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Society and the Schools: An Essay on 'The Conflict Between Aims'
| Article
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10450 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1993 |
4,871 Words |
| Author
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James M. Banner, Jr.
James M. Banner, Jr., former professor of history at Princeton
and now director of academic programs of the James Madison
Memorial Fellowship Foundation in Washington, D.C., is the
author of many books and articles in American history,
education, and public affairs. |
When T.S. Eliot delivered his lectures on education at the University of Chicago in 1950, his audience could not have failed to recognize their title as that of the celebrated lectures by Alfred North Whitehead published twenty-one years before. Yet Eliot's Aims of Education, destined for comparative obscurity, could not have had a more different cast than his predecessor's. A revolutionary English-born mathematician and then professor of philosophy at Harvard, whitehead had been out to weaken the hold of "inert ideas," dead knowledge," and the "mental dry rot" that results from learning left unutilized; he had sought to place knowledge, especially that emerging from universities, more actively in service to a technological age. By contrast, the American-born, Harvard-educated expatriate, long resident of England, was setting forth in his remarks to review, with philosophic serenity, the timeless justifications for learning at all levels; like the philosopher before him, the poet was venturing from his accustomed subject. Yet it was also as if Eliot, the most "difficult" and modernist of artists, were mocking one of the most accessible (in his popular writings), democratic philosophers of his age. By his very different approach, this great traditionalist was playing the part of radical. He was seeking to get to the roots of education and to justify their timeless value to twentieth-century Americans.
The third of his lectures--on the conflicts between education's aims--drew naturally upon the preceding two. In them, Eliot had set forth what he thought should be the essential purposes of education and the relationships between them. He termed these aims "the professional, or, in the humblest way of putting it, training to earn a living; the social, or preparation for citizenship; and the individual or, in Mathew Arnold's way of putting it, the pursuit of perfection." These were not for their time novel ideas. In fact, an audience at Hutchins' Chicago might well have asked if those aims really exhausted the possibilities. After all, should one not also try to prepare youths for the sheer delight in learning itself, for the pleasure of contemplation and of possessing knowledge for no other reason than its embrace? (In fact, in his second lecture, Eliot conceded that the Ciceronian ideal of the pursuit of knowledge for itself alone--what he called "disinterestedness," the pursuit of studies "for their own sake, for the love of truth, or wisdom, or at least out of curiosity, ignoring any practical advantage which may come to you from mastering them"--fell within the "pursuit of perfection." But he never developed the point at length.)
Disinterestedness
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