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Moral Values and Civic Education: An Essay on "The Interrelation of Aims"
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10552 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
5,448 Words |
| Author
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Robert K. Fullinwider
Robert K. Fullinwider directs the program in moral and civic
education at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Affairs,
University of Maryland. |
Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle upon which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children Stick to Facts, sir!
-Schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind
(Charles Dickens, Hard Times)
In the educational philosophy of Thomas Gradgrind, we have an extreme expression of the spirit of "instruction" that T.S. Eliot deplored. In the Idea of a Christian society (1940), Eliot repeatedly drew the distinction between "education" and (mere) "instruction," and, although he never made the distinction precise, it is clear enough in that work and in the later lectures, "The Aims of education," that the mark of education is training in Value, not just immersion in Facts. The complaint of "The Aims of Education," directly and by implication, is that modern statements of educational purposes neglect or downplay the dimension of value in education. They conceive of educating just as imparting skills and information. They ignore and neglect presuppositions about the ends to which information is put and for which skills are developed. In short, they picture education as instruction."
Modern educational theory remains skittish about the place of value. Gradgrindism is by no means obsolete, even if no longer ascendant. Opposition to Gradgrindism flourishes, but it divides sharply on a dilemma Eliot's own thought could never overcome. Eliot's general proposition is simple enough: The three aims of education--to enable boys and girls to make a living, to equip them to play their parts as citizens of a democracy, and to enable them to develop all latent powers and faculties of their natures presupposed underlying views about the worth of vocations, the virtues of citizenship, and value of a way of life.
Indeed, the three aims are interrelated, he claims, so that the value of vocational activity is measured against the needs of social and civic arrangements, and the value of civic activity against its compatibility with the flourishing of general human excellences. "What is the good worker?" and "What is the good citizen?" resolve into the question, What is the good man? And here, then, is the dilemma: An educational system seemingly must reflect society's agreement about "the good of man" or impose on everybody the views about
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