THE aura surrounding the word ‘education’ has assumed the proportions of such a heavyweight champion that a bantamweight dilettante like myself, when entering the ring, must feel like nothing more than “the slender vine twisting around the sturdy oak.” So I must earnestly feel that whatever I have to say to interest my readers could only be a candid rationalization of my ignorance. But you cannot deny at the same time that it is a subject like politics or city administration which concerns everybody, the politician as well as the citizen on whose vote his representative gets a push into the portals of power.
I feel concerned, as you too would, when I notice my small grand-children weighed down by bulky school-bags as heavy as themselves. I am pained when I see non-English-speaking kids, of say class 7, bashing their tender heads against such heavy and unexplained terms as indehiscent fruit or non-endospermic seeds which, I bet, would make you too run to the dictionary unless you yourself are a graduate in biology.
This however is beside the point in these random thoughts on mental edification which, nevertheless, concern most of us as parents or guardians of school-going children. All we can see before our own eyes is that standards everywhere are on the downward slide. Cherished cultural values are going down the drain and the world is transforming into a global village, just as Marshall MacLuhan predicted some decades ago. Innocent people face mind-management and mental enslavement in spite of the fact that, as Voltaire insisted, “Nothing enfranchises like education,” which means that brain-building is the art of utilizing Knowledge which itself is Power, as Francis Bacon said.
Would it not seem that education has meant different things to different people in different places at different times? It looks like an abstract word such as beauty or courage of which no two people can offer the same definition.
The primitive man, some half a million years ago, must have realized at some stage that the head is often needed to solve some practical problem. He must have done his best to ‘educate’ his progeny to use the hands and the tools accordingly. Later on, even human societies, with developing or developed languages, would have done all they possibly could to devise some instructive method to make sure their own and their families’ survival. But it appears that at no stage could they comfortably agree on a definite system to make their knowledge — their storehouse of power — a positive utility for their young generations.
In our time and day, education is understood as something sifted from a mass of ideas standing for upbringing, guidance, spoon-feeding or catechization. The whole process is compartmentalized into classical, scientific, technical, commercial and vocational education like the branches and twigs of some enormous tree without knowing the kind of the tree itself. Plato decided that education was no education without instruction and competence in music and gymnastics. He insisted on selective education and not on universal education. In his opinion the pupils, hand-picked for the ‘highest training’, would combine seven basic requirements listed in the seventh book of his The Republic. Quintillion reduced them to five and later to two.
Education was later defined as the process by which the educand absorbs and is absorbed by the environment; the accomplishments of the schoolroom have all a very definite relation to the pupil’s present and future surroundings. On the other hand, William Hazlitt proved that “men of the greatest genius have not been most distinguished for their achievements at school or university. It should not be forgotten that the least respectable character among modern politicians was the cleverest boy at Eton.” Walter de la Mare demanded that the growing child deserves only the “rarest of the best” because this is the stage when foundations are laid.
The philosophy of education generally recognizes that man is moved by the passions and instincts which are common to the human race and shares these with the most primitive of mankind. What makes a man civilized is something not innate but acquired. It is not transmitted by birth but by some other means like education, training, books or conversation. Being civilized makes a difference to the way in which man thinks and acts differently from the primitive man. Although the process of education and training go hand in hand, training must be treated as a kind of heuristic education, a system in which pupils are to find out things for themselves by trial and error.
This chalk-talk can go on without an end. To cut it short and make it to the point, let us call the tree of learning the Common Sense which swings joyously, instructively and knowledgefully in the invigorating and refreshing breeze of civilization and culture. Common Sense means nothing but a balanced view of things. It appeals to reason, and it comes to grief when the view tends to become lopsided. Common Sense has an intellectual character. It is the fertile loam in which the seeds of civilizing nourishment are ready to sprout and burgeon. The American philosopher Professor AN White head puts it in these words: “Culture is activity of thought and receptiveness to beauty and human feelings. What we should aim at producing in men is who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some social direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start from, and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art.”
To this let us add that all culture has two basic ingredients. Externally it has its manifestations of customs and traditions. Internally it is endowed with a particularly characteristic mode of mind which two might call a phenotype. Would not therefore textbooks at once assume greater advantage and productivity if they were to take account of this particular mode of mind or phenotype, provided also that they are written in the national language. Who can deny that the national language is the sole vehicle in which abstract ideas will go “as deep as philosophy and as high as art.” Education or mental edification would offer great self confidence and rationality as legniappes or things given as bonus or gratuity in the bargain.
Preceptors confirm that the power and the capacity of learning lie dormant in childhood which is the stage when foundations are laid. Here the foremost function of the educator is therefore to prudently and patiently wake up this power to its natural capacity in virtues which a child’s nature is capable. The aim is to achieve good life which permits the growth of the educand in a society to his or her full stature intellectually, morally, politically and economically.
I would like to conclude this chalk-talk by repeating the verdict of Voltaire: “Nothing enfranchises like education.” Here education does not mean just literacy or book-learning. What the future demands is qualitative education. It is again Voltaire who said:
“When once a nation begins to think, it is impossible to stop it.”
THE aura surrounding the word ‘education’ has assumed the proportions of such a heavyweight champion that a bantamweight dilettante like myself, when entering the ring, must feel like nothing more than “the slender vine twisting around the sturdy oak.” So I must earnestly feel that whatever I have to say to interest my readers could only be a candid rationalization of my ignorance. But you cannot deny at the same time that it is a subject like politics or city administration which concerns everybody, the politician as well as the citizen on whose vote his representative gets a push into the portals of power.
