Philosophy of education

“ Is upon us; and assuredly we should hail a workable, effectual philosophy of education as a deliverance from much perplexity. Before this great deliverance comes to us it is probable that many tentative efforts will be put forth, having more or less of the characters of a philosophy ”

“ Science, history, philosophy, literature, must [43] no longer be the luxuries of the ‘educated’ classes; all classes must be educated and sit down to these things of the mind as they do to their daily bread. History must afford its pageants, science its wonders, literature its intimacies, philosophy its speculations, religion its assurances to every man, and his education must have prepared him for wanderings in these realms of gold. ”

“ TOO WIDE A MESH “The wide world dreaming on things to come” is concentrating on a luminous figure of education which it beholds, dimly, emerging from a cloudy horizon. This gracious presence is to change the world, to give to all men wider possibilities, other thoughts, aims: but, alas, this Education which is to be open to all promises no more on a nearer view than to make Opportunity universal—that is, in spiritual things, he may take who has the power and he may keep who can. ”

“ I am anxious to bring a quite successful educational experiment before the public at a moment when we are told on authority that “Education must be ... an appeal to the spirit if it is to be made interesting.” Here is Education which is as interesting and fascinating as a fine art to parents, children and teachers.
During the last thirty years thousands of children educated on these lines have grown up in love with Knowledge and manifesting a ‘right judgment in all things’ so far as a pretty wide curriculum gives them data. ”

“ What we have to do is to gather together and order our resources; to put the first thing foremost and all things in sequence, and to see that education is neither more nor less than the practical application of our philosophy. Hence, if our educational thought is to be sound and effectual, we must look to the philosophy which underlies it, and must be in a condition to trace every counsel of perfection for the bringing up of children to one or other of the two schools of philosophy of which it must needs be the outcome. ”

“ Teachers are looking out for the support of a sound theory, and such a theory must recognize with conviction the part mind plays in education and the conditions under which this prime agent acts. We want a philosophy of education which, admitting that thought alone appeals to mind, that thought begets thought, shall relegate to their proper subsidiary places all those sensory and muscular activities which are supposed to afford intellectual as well as physical training. ”

“ By every person of learning, then, and even by individuals of humbler attainments, in the exercise of a plain common understanding, the importance of the rule in education which we are here recommending, must at once be admitted;—That in the selection of truths and exercises for educating and training the young, a decided preference should always be given to those which have a reference to their well-being and happiness, not in time so much as in eternity. ”

“ But these principles are obvious and simple enough, and, when we consider that at present education is chaotic for want of a unifying theory, and that there happens to be no other comprehensive theory in the field which is in line with modern thought and fits every occasion, might it not be well to try one which is immediately practicable and always pleasant and has proved itself by producing many capable, serviceable, dutiful men and women of sound judgment and willing mind? ”

“ Neither need we discuss the scope of such an education. We are aware that good life implies cultivated intelligence, that, according to the Platonic axiom, ‘Knowledge is virtue,’ even though there be many exceptions to the rule. Educated teachers are not slow to perceive the part the Humanities play in a worthy scheme of education, but they are faced by enormous difficulties which are admirably summed up in a recent work,— [42]
“The tragedy of modern education has been the prolonged failure of Humanism to secure conditions under which its purpose might be realised for the people at large.” ”

“ But, always, it is the book, the knowledge, the clay, the bird or blossom, he thinks of, not his own place or his own progress.
I am afraid that some knowledge of the theory we advance is necessary to the open-minded teacher who would give our practices a trial, because every detail of schoolroom work is the outcome of certain principles. For instance it would be quite easy without much [32] thought to experiment with our use of books; but in education, as in religion, it is the motive that counts, and the boy who reads his lesson for a ‘good mark’ becomes word-perfect, but does not know. ”

“ There as elsewhere a cruel universe combined to crush a child. As though three or four vigorous brothers and sisters, with the best will, were not enough to crush any child, every one else conspired towards an education which he hated. From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics, and economy; ”

“ This is the real educational difficulty in schools for all classes, for pupils of all ages,—the enormous field of knowledge which it is necessary to cover in order to live with intelligence and moral insight. Know one thing well and you have the power to apprehend many things is the academic solution, which has not worked altogether badly, but it cannot be stretched to fit our present occasion,—the “Enlightenment of the Masses.” What we [289] may call the ‘academic’ doctrine assumes that mind like body is capable of development in various directions by means of due exercise. ”

“ Shortly we shall have a new rule,—every school must educate every scholar in the three sorts of knowledge proper to him as a human being. What is knowledge? some one will say, and there is no pat, neatly-framed answer to be given; only this we can assert,—Knowledge is that which we know; and the learner knows only by a definite act of knowing which he performs for himself. ”

“ If this can be established, then nothing can be more decisive as to the intention of Nature, that moral and religious training, is not only the great end in view by a course of education generally, but that it is, and ought always to be, the first object of the parent and teacher, and the only true and solid basis upon which they are to build all that is to follow. ”

“ Education is not a thing apart from life—not a "system," nor a philosophy; it is direct teaching how to live and how to work. ”

“ Once we give up the notion that education is a development of the ‘faculties’ to be accomplished by the teacher, and realize that it is on the contrary an appropriation of wide knowledge which the pupil must get for himself, there is some fear that the old exclusive education must go by the board ”

“ We have left until the last that instrument of education implied in the phrase ‘Education is a life’; ‘implied’ because life is no more self-existing than it is self-supporting; it requires sustenance, regular, ordered and fitting. This is fully recognised as regards bodily life and, possibly, the great discovery of the twentieth century will be that mind too requires its ordered rations and perishes when these fail. ”

“ Or we may call it humanity, if the word philosophy suggests strangeness and difficulty of attainment. For our demand for an educational reform, in accordance with our renewed consciousness, is prompted by the old 245 but never ancient desire which put the lantern in the hand of the Greek philosopher. Education is truly human when it has for its contents that ideal which I have briefly touched upon in this chapter, the ideal of the spirit, philosophy. ”

“ We live in times critical for everybody but eminently critical for teachers because it rests with them to decide whether personal or general good should be aimed at, whether education shall be merely a means of getting on or a means of general progress towards high thinking and plain living and therefore an instrument of the greatest national good. ”

“ In every branch of natural philosophy, there are great leading principles already established. But where were there any such principles established by the philosopher for the guidance of the teacher? By what, except their own experience, and conjectures, were teachers directed in the training of the young?—Thirty or forty years ago, what was called "education" in our ordinary week-day schools, was little more than a mechanical round of barren exercises. ”

“ If there be, what is it?—Let it be examined;—and we have no hesitation in saying, that if it be "education," or any thing that deserves the name, it will be found to resolve itself into some one or other of the moral qualities which we have above enumerated. If therefore children, during the earlier stages of their educational progress are to be taught at all, religion and morals must be, the subjects, seeing that they are for a long period capable of learning nothing else. ”

“ We shall only remark, in conclusion, that if, by the proper application of this principle, so much knowledge may be acquired by rude and ignorant children, not only without effort, but in the enjoyment of great satisfaction; what may not be expected in ordinary circumstances, when the pupils are regularly trained and prepared for the purpose, and when all the principles employed by Nature in this great work, are made to unite their aids, and to work in harmony together for producing an enlightened and virtuous population? ”

“ Since education is the process through which the needed transformation may be accomplished and not remain a mere hypothesis as to what is desirable, we reach a justification of the statement that philosophy is the theory of education as a deliberately conducted practice. ”

“ And therefore it is, that from a calm and dispassionate consideration of these facts, and independently altogether of revelation, we cannot see how any impartial philosophic mind can evade the conclusion, that the chief object to be attended to in the education of the young, and to which every thing else should be strictly subservient, is their regular and early training in religion and morals. ”

“ Above all other educational subjects in importance stands philosophy, the exercise of reason upon those manifold and perplexing problems of existence which are as old as humanity and as new as the nineteenth century. For its place in a liberal education no substitute need apply. ”

“ Let our schools and our colleges and universities make men first, and then let them make lawyers and physicians and teachers. Ordinarily, so far as education is concerned—and we are confining our discussion to that now—the only path to true completed manhood is through a thorough course of educational training. Latin and Greek and the higher mathematics, rhetoric and logic and mental and moral philosophy, these are the useful studies in education. ”

“ The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and with the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy were not worth knowing. So one-sided an education could have been possible in no other country or time, but it became, almost of necessity, the more literary and political. As the children grew up, they exaggerated the literary and the political interests. They joined in the dinner-table discussions and from childhood the boys were accustomed to hear, almost every day, table-talk as good as they were ever likely to hear again. ”

“ In the saying that Education is a life, the need of intellectual and moral as well as of physical sustenance is implied. The mind feeds on ideas, and therefore children should have a generous curriculum.
9. But the mind is not a receptacle into which ideas must be dropped, each idea adding to an 'apperception mass' of its like, the theory upon which the Herbartian doctrine of interest rests. ”

“ And looking attentively at this universal foundation on which our own human value is supported—call it language, logic, law,—we were led to study the relationship existing between individuality, which is the aim of all forms of education, and this universal spirit which here intervenes as it does in every moment of the human life. It intervenes in education, as the science and the conscience and the entire personality of the teacher. ”

“ If we are to work to good purpose we must take our stand, with the great thinkers and educators, on the broad field of man's nature, and act in the light of the only true ideal of education,—that its end is wisdom, virtue, knowledge, power, reverence, faith, health, behavior, hope, and love; in a word, whatever powers and capacities make for intelligence, for conduct, for character, for completeness of life. ”

“ The aim of all education is twofold: it is twofold whether looked at on the side of him that teaches or on the side of him that learns; that is, on the part of the student, one aim is the acquisition of knowledge, the other aim is the development and exercise and cultivation of his intellectual powers. ”

“ Education is in the first place instruction in what is necessary, and then in what is changing and inconstant. The youth is introduced to nature, and the sway of laws is everywhere pointed out to him; followed by an explanation of the laws of ordinary society. ”

“ Instead, then, of attempting to reform education by "devising courses," by finding out new things, by contesting the supremacy of this or that branch of knowledge, does it not seem wiser to insist upon right teaching? Subjects as doleful to the common student-mind as Latin grammar, Greek grammar, formal logic, psychology, and ethics, have been made "to revolutionize" the whole state of being for many a pupil, and this by right teaching. All knowledge is worthy—worthy the best of human endeavor, both to secure and to communicate. ”