|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Nine Responses to Eliot on Education
| Article
# : |
10229 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1993 |
4,945 Words |
| Author
: |
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, Kenneth Asher, et al.
|
The Overwhelming Question
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
In a series of four lectures, T.S. Eliot approaches "the overwhelming question" of the aims of education, but then like J. Alfred Prufrock, his own invention, he sighs, "Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?' "
It is helpful that Eliot calls his lectures the "Aims of Education" and avoids "process" in both title and content. But, having discerned these aims broadly as professional, social, and the development of the individual's latent faculties, goals with which a college president would have a hard time picking a quarrel; having observed that each aim can be interpreted variously by different people; and having concluded that each aim is implicated with the others while possibly interfering with them, Eliot pronounces the problem ultimately moral rather than utilitarian, only to say in the final lecture that neither religion nor philosophy is available, or desirable, to provide the answer. "I am aware," he concludes, "that I have been trying to persuade, though I may not be quite sure of what." Neither am I.
And so Eliot leaves me where I began because, as a university president, I am constrained--when I ask "What is it?"--not to inquire only about the aims of education, but about the aims of an educational institution, and particularly my own. I accept, moreover, that the inquiry is going to be interminable because society is habitually engaged in revising its cultural givens and exploding as myths any notion or modality that comes from the past, the past being any time between the cave paintings at Lascaux and last night.
Finally, I am obliged, in a way and under conditions no one knew when Eliot was delivering his lectures, to see that my university's bottom line is writ large and in black ink.
Taking these conditions as factual on the one hand and Eliot's three broad aims as unexceptionable on the other, I can conclude that the aims of an educational institution must be the creation and maintenance of an equilibrium in the face of social and intellectual fragmentation on campus, of academic tribalism. The educational institution, in other words, must first aim at creating the preconditions that make any learning and teaching possible and then decide what is worth learning and teaching.
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
