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Diversity and a Common Education: An Essay on "Can 'Education' be Defined?"
| Article
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10545 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
5,089 Words |
| Author
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Elliott Wright
Elliott Wright consults and writes on the topics of education,
religion, and race. The former senior vice president of the
National Conference of Christians and Jews, he designed "This
is My Constitution," the basic civic education program
marketing the two hundredth anniversary of the U.S.
Constitution in 1987. |
Visiting Prague in the summer of 1990, I stood one evening in a handsome room dating from the Masaryk era as a midlevel official of Vaclav Havel's eight-month-old government explained to me the promise of the new republic. "We will have a democratic society based on a free market economy, a capitalist system, that avoids the mistakes you have made in the West," he declared in tones at once reverent and passionate. "We will not have the injustice and poverty you allow in the United States."
"How?" I asked, no doubt displaying my American pragmatism and also betraying my limited experience of Bohemian patriotism.
"Education."
The occasion, a reception for an international delegation of human relation specialists, gave me no chance to explore the educational theory and strategy he expected would deliver the perfect society. I was never sure that the man had any particular plan in mind; rather, he seemed to be positing as an axiom his conviction that his nation, perhaps any people, freed from totalitarianism would learn and live by the highest human ideals.
I thought of the man in Prague as I contemplated T.S. Eliot's 1950 lecture series on education. Like Eliot, the Czech was a utilitarian. He understood education and its definition more in terms of purpose or content. He had dealt with one of the main issues that Eliot said is essential in attempting to define education, namely, What is it for? The what, to the official, was speedy realization of prosperous, equitable democracy capitalism. Unlike Eliot, the Czech showed little awareness that educational purpose is culturally induced, conditioned not only by hope (that is, goals) but also by history and context.
While I have not been back to Prague, I have listened intently to American and western European colleagues who have become directly or indirectly engaged in the reformulation of societies "after the change" in Czech lands and other parts of central and eastern Europe. The reports make it clear that prosperity and democracy are daunting goals, made more difficult to achieve by the revival of old tribalisms. Some of the educational challenges pertain to the pace and models for new systems meant to replace those constructed to Marxist specifications. Others concern the roles of a democratic government and of formerly established religions in the operation of schools. Another set of issues focuses on a philosophy suitable for comprehending and participating in a world of
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