WHITEHEAD, Alfred
North
The Aims of
Education and Other Essays
MacMillan, New York 1929 (this edition 1959)
This book contains ten addresses or papers
delivered or written by A.N. Whitehead at different times between 1912 and
1928. The general theme is "education on its intellectual side." The
topics dealt with are:
I The Aims of Education (24 pp.)
II The Rhythm of Education (20 pp.)
III The Rhythmic Claims of Freedom and
Discipline (20 pp.)
IV Technical Education and Its Relation to
Science and Literature (28 pp.)
V The Place of Classics in Education (22 pp.)
VI The Mathematical Curriculum (19 pp.)
VII Universities and Their Function (16 pp.)
VIII The Organisation of Thought (26 pp.)
IX The Anatomy of Some Scientific Ideas (51
pp.)
X Space, Time and Relativity (15 pp.)
Only the first seven essays are reviewed here,
since they are the only ones directly related to education.
One main idea runs throughout the volume:
"The students are alive, and the purpose of education is to stimulate and
guide that self-development." The corollary of this idea is that
"teachers also should be alive with living thoughts." In short, the
whole book is a protest against dead knowledge, that is to say, against inert
ideas." (Preface, p. v)
Summary of the First Seven Essays
I. The Aims of Education
Whitehead begins with a definition of culture:
"Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and human
feelings." (p. 1) On the basis of this somewhat vague and idealistic
conception of culture, Whitehead proceeds to his first main point, that the
educator must avoid at all costs "education with inert ideas — that is to
say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or
tested, or thrown into fresh combinations." (p. 2) Whitehead insists that
the child should be taught few but important ideas, in such a way that he can
"make them his own" and utilise them. He should "experience the
joy of discovery." But the worth of ideas needs to be proved, and their
connection with other ideas shown. There must be specialization, but never
disconnected from the one main "subject-matter for education... life in
all ite manifestations." (p. 10) Utilising an idea means "relating it
to that stream, compounded of sense perceptions, feelings, hopes, desires and
of mental activities adjusting thought to thought, which forms our life." (p.
4)
Whitehead's tendency to idealist subjectivism
emerges even more clearly on p. 18 when he says: "What education has to
impart is an intimate sense for the power of ideas, for the beauty of ideas, and
for the structure of ideas, together with a particular body of knowledge which
has peculiar reference to the life of the being possessing it."
In a similar vein he advocates the development
in students of what he calls "the most austere of all mental qualities ...
the sense for style" (p. 19), that is, "an aesthetic sense, based on
admiration for the direct attainment of a foreseen end, simply and without
waste ...". For "style is the ultimate morality of mind." In
this passage Whitehead might well be speaking of the virtue of order (in its
intellectual aspect), but since nowhere in this essay does he make any
reference to the intellect or to truth or to the capacity of the intellect to
know things, one must conclude that despite his conviction as a natural
scientist that we do know ordinary external objects (a chair, a tree, a dog,
etc.), Whitehead's theory of knowledge is quite inadequate, being on the one
hand empiricist — he cannot account satisfactorily for the way the intellect,
through abstraction, grasps the essence of material things — and on the other
hand being idealist, giving an exaggerated importance to ideas (especially in
the logical order).
Again, in a later passage, Whitehead employs
his own peculiar language to speak about something which seems to resemble
will-power and even love. On p. 20 he says: "But above style and above
knowledge, there is something, a vague shape like fate above the Greek gods. That
something is Power. Style is the fashioning of power, the restraining of power.
But, after all, the power of attainment of the desired end is fundamental. The
first thing is to get there." However, Whitehead makes no reference to the
good as the object of the will, and the reader is left perplexed both as to
what ideas are useful and as to what ends students should be encouraged to
desire and attain.
Whitehead appears ready to help the reader out
of this perplexity when on p. 23 he says that "the essence of education is
that it be religious." But by this Whitehead simply means "an
education which inculcates duty and reverence," and Whitehead's conception
of duty and reverence is once again both subjectivist and question-begging:
"Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where
attainable knowledge could have changed this issue, ignorance has the guilt of
vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present
holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that
whole amplitude of time which is eternity." Here, like Hegel, Whitehead
seems to be attempting to fuse time and eternity, as if it were possible for
human created reason to attain the viewpoint of God.
Thus the several worthwhile points Whitehead
makes — for instance, his insistence that "no absolutely rigid curriculum"
should be imposed on schools, but rather each school, as "the true
educational unit in any national system", should "be considered in
relation to its special circumstances" — are weakened, if not even
vitiated by his idealism and lack of clarity about the true ends of education,
even on the strictly human level.
II The Rhythm of Education
This essay discusses the question: at what age
should students undertake different subjects and different modes of study? Making
use of Hegel's analysis of progress into Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis,
Whitehead asserts that the stages of mental growth — life being essentially
periodic and even cyclical — may be roughly analysed into three: the stage of
romance, the stage of precision and the stage of generalization. University
education should be mainly concerned with the third stage: "The function
of a University is to enable you to shed details in favour of principles."
(p. 42)
In this essay, as in several of the others,
Whitehead reveals his tendency not to distinguish clearly between matter and
spirit due to a naturalistic orientation. For example, "the mind and the
brain develop so as to adapt themselves to the many-hued world in which their
lot is cast". (p. 33)
III The Rhythmic Claims of Freedom and
Education
In this essay Whitehead emphasizes that the aim
of education is wisdom, not knowledge. But it becomes clear that Whitehead's
conception of wisdom is more aesthetic than intellectual or moral. In a key
passage (pp. 62-63) he says: "The ultimate motive power, alike in science,
in morality and in religion, is the sense of value, the sense of importance. It
takes the various forms of wonder, of curiosity, of reverence, of worship, of
tumultuous desire for merging personality in something beyond itself... The
most penetrating exhibition of this force is the sense of beauty, the aesthetic
sense of realized perfection." On p. 64 he says: "History shows us
that an efflorescence of art is the first activity of nations on the road to
civilisation."
Nowhere does Whitehead show any awareness
either that the best art has always been inspired by religion (see the numerous
illustrations of this point in the works of Christopher Dawson) or that art is
eminently of the intellectual order (see Maritain's Art and Scholasticism).
IV Technical Education and Its Relation to
Science and Literature
Whitehead criticizes the post-Renaissance
Platonist tendency to split the mind from the body and emphasizes the great
importance in education of linking theory to practice. He praises the early
Benedictine monks "who saved for mankind the vanishing civilisation of the
ancient world by linking together knowledge, labour, and moral energy." (p.
91) He emphasizes that "essentially culture should be for action, and its
effect should be to divest labour from the associations of aimless toil." He
criticizes the parasitism of the academic world: "The second-handedness of
the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity. It is tame because it has
never been scared by the facts."
However, once again, in the midst of several
valid and worthwhile points, Whitehead reveals his naturalism, in this case
under the form of the theory of evolution: "It is a moot point whether the
human hand created the human brain, or the brain created the hand." (p.
78) And: "In the contest of the races which in its final issues will be
decided in the workshops and not on the battlefield, the victory will belong to
those who are masters of stores of trained nervous energy, working under
conditions favourable to growth." (p. 91)
V The Place of Classics in Education
Like many of his generation Whitehead had a
high appreciation for classical Greek and Roman civilisation and for its
educational value as a field of study. In particular he sees the study of Latin
as "the best stimulus for mental expansion" and the study of the
history of Rome as the principal key to understanding European civilisation:
"The history of Europe is the history of Rome curbing the Hebrew and the
Greek, with their various impulses of religion, and of science, and of art, and
of quest for material comfort, and of lust of domination, which are all at
daggers drawn with each other. The vision of Rome is the vision of the unity of
civilisation." (p. 115)
While by no means unaware of some of the
limitations of Roman culture, Whitehead considers that the special merit of the
study of that civilisation "in the education of youth is its concreteness,
its inspiration to action, and the uniform greatness of persons, in their
characters and their staging". Their aims were great, their virtues were
great, and their vices were great. They had the saving merit of sinning with
their cart-ropes."
Whitehead's main point is that: "Moral
education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness" since
"the sense of greatness is the groundwork of morals." (pp. 106-107)
Unfortunately, true to type, Whitehead lets himself be carried away by a
somewhat superficial lyricism and proceeds to lay down the dangerously vague
and tendentious maxim: "If we are not great, it does not matter what we do
or what is the issue." (p. 106)
Here and elsewhere, one cannot but get the
impression that Whitehead's knowledge of classical culture — and even more so
of early and medieval Christian culture — is quite limited and uneven. His
generalizations are consequently often superficial compared, for instance, with
those of a historian such as Christopher Dawson (e.g., his essay St.
Augustine and His Age.) Also, as a member of the British Empire not yet
exposed to the criticisms that became commonplace in the late 1930's and
1940's, he was obviously blind to much of the dark underside of Imperial
expansion and conquest. He would have benefitted from a reading of some parts
of St. Augustine's City of God.
VI The Mathematical Curriculum
In this essay Whitehead again exhibits his
acceptance of the theory of evolution (in its total sense), viz.: "... for
the human mind was not evolved in the bygone ages for the sake of reasoning,
but merely to enable mankind with more art to hunt between meals for fresh food
supplies." (p. 127)
For the most part this essay is an explanation
of how the mathematical curriculum should be and can be an excellent training
in logical method.
VII Universities and Their Function
Whitehead sees the justification for a
university in its capacity to preserve "the connection between knowledge
and the zest for life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative
consideration of learning..." (p. 139) Thus "the whole point of a
university, on its educational side, is to bring the young under the
intellectual influence of a band of imaginative scholars." (p. 150)
In this essay one or two of Whitehead's
historical judgements seem a little exaggerated, in function of Whitehead's
tendency to esteem imagination more highly than intellect. He says, for
instance: "The New England Puritans of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries were the most intensely imaginative people, restrained in their
outward expression, and fearful of symbolism by physical beauty, but, as it
were, racked with the intensity of spiritual truths intellectually
imagined." (p. 152) Such a judgement — intended as a compliment — though
not without its truth, says nothing of the narrow religious fanaticism which
characterized not a few Puritans of those centuries (well described by Arthur
Miller in his play The Crucible).
Conclusion
Whitehead's many valid and useful observations
and recommendations in these essays are unfortunately compromised, that is,
undermined, by his inadequate and vague philosophy of man. In subscribing to
the theory of evolution — one would guess very much in its Darwinian form —
Whitehead is unable to distinguish clearly between matter and spirit, between
the senses and the intellect, and thus between right and wrong. It is
noteworthy that very seldom, if at all, does he make any reference to the
notions of truth and goodness. In the last resort his is a materialist
philosophy of man, since he fails to give any criterion for distinguishing
between man and the animals. Needless to say, Whitehead has little real
understanding of religion.
It is very instructive to compare this work of
Whitehead's with Maritain's Education at the Crossroads (Yale, 1943)
which covers much of the same ground, but at a much deeper level. Because of
his training in Thomistic metaphysics Maritain is able to throw a flood of
light on the potentially valid points of Whitehead, liberating them, so to
speak, from the vague, superficial and ultimately materialist Weltanschauung
in which they are clothed.
For a criticism of the liberal attitude to
education implicit everywhere in Whitehead (especially classical education) it
is also instructive to read T. S. Eliot's Modern Education and the Classics
(1932) in which the relevance of the classics to the preservation of Christian
values is well put over.
J.W. (1985)
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