IN CONSTRUCTION
AS THE TWIG IS BENT THE TREE INCLINES
If this green planet is to be saved from the disaster which now awaits it, the straight-cut canal of education from kindergarten to university and beyond must be shattered so that the nourishing waters of life can liberate the human mind enmeshed in a dreadful globalization.
It may be said that “Education is the gradual process of imparting or acquiring knowledge or skill by means of instruction or activities that permits a clear assimilation of that knowledge or skill by the student.”
A very pretty definiition, but it is empty as education itself, for two questions remain critical. What knowledge is to be imparted and how is it to be transmitted and acquired?
Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.
It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.
It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought -- that is to be educated. (1908, notebook)
If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labour, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.
But the ground of a man's culture lies in his nature, not in his calling. His powers are to be unfolded on account of their inherent dignity, not their outward direction. He is to be educated, because he is a man, not because he is to make shoes, nail, or pins.
I do not look on a human being as a machine, made to be kept in action by a foreign force, to accomplish an unvarying succession of motions, to do a fixed amount of work, and then to fall to pieces at death, but as a being of free spiritual powers; and I place little value on any culture but that which aims to bring out these, and to give them perpetual impulse and expansion.
An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious -just dead wrong.
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever or whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
As the twig is bent the tree inclines.
If any educador at any level from kindergarden to university and beyond is inclined, after reading these quotations, to agree, then he or she must ask himself why he has allowed him or herself to be enslaved in a system which is conditioning a world of self-indulgent robots enmeshed in the web of the generated confusion, selfishness and aversion which now characterizes the human creature.
If any politician at any state or local level is inclined, alter reading these quotations to agree, then he or she must ask themselves why they are continuing leading their ships flying worrn ot pennants of multiple colors and symbols of state into the hurricane from which there is no return.
If any religious leader or members of the various churches, alter reading these quotations is inclined to agree, then he or she must ask themselves, if they value their own children as they claim their own God does, why they are only giving lip service to their gods and their energies to Ceasar.
If any parents, alter reading these quotations, is inclined to agree, then they must ask themselves why they send their children like lambs to the slaughter instead of casting stones like David at Goliath. Only when the men and women like David come together and say, “No” firmly and resolutely, united as one, with a new psychology, philosophy and an enriched idea of what education is and how that knowledge can be imparted will the world become, once more, a potential paradise and a haven for all creatures great and small.
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding line, and no way of knowing how near the harbor was. "Light! Give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.