Aims of education Essay

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to violator and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A stainlessly well-informed man is the most useless bore on Gods earth. What we should aim at producing is men who possess two culture and practised knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge leave give them the ground to start from, and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as spicy as art. We have to remember that the valuable intellectual development is self- development, and that it in general takes place between the ages of sixteen and thirty.As to facts of life, the most important character is given by mothers before the age of twelve. A saying imputable 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 mat ters. In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must heed of what I will call inert ideas-that is to say, ideas that are merely standard into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinings.In the history of study, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding contemporaries exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. raising with inert ideas is not only useless it is, above all things, toxic Corruptio optimi, pessima. Except at rare intervals of intellectual ferment, education in the onetime(prenominal) has been radically infected with inert ideas.That is the reason why uneducated foxy women, who have seen much of the world, are in middle life so much the most cultured part of the community. They have been saved from this surly burden of inert ideas. Every intellectual revolution which has e ver aroused unselfishness into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with miserable ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.Let us now consider how in our system of education we are to guard against this mental dryrot. We notify two educational commandments, Do not teach too numerous subjects, and again, What you teach, teach thoroughly. The result of teaching small parts of a astronomical number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumined with any flicker of vitality. Let the main ideas which are introduced into a childs education be few and important, and let them be thrown into every 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 rejoic ing of discovery. The discovery which he has to make, is that general ideas give an understanding of that stream of events which pours with his life, which is his life. By understanding I mean more than a mere logical analysis, though that is included. I mean understanding in the guts in which it is used in the French.