Aims of education Essay

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to cup of tea and hu humannesse feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most unusable bore on Gods earth. What we should aim at producing is men who deliver both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start from, and their culture will lead them as deep as ism and as high as art. We have to remember that the valuable intellectual development is self- development, and that it mostly takes channelize between the dates of sixteen and thirty. As to training, the most important part is given by mothers before the age of twelve. A saying due to Archbishop Temple illustrates my meaning.Surprise was expressed at the success in after-life of a man, who as a boy at Rugby had been somewhat undistinguished. He answered, It is not what they be at eighteen, it is what they become afterwards that matters. In training a chi ld to activity of thought, above all things we mustiness bewargon of what I will call inert ideas-that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without existence utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations. In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at unrivaled epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation picture merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless it is, above all things, harmful Corruptio optimi, pessima.Except at rare intervals of intellectual ferment, education in the ago has been radically infected with inert ideas. That is the reason why uneducated clever women, who have seen much of the world, are in middle life so much the most cultured part of the community. They have been salve from this horrible burden of inert ideas. Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into immenseness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational schema to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning. Let us now ask how in our system of education we are to guard against this mental dryrot. We enunciate two educational commandments, Do not teach too many subjects, and again, What you teach, teach thoroughly. The result of teaching small parts of a boastfully number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumined with any spark of vitality.Let the main ideas which are introduced into a childs education be few and important, and let them be thrown into either combination possible. The child should make them his own, and should understand their application here and now in the circumstances of his actual life. From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery. The discovery wh ich he has to make, is that general ideas give an reason of that stream of events which pours through his life, which is his life. By understanding I mean more than a mere crystalline analysis, though that is included. I mean understanding in the sense in which it is used in the cut