Aims of education Essay

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. put away of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most uneffective bore on Gods earth. What we should aim at producing is men who possess both close and expert knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the underseal to start from, and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as blue as art. We have to remember that the valuable intellectual development is self- development, and that it mostly takes place between the ages of sixteen and thirty.As to training, the most important part is given by mothers before the age of twelve. A reflection 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 atomic number 18 at eighteen, it is what they become afterwards that matters. I n training a kid to activity of thought, above exclusively things we must beware of what I will call inert ideas-that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The causality 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 past has been radically infected with inert ideas.That is the reason why uneducated clever women, who have seen much of the world, are in midpoint life so much the most cultured part of the community. They have been saved from this horrible outcome of inert ideas. Every intellectual revolution which has ev er stirred human into greatness has been a aroused protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic 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 ask how in our system of education we are to guard against this mental dryrot. We enunciate two educational commandments, Do not teach in any case many subjects, and again, What you teach, teach thoroughly. The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive voice reception of disconnected ideas, not illumined with any spark of vitality. Let the main ideas which are introduced into a churls 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 commencement exercise of his education, the child should experience the joy of disc overy. The discovery which he has to make, is that general ideas give an understanding of that stream of events which pours by 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 sense in which it is used in the French.