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The Interrelation of Aims
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10547 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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1 / 1993 |
2,275 Words |
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T.S. Eliot
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So far, we have accepted as the most convenient starting point ...the three aims of education: 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 Matthew Arnold's way of putting it, the pursuit of perfection. But we cannot define education as merely the sum of these three activities; for if the term "education" is to cover all three and not be wholly applicable to any one of them separately, we must appreciate some relationship, or rather some mutual implication, between them, such that each, while it may still be called education, is not the whole of education by itself. We recognize that the choice of a livelihood is limited, first, by the capacities of the individual; and second, by the kinds of activity favored or discouraged by the society in which the individual finds himself, or in other words, the kinds of thing that people are prepared to pay a man to do. ...And this raises the question of moral criteria; so that the formula of earning a living is doubly inadequate, and we are led to both of the other aims on our list. Or, if we start from the formula "training for citizenship," that implies training to make a living; or, in a wider sense (including those persons, a few of whom still exist, who are able to live on unearned income), training in some useful activity. ...
...And I think we must agree that the best citizens are likely to be those who develop "the latent powers and faculties of their nature"; or at least that any society which does not endeavor to make possible the development of the latent powers and faculties of those who have the best latent powers and faculties to develop has a very narrow and mediocre conception of citizenship, and will not be a society worth educating people for. Finally, the development of the latent powers and faculties depends upon the pursuit of the right activities, including the best occupation for a livelihood that the individual can find; and depends also upon the individual's finding himself in a society in which his powers and faculties can be nourished and can bear fruit. So each one of these aims of education leads to a process which can in the right context be called "education," though we cannot define education by any one of them alone. And each one of these paths leads inevitably to moral judgment and decisions which take us beyond the limits within which we should like to confine "education" if the subject is to be manageable.
The danger of the list, as a mere list, is that we cannot long retain all three of the items in equal balance in our minds, once we start trying to educate people. This is not only because, in consequence of attending to one,
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