|
Education is derived from the Latin 'educare' (to bring up) and 'educere' (to draw out, lead forth).
Many definitions have been given of the word education, but underlying them all is the conception that it denotes an attempt on the part of the adult members of a human society to shape the development of the coming generation in accordance with its own ideals of life. It is true that the word has frequently been used in wider senses than this. For example, J. S. Mill included under it everything which helps to shape the human being and we speak of the education of a people or even of the whole human race. But all such usages are rhetorical extensions of the commonly accepted sense of the term, which includes, as an essential element, the idea of deliberate direction and training.
It follows that an education may be good or bad, and that its goodness or badness will be relative to the virtue, wisdom and intelligence of the educator.
|
|
Study the past if you would define the future. ... I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge; I am one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there. ... Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. (Confucius, Analects)
The object of education is to teach us to love beauty. ... The just man will so regulate his own character as to be on good terms with himself, and to set those three principles {reasons, passion, and desire} in tune together, as if they were verily three chords of a harmony, a higher, and a lower, and a middle, and whatever may lie between these; and after he had bound all these together and reduced the many elelments of his nature to a real unity as a temperate and duly harmonized man, he will then at length proceed to do whatever he may have to do. (Plato, Republic)
What we have to aim at is for the happiness of each citizen, and happiness consists in a complete activity and practice of virtue. .. Happiness is the conscious activity of the highest part of man according to the law of his own excellence, not unaccompanied by adequate, external conditions. (Aristotle, Politics, IV)
The three things which make men good and virtuous: nature, habit, and reason .. must be in harmony with one another (for they do not always agree); men do many things against habit and nature, if reason persuades them that they ought. .. All else is the work of education; we learn some things by habit and some by instruction. (Aristotle, Politics, Bk. VII)
Now if arguments and theories were able by themselves to make people good, they would, in the words of Theognis, be entitled to receive high and great rewards, and it is with theories that we should have to provide ourselves. But the truth apparently is that, though they are strong enough to encourage and stimulate young men of liberal minds, though they are able to inspire with goodness a character that is naurally noble and sincerely loves the beautiful, they are incapable of converting the mass of men to goodness and beauty of character. (Aristotle, Ethics)
Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents, for these gave only life, those the art of living well. ... The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead. (Aristotle, In Education)
Learned we may be with another mans' learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own: (Euripides)
What use is knowledge if there is no understanding? (Stobaeus)
|
|
Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it? .. But in truth I know nothing about the philosophy of education except this: that the greatest and the most important difficulty known to human learning seems to lie in that area which treats how to bring up children and how to educate them. (Michel de Montaigne, The Essays)
Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education. .. We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgement. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education. ... I will say little of the importance of a good education; nor will I stop to prove that the current one is bad. Countless others have done so before me, and I do not like to fill a book with things everybody knows. I will note that for the longest time there has been nothing but a cry against the established practice without anyone taking it upon himself to propose a better one. The literature and the learning of our age tend much more to destruction than to edification. (Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile)
The Teacher as a Necessary Evil. Let us have as few people as possible between the productive minds and the hungry and recipient minds! The middlemen almost unconsciously adulterate the food which they supply. It is because of teachers that so little is learned, and that so badly. (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1880)
|
|
My dear children: I rejoice to see you before me today, happy youth of a sunny and fortunate land. Bear in mind that the wonderful things that you learn in your schools are the work of many generations, produced by enthusiastic effort and infinite labour in every country of the world. All this is put into your hands as your inheritance in order that you may receive it, honour it, and add to it, and one day faithfully hand it on to your children. Thus do we mortals achieve immortality in the permanent things which we create in common. If you always keep that in mind you will find meaning in life and work and acquire the right attitude towards other nations and ages. (Albert Einstein talking to a group of school children. 1934)
There are only a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style and with good taste within a century. What has been preserved of their work belongs among the most precious possessions of mankind. We owe it to a few writers of antiquity (Plato, Aristotle, etc.) that the people in the Middle Ages could slowly extricate themselves from the superstitions and ignorance that had darkened life for more than half a millennium. Nothing is more needed to overcome the modernist's snobbishness. (Albert Einstein, 1954)
... knowledge must continually be renewed by ceaseless effort, if it is not to be lost. It resembles a statue of marble which stands in the desert and is continually threatened with burial by the shifting sand. The hands of service must ever be at work, in order that the marble continue to lastingly shine in the sun. To these serving hands mine shall also belong. (Albert Einstein, On Education, 1950)
The development of science and of the creative activities of the spirit in general requires still another kind of freedom, which may be characterised as inward freedom. It is this freedom of spirit which consists in the independence of thought from the restrictions of authoritarian and social prejudices as well as from unphilosophical routinizing and habit in general. This inward freedom is an infrequent gift of nature and a worthy objective for the individual.
.. schools may favor such freedom by encouraging independent thought. Only if outward and inner freedom are constantly and consciously pursued is there a possibility of spiritual development and perfection and thus of improving man's outward and inner life. (Albert Einstein, 1954)
Editor: Haselhurst
|
|
