around them. Is it a matter of surprise that some children shrink and recoil from such a system? Perhaps, the truly surprising fact is that how any one can endure it at all.

         Ultimate Goal of Education: Ideal Man. Educators throughout the ages have defined for education various aims -the communication of factual knowledge, social adjustment of the child (for professions, for interaction with other individuals, etc.), individuating the child, developing morality in the child, training him in thinking, etc. We have endeavored in this treatise to demonstrate that the primary object of education is the perfection of the individual, in his mental and corporeal capacities; and this object can be attained only through culture and instruction, i.e. through developing his powers and furnishing his mind with knowledge. By defining correctly the primary object of education and by striving for it and achieving it, and only then, largely as a consequence, other desirable but secondary goals can be attained. Thus, a true education should form, by gradual action of prolonged and disinterested studies, a young person:

         Whose intellect is a clear, serene, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a nuclear engine, to be turned to any kind of work;

         Who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience;

         Who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness;

         Whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great fundamental truths of Nature, and of the laws of her operations;

         Whose body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that it is potentially capable of;

         Who has made himself his highest value by achieving moral perfection; and respects others as himself unless they prove otherwise;

         Who, whatever specialty he takes up later, will be distinguished by an eminent power to interest himself in and to apply himself to the varied creations of the spirit as well as of the industry of man;

         Who, as a man of reason and as a freethinker, has a tendency to be impatient with narrow orthodoxies and political tyrannies;

         Who is enabled to conduct himself with elegance in the drawing room, and with bravery and distinction in the military, civil, or business services of his country;

         Who, in short, is as complete as man can be.