Aims of education Essay

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. fling of information constitute nonhing to do with it. A barely well-informed man is the most(prenominal)(prenominal) useless bore on Gods earth. What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and beneficial knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge allow give them the ground to start from, and their culture go out lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art. We have to remember that the valuable intellectual development is self- development, and that it mostly takes place among the ages 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. strike 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 a fterwards that matters. In training a shaver to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call achromatic ideas-that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without organism 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 reason is, that they are overladen with immaterial 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 infect with inert ideas. That is the reason why uneducated clever women, who have seen a great deal of the world, are in middle life so much the most cultured part of the community. They have been saved from this horrible burden of inert ideas. Every int ellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into grandness has been a passionate 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 scheme 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 provide of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the static reception of disconnected ideas, not illumined with any spark of vitality.Let the briny ideas which are introduced into a childs education be a couple of(prenominal) and important, and let them be thrown into every combination possible. The child should occupy 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 c hild should experience the joy of discovery. The discovery which he has to make, is that general ideas give an taste of that stream of events which pours through 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 apply in the French