[I, Niall Francis Lambkin, hereby assert and give notice of my right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the author of this essay.]
There is one area of human affairs where you would expect to find an enormous expenditure of energy being focussed on everything that is excellent about the human species; that is, an enormous expenditure of energy focussed on the understanding of Science and Art. By Science and Art I mean the intellectual and spiritual adventure that is realised in the best of human experience over the past two and a half thousand years or so. To have an understanding of this adventure is to possess an overview of Science and Art, a perspective that allows the individual mind to ‘see’ how human experience fits together in all its divers modes — to see how each experience coheres with every other experience. This understanding is therefore the state of mind that imposes order and meaning on experience and as such constitutes a perspective not just for the foundation of civilisation but also the continuing intellectual and spiritual dynamic of that civilisation. This means that a society that does not actively foster in its members such an understanding is sowing the seeds of its own intellectual and spiritual destruction.
If this is the case then I should expect this understanding to be fostered and grown (critically) in a society’s system of education. Therefore, an examination of a society’s system of education will reveal to what extent that society is expending its energies on all that is excellent in the human species,
My contention is that in our present liberal democracies the idea of education is being suffocated beneath an increasingly spreading pall of crude utilitarian and egalitarian values, values expressed in terms of mere economics and social justice. By degrees, and at an increasingly rapid rate, the old notion of ‘education’ is being severely marginalized by the more economically creditable idea of social training — in effect little more than a creeping programme of social engineering. The danger in seeing such a programme through in the absence of a coherent programme of education is that the individual receiving this training assumes, by degrees, a certain dullness of mind, an intolerance for the difficult and profound, and an expectation of the immediate satisfaction of his desire. His mind locks gradually and inevitably into the world of the mundane and facile where he may wallow comfortably in his shallow state of unfulfilled potential. In essence he becomes a philistine.
Both the terms ‘philistine’ and ‘education’ carry conceptual ambiguities and therefore need some explication. A philistine is someone who sees things, and their relations, in crudely shallow and narrow terms; he is deficient in liberal culture and is generally commonplace in all his aspects, boorish and prosaic. It follows, therefore, that we can all be philistines to a greater or lesser degree. It is important to note that philistines are not born but nurtured in youth by their environment, most immediately by their elders, and it should be noted also that once a committed philistine it is not easy to quit that state of mind for it is most difficult to give up the facile and shallow for the complex and deep. The term, of course, is relative and the context of debate should dictate where in fact philistinism ends and the educated state begins.
Education is more akin to a process than anything else whereby he who undergoes the process experiences a slow transformation from an uneducated state of mind to an educated state which is a mind characterised by intellectual and spiritual integrity, one that can engage with life in broad and deep terms, and resonate with all the richness of liberal culture stretching back to the ancient Greeks. An educated mind is therefore a mind intensely interested in life, expressing a broad understanding of life’s matrix, and is in itself intensely interesting and alive. It also (like that of the philistine) is a relative state of mind.
The conceptual ambiguities occur because we need to know more precisely what it means to have a boorish mentality and what precisely it means for a mind to resonate with liberal culture.
Education is thus about the value of human personality and the nurture of personal growth; it is about the process of human transformation through the transmission of everything of deep value and all this through respect for human personality per se. In this sense the enterprise of education is the manner in which the individual comes to see himself as an end in itself and all others as ends in themselves. It should be clear now that what I have been characterising as education is not of necessity linked to the notions of schools or similar institutions; but it should also be clear that such institutions could and perhaps should participate consciously in the transformation of mind into the type I am describing. What goes on in schools and other institutions of learning can therefore promote the transformation or militate against it according to how well they understand their role in society.
My contention, of course, is that through conceptual confusion — through confusing education with training — education is being stifled. To see this you only need to talk for a short while to those issuing from our institutions of higher education.
But before I move on to discuss the conceptual confusion, and two other causes of education’s demise (the failure to appreciate the difference between defining a term and analysing a concept, and the failure to understand the problematic nature of the notion that schooling should be relevant and useful), I wish to say a bit more about what I take education to be.
The phenomenon of schooling — that is, of placing young people in institutions where they formally experience the process of learning about a series of discrete facts, operations, opinions and skills — is relatively new. Such experience does not take place — or ought not to take place — in vacuo for it is the context in which the schooling takes place that determines the quality of the education (as opposed to training) that is received. This is because education is essentially about coming to see and understand the whole life of a community. Emphasis is placed upon the idea of wholeness because without it understanding can only be partial and in its incompleteness it is rendered irresponsible. The irresponsibility of partial understanding entails misconceptions and myopia — both severe threats to the clear-sighted development of the human mind. So, education is about integrity — integrity of the intellect, of the emotions and of the spirit — seeing the whole of things in the context of development. In our case it is therefore about a complete understanding of our civilisation in its broadest sweep — understanding its Art and Science, its Religion and Philosophy — and grasping this historically and conceptually so that what on one level appears to be a disconnected melee of knowledge is apprehended on a higher level as an interconnected, cohesive body of human experience. It goes without saying it follows that there can be degrees of education and that if a society is to be judged on how seriously it takes the notion of the development of mind then it is to the schools and universities that we should look to see how these institutions consciously direct the process of education. In other words if we wish to judge the value a society places upon education we must do so by seeing how much higher level activity goes on in its institutions of learning. (The lack of higher level activity can have a disastrous effect upon the mind and therefore upon society as we shall see later.)
Of course, any society which wishes to avoid a state of stagnation must ensure that it operates in a dynamic flux of review and revaluation, and it follows that in such a society no person can be completely educated in the sense in which I am using the term, for there is always a higher level of integration to achieve. Whether you are educated or not, therefore, depends upon how well you integrate all the items of the historical experience of the species and how clear your understanding is of the whole body of human sapience in all its wonderful richness and subtlety. The transformation from philistine to educated man is therefore gradual and is the transformation from having little understanding of what life is all about to a highly sophisticated, comprehensive understanding of just that.
This point demonstrates a first principle in the process of education: that there is no end point. Education is about growth and more specifically about the nurture of personal growth, and where there is growth there can be no complete state — no end at which there is no more. Like the experience it sets out to integrate education is dynamic, a process designed to evaluate and revaluate the experience of being alive in a particular world. At the core of education lies the growing individual and at each stage of the individual’s growth (in reality there are no discrete stages) the individual constitutes an end in himself. So, as far as education goes the individual who is being educated is an end in himself — that is, his being makes complete sense at whatever time you happen to examine him. Consequently the educator’s task (as opposed to the trainer’s) is to enable the growing individual to make the best of himself at whatever stage he is at so that he progresses seamlessly to the next with integrity and understanding. It is surely true that "childhood has a meaning and a value in itself apart from its value as a stop on the way to maturity. The better the child; that is, the truer he is to his child nature as such, the better man will he make when the proper time comes." It is easy to hear the discordance of this view set against the overly loud utilitarian and egalitarian views of our present national (Western society) schooling ethos.
I have said that education is not just about growth but is more specifically about nurturing personal growth. By this I mean nurturing the rational and moral faculties that raise man above his more gross animal origins. And the core issue here is that of tension — the powerful, dynamic tension between our rational, moral nature and the crude appetites given us through animal evolution. Man’s predicament is that he is a transcendent creature who has stepped out of the mundane cut and thrust of natural evolution and created for himself a society of the intellect, the moral and of the imagination. It is therefore his subjective being which separates him from nature in the raw and it is within this subjective world that he must seek his future for there can be no ‘natural’ solution to his problems. Man’s health lies in his own understanding of his condition and how he relates to his world. His problem is how to overcome the subject/object divide in a manner that will elevate him and at the same time allow him to live in balance in the material universe. The tension between man the metaphysician and man the beast is therefore the history of the species, for history is nothing more than the recorded story of man’s struggle with himself. A man cannot be educated, it follows, if he does not understand this struggle and that its dynamic and energy is the key to his growth. The individual as microcosm must see and fully grasp his position in relation to the macrocosm, which is the history of his species and how this species fits into the far larger context of existence itself. A man who does not possess this philosophical understanding of the underlying tension of being cannot, therefore, be said to be truly educated. That he does not achieve such an understanding may not necessarily be his fault; he may simply be unfortunate enough to have been born into a society that has lost sight of the concept of ‘personal growth’, for the growth of the person is the growth of the metaphysical being.
Personal growth cannot of course occur in vacuo and the context in which it occurs is of enormous importance. The educator (parent, teacher, society) cannot compel the individual to grow, personally, in the manner I have described, and equally obvious is that there will be no growth if there is also neglect. The opportunity for such growth must be created and then the individual must be coaxed and cajoled to choose to so grow, and choose to do so in a way which makes him independent of authority, liberating him to freely explore the complexities of life in a responsible, imaginative and integral fashion. In the end, that is, whether the individual grows personally is entirely up to him. But this road of choice — this road of personal growth — is difficult and fraught with disappointment; it is so much easier (and cost-effective) to engineer people and merely train them to fulfil simple but well-defined roles so that the immediate needs of society (and indeed of the individual) are satisfied.
Of course satisfying the immediate needs of society is important but it is not strictly the role of education to do this. People may be trained in certain skills in order to fulfil some requirement that society has — for managers, engineers, doctors, software technicians etc. And on the whole the society we presently enjoy does a good job in supplying the demand. Where education comes in is placing all the training in the far larger context of the struggle of human existence as expressed through history (in the broad sense) and how this relates to the particular culture and civilisation in which the individual manager, technician etc., lives. Education, therefore, draws all threads together to make a meaningful fabric of life so that the engineer is not just an engineer but, more remarkably, an educated engineer.
Education is clearly bound up with culture and civilisation where the latter is the structure of the society in which we live and the former the intelligent and imaginative reflection upon that structure. In this sense education is the distilled commentary upon the civilisation that sustains its members and in this mode must focus, with a clear head, upon that civilisation, understanding it in all its aspects. But to do this successfully it must understand the history of the species which led up to this point and then imaginatively (and rationally) project that understanding into a coherent future.
Good schooling, therefore, includes efficient training and meaningful education so that those who go through the schooling process emerge with skills required by society and an understanding of what life is all about — an understanding of the great adventure of ideas created by the tension generated between man the sacred and man the profane.
My contention, as I have said, is that education as described above is on the wane and near collapse. I take it also as self-evident that education is a desirable thing and ought to be pursued regardless of cost (in rich societies). What, therefore, has caused its demise? The answer is certainly complex and I shall restrict myself to discussing briefly just a few of the causal factors.
I have suggested that the root cause is the rather crude subscription to utilitarian and egalitarian principles by government and industry. Put simply, slavish allegiance to principles of utility in the context of market economics, and to the anti-elitist principle that we are all equal, not just in the sight of God but also in the sight of market economies and in terms of our human faculties; in a word simple allegiance to the notion that we all operate from and on a base-level playing field of life, distorts human reality and demeans human existence. A moment’s reflection will flag up the absurdity of this allegiance for it is easily seen that we are not all equal in terms of economics and intellectual, moral, emotional, imaginative and physical attributes. What a dull world it would be if we were! Nor is it the case that the notion of utility should be confined to the economic cost-efficiency sphere alone. The allegiance itself points to a lack of education, for it exemplifies precisely the partial, and therefore irresponsible, understanding of how things are.
And here we have the birth of the philistines en masse. State controlled schooling comes under the shallow direction of the dogmatically driven, cost-effective conscious DfES, which has a confused understanding of what it means by ‘education and skills’ and this confusion allows the deterioration to set in. But astonishingly the whole perishing of education is aided and abetted (unwittingly) by the educators themselves who allow thinking about schooling to be reduced to a matter of mere empirical research; that is, to a procedure of measuring, predicting and identifying discrete teaching techniques. In doing so they drive a blade into the art of teaching and twist it. Thereby the educators maim themselves and reduce the prospect of providing the opportunity for the nurturing of personal growth - their raison d’etre qua educators being in fact the complete reverse of this particular folly. The important question ought to be this: how should a school develop its curriculum so that [a] the learning of the essential skills (numeracy, reading, writing etc.,) is carried out efficiently (an admirable aim) and [b] the process of nurturing personal growth is carried out in as meaningful a way as possible?
There are two points to be made here: firstly, the learning of skills alone is quantifiable and a legitimate interest of empirical research and as such may well commend cost-effective learning techniques; secondly, the nurturing of personal growth is not quantifiable and so is not a legitimate interest of empirical research and so cannot be judged on the grounds of cost-effectiveness. Education, as I have said, does not proceed in vacuo and indeed the nurturing of personal growth proceeds in part through the learning of essential skills — hence, in the course of empirical research that which cannot be quantified and made cost-effective is marginalized and thereby diminished in value and use by those who subscribe to broad market economy philosophies and the principle of cost efficiency. But it is precisely those who subscribe to such philosophies and principles who direct and control schooling, so the tendency is to reduce the emphasis on education (it is not cost-efficient and is of no clear use in a pragmatic market-economy driven society) and concentrate efforts and resources on skills and training. Schools, therefore, finds themselves increasingly asking the question: not, how can we best prepare our pupils for an intelligent, integrated, mature life, rich in the understanding of the human condition, but rather, how can we best train our pupils so that they can get a job when they leave our institution? Schools are thus forced into the world of the commonplace market, tailoring their product like any other to satisfy the appetite of the client.
Of course, with the emphasis shifting away from education per se and towards mere training, the pupils cease to be seen as ends in themselves and much more as incomplete parts of a finished product. In this serious sense schools are increasingly being transformed (again unwittingly) into factories of manufactured goods (pupils with examination certificates). Whereas in the sphere of personal growth the individual at every stage is an end in himself, in the sphere of training there is a clearly marked end point and at any stage in the process leading up to this end point the pupil (trainee) is incomplete and in a sense useless — because incomplete. In a factory the conveyor-belt process is wasted unless the finished product comes out at the end. So it is now, increasingly, in schools and hence the drive for cost-efficiency. If this is essentially all we require of our schools then there shall be very limited personal growth and the pupil shall be diminished as a human being. The examination factories that schools are in real danger of becoming will have a profound de-humanising effect upon the children passing through them, making of them mere witless (though in many cases extremely clever) products of myopic cost-effective social engineering.
So, the philosophy of the market economy and its attendant obsession with quantification create the initial atmosphere in which education, as I have characterised it, begins to suffocate. But there are other, more fundamental, reasons that account for the demise of education and the subsequent growth of philistinism. I have mentioned them briefly and shall deal with them now in more detail.
I have suggested that there is a difference between defining a term and analysing a concept. I define a word usually by offering a synonym for it, either another word or possibly a phrase. I defined ‘philistine’ by saying that a philistine is a person of narrow and materialistic views, someone deficient in liberal culture, commonplace and rather prosaic. Now there may well be a real conceptual problem with the notion of a philistine because the definition may not serve to give me a clear and satisfactory understanding of what the term means. I might clear up the ambiguity, however, if I have a clear understanding of what the opposite of a philistine might be. For the sake of argument I am suggesting that the opposite of a philistine is ‘an educated man’, and the definition of this term might be: one who has a firm understanding of the human condition gained through an appreciation of human culture, including the Arts, Sciences, Religion and Philosophy. But this definition is not necessarily clear because I may yet be confused about what the term ‘culture’ might mean and what precisely might count as ‘philosophy’. I therefore need to investigate/analyse these terms before I can have a clear understanding of what ‘an educated man’ might be and indeed what a philistine might be. The concepts ‘an educated man’ and ‘a philistine’ demand analysis before there is clarity of understanding. On the other hand the term ‘chair’ needs no such analysis — a simple definition will suffice to understand what something must be in order to be a chair (a moveable seat [that upon which one may sit] with a back for one person). I have not yet scratched my head and wondered whether the object in front of me is a chair or not. But I might wonder whether the person I am talking to is a philistine, although in most cases a few simple questions to him will reveal his state. Of course that he turns out not be a philistine will not of itself make him educated; he may simply be occupying an intermediate stage — not quite a philistine, not quite an educated man. It is the position most of us occupy.
The relevance of this definition/conceptual analysis issue is this: empirical research often proceeds from definition rather than from conceptual analysis. If the object of study is rocks then there is no issue; but if the object of study is ‘education’ then we cannot offer simple definitions and then immediately move to quantify our object. The concept of education is complex and needs careful explication, and as we have seen is essentially non-quantifiable. How does one objectively measure the understanding some man may have of the whole human enterprise; he alone may judge the depth of meaning that comprehension has given him — for answering questions in examinations is altogether too facile and shallow. Yet at the same time we can easily distinguish the philistine from the non-philistine. The contemporary drive to measure, predict and isolate techniques, to demonstrate progress and value-added — this drive points to empirical research proceeding from simple definition. It is simply not good enough to say that education is "the systematic training and development of the moral and intellectual faculties" and then proceed to measure this training and development. The philosopher will say: hang on a minute, what precisely does this definition mean; what is entailed by this definition; what are the ramifications and implications? The philosopher wants to think about education in the interest of clarity. Then and only then should empirical research proceed and limit its interest to what can indeed be meaningfully quantified.
This kind of conceptual thinking will inevitably point to a division of interests and roles of enormous importance within schools and universities. There is a substantive difference between providing technological skills and social manners in schools and providing for the development of the mind in the broadest terms of personal growth. The difference is that between those who have no other aim than to provide people with the control of the means to what are essentially arbitrary ends (i.e., government agencies) and those who wish to develop in people the high-level ability to intellectually, morally and imaginatively engage in life as a whole and think significantly about life’s end. For the latter the battle is being sadly lost.
There should of course be room for both provisions (for both the training and the educational) but because the educational lacks market-economy credibility it is also whimpering into oblivion. A loud voice, a trumpet sound, should be raised: look, education is essential to the moral and intellectual health of the species and in this capacity it lays down certain logical conditions — for it is about nurturing personal growth, and this is about understanding the big picture which in turn is about grasping the nature of fundamental principles. Education is therefore about the reason why of things and therefore it is about understanding all the logical distinctions that are to be made in the field of knowledge. The educated man is thus not to be judged by his ability to pass fact-based examinations, or by his ability to create (no matter how brilliantly), or by his specialist knowledge or his ability to perform certain tasks well. He is, rather, to be judged alone on the breadth and competence of his understanding of the nature of human existence itself. Surely the state of mind of the educated man is a worthy state, a noble and desirable state. Surely it can be seen that its opposite is shallow and limited. Surely the community that takes seriously the intellectual and moral growth of its citizens must invest eagerly in a process designed to promote such intellectual and moral development.
This leads me on to the problematic nature of the demand for utility and the idea that utility is something fixed and absolute. It is supposed by the market economists, the cost-efficiency agents of education’s demise, that for something to be useful it must contribute directly to the economic prosperity of the commonwealth. So, an activity is useful if it is either a means to an economic end or indeed is an economic end in itself. So far as schooling is concerned (and increasingly so in the world of higher education) the aim of the curriculum is to produce people who are able to fulfil a certain economic role in society. In discussion of curriculum matters the touchstone is this: will this proposed change in the curriculum contribute (cost-effectively) towards the general economic health of the community? If the answer is No then the proposed change is either dropped or at best marginalized, pushed into the shadows to ruminate in the twilight, on the grounds of irrelevance.
Utility, of course, is not fixed and absolute but is rather relative to some end. To say, for example, that Philosophy or History is not a relevant subject because it has no economic value is to say something preposterous and deeply stupid. Relative to the narrow cost-efficiency aims of a market driven economy it is true that Philosophy and History lack value, but relative to the educational aim of nurturing personal growth both disciplines have enormous value. This point about the relativity of value is almost completely lost on those who dictate the educational agenda. It is due to the relative nature of the values we are talking about which allows the distinction to be made between the philistine and the educated man. The educated man, that is, is educated relative to the individual who is not; the philistine exists simply because somewhere there is an educated man, or at least the idea of an educated man.
This points to the astonishing confusion in the minds of the curriculum architects and their masters. It might be asked which is the more useful, teaching Information Technology or Philosophy? The first thing to point out is the astonishing crudity of the question, and the second the confusion underlying the use of the term ‘useful’. If our purpose is to produce people who will be competent at manipulating information through technology (whether the information is understood or not is irrelevant) then teaching IT will be more useful than Philosophy. But if our aim is to open the minds of people to general principles so that they grasp a comprehensive understanding of human experience and thought, then teaching Philosophy will be infinitely more useful than teaching IT. We should, of course, be teaching both so that society enjoys the company of philosophical information technicians who contribute to the general commonwealth not just through their economic activity, but more importantly through their manner of living. The question "Which is more useful?" is therefore ill-defined and implies (though does not entail) that one item should be accepted and the other rejected, and this is precisely the black and white vision you would expect in a narrowly defined two-dimensional society.
Given the careful distinction I have drawn between training and education; given that both can legitimately be conducted within school and similar institutions, and given that there is no argument about either training or education, Society should be asking itself: what advantage would there be to the commonwealth — over a long period — in educating its citizens; that is, in developing their rationality, their intelligence and understanding of the human condition?
Let me try to answer this question and do so by again contrasting the educated man with the philistine. The philistine does not necessarily lack skill and expertise, intelligence or moral sense; he merely lacks a comprehensive overview of the human situation in all its richness, and this implies he lacks a certain control over the shaping of his life because he cannot see the interconnectedness of the forms of knowledge and the diversity of possibilities. His life expectations tend, therefore, to be rather limited and his behaviour dull and uninspired. His ideas, whilst clever and sometimes brilliant perhaps, lean towards the narrow and shallow by virtue of their discontinuity with the achingly rich macrocosmic fabric of human experience. The philistine may be a supremely talented technician — a doctor say — but he remains little more than this; his value to society, qua doctor, is important indeed but his value remains limited to this narrow expert activity. The philistine, in other words, is simply someone who has not received an education and so does not conceive the big picture.
What advantage would there be, therefore, to a society that deliberately and self-consciously set out to produce from its institutions of learning social, rational persons of intelligence and discernment; persons who had an understanding of the why of things, and way things are? A society should expect all its members to understand what the acceptable codes of social conduct are and act according to those codes, but the rational, intelligent and discerning citizen will be able to reflect upon these codes and whilst obeying them in the first instance, determine critically their worth and if necessary act for their re-evaluation. The educated man is therefore a critically dynamic member of society and acts accordingly, thereby counteracting any tendency towards negative social inertia.
As a rational citizen he is disposed to seek good reasons for the specific conditions he finds himself in so that he seeks explanation and justification not only of society’s actions but also of his own activity within society. He is able to analyse his condition and the condition of the community that nourishes him conceptually, and does this with a disinterested logical rigour. And in doing this once again society is warned against negative social inertia. But not only this: the educated man’s rationality allows him to make fine distinctions in matters of value. He is not subject to the crude idea that value judgements are arbitrary and therefore carry equal weight. He is no simple relativist — though he may be a sophisticated and subtle one. He is able to distinguish between good and bad reasoning, between quality and lack of quality — so that once he has clearly defined his terms and the criteria by which judgement is to be made, he is able to tell the difference, say, between a work of literature and a work of pulp fiction. The educated man, therefore, promotes quality in the commonwealth. Finally he brings his intelligence (a matter of degree) to bear on the matter of what it means to be a human being in the world. His interest in the matter is fundamental because his intelligence and rationality demand a coherence of understanding, and there can be no such understanding without the experience of the interconnectedness of knowledge. In this respect the educated man desires to enter into the conversation of all human experience whether this be at one moment concerning the Arts or the Sciences, or at another Religion and Philosophy; and once in the conversation he contributes to it in a unique and creative way.
In a nutshell, the advantage to any society of self-consciously producing educated men is the deep enrichment such persons would bring to it. Such persons enrich the commonwealth and protect it against decay. The question now is obvious: Do we, as a society, want to be enriched in this intellectual, moral and spiritual manner, or do we wish to limit our horizons through narrow economic drives and subsequent dullness of mind. In the manner in which this question is posed there is the implication that a society enriched with educated men has more quality than a society impoverished by their absence. But it is not thereby obvious that the choice should be made in favour of education. Whilst economic motives tend to be shallow and limiting it is important to recognise the economic dimension in the matter of decision- making. Education, as I have described it, will not of itself provide any economic return and will, therefore, be perceived as an indulgence and an unnecessary expense. Society might legitimately take the view that it cannot afford such a luxury and turn its back on enrichment. It might argue that it needs physicists rather than educated men, practical expertise rather than abstract wisdom.
If society is poor then to choose the practical and cost-effective at the expense of the culturally enriching is understandable and correct. But if society is rich (as ours is) then the whole issue becomes one of prioritising what that society can afford in the sphere of the non-economic. A rich society that fails to fund a coherent programme of education for its citizens seems to me to be committing not just an act of outrageous philistinism, but more importantly a violent spiritual act against its members.
I have contended that education in our schools and universities is on the wane and that this is in no small measure due to a combination of crude market economy mentality in government and a conceptual confusion about what education is and what schools are for. The result is an increasing philistinism that is riding roughshod over matters of deep cultural concern. How, then, might this marginalisation of education manifest itself? The answer is without doubt a certain dullness of consciousness which if unchecked will lead to an inevitable sense of emptiness through failure of the imagination.
It is important, in order to understand this point, to see the basic nature of human existence. In experience there is a continual flux of striving for the satisfaction of desire; I desire some object that may be internal or external to me and strive to satisfy it, and upon satisfaction I desire some other object and strive to satisfy that and so on, continually. Now clearly the manner of my striving and the character of my desires are bound up with the quality of my consciousness, so there is a sense in which my existence (taken as it is with this willing and striving) can be judged to have high or low quality, or any number of intermediate grades. Schopenhauer describes the situation thus when he talks of the universal tendency for all things to strive to fulfil certain aims and that this striving (Will) is ceaseless and unsatisfiable. In the case of human existence this Will "is seen in human endeavours and desires that buoy us up with the vain hope that their fulfilment is always the final goal of willing. But as soon as they are attained, they no longer look the same, and are soon forgotten, become antiquated, and are really, although not admittedly, always laid aside as vanquished illusions. It is fortunate enough when something to desire and strive for still remains, so that the game may be kept up of the constant transition from desire to satisfaction, and from that to fresh desire, the rapid course of which is called happiness, the slow course sorrow, and so that this game may not come to a standstill, showing itself as a fearful, life-destroying boredom, a lifeless longing without a definite object, a deadening languor."
This striving and longing is central to the human condition and a mind that cannot focus upon carefully chosen and worthwhile objects of desire, and then live in a manner appropriate for the satisfaction of such desires, is in profound danger of coming to a standstill and experiencing, consequently, fear, confusion, despair and boredom. Such a state is a negation of everything that is worthy in human existence. The danger of becoming so deadened is particularly acute in our western liberal democracies because in these have been removed (largely) the need for the individual to daily sustain himself in terms of basic physical needs, such as shelter, clothing and food. The state looks after us in this respect by taking us out of the struggle for existence and so our minds must focus upon other objects of desire to satisfy the fundamental current of Will or striving that drives our waking lives. The mind that quickly satisfies all its desires and struggles to conceive of others is on the brink of a manner of spiritual collapse and will languish in a state of nervous boredom so long as it cannot see worthy objects with which it can feed its Will.
Education enables the mind to better manage its activity of life; that is, it enables a person to choose the objects of his desire wisely and embrace the satisfaction of his desires as an imaginative springboard from which to launch the next set of objectives which in turn build upon the satisfaction of all those preceding. In this way the mind grows and improves. Because of the interconnectedness of things, education also enables a person to strive to satisfy his desires with a sense of moral responsibility so that the objects of desire and the manner of the striving are held in constant review. There might be times when the striving must be slowed down and the object abandoned, as when the striving entails the misery of others, or simply an injustice. Education therefore tempers the nature of the mind and dampens its egoistic tendencies. In contrast, the mind that lacks education may lack caution and be relatively unaware of the nature of its activity; it may ill-choose its desired objects and pursue them too aggressively, with a monstrous tunnel vision and live a blinkered existence of ceaseless demand for immediate gratification. It may, when it has exhausted its imagination, turn fearfully to the criminal or perhaps, when under significant strain, the pathological.
This characterisation of an uneducated mind is of course extreme, but it serves to show how the grades of relative dysfunction might be manifested. No society could tolerate a sizable population of uneducated minds of the kind described above. The conclusion is obvious.
The main point to grasp here is that quality of consciousness is essential to the commonwealth and that it is in any society’s interest to deliberately foster such high quality for it is the degree of consciousness that determines the degree of a being’s existence. There is a great difference between human beings through degree of consciousness. The clearness of consciousness and the distinctness of knowledge dependant on it, point to a fundamental difference in the degree of existence. The higher a consciousness has risen, the more distinct and connected are its thoughts and ideas, the clearer its perceptions, the deeper and more profound its sensations. In this mode everything gains more depth; all emotion, all sadness and joy and sorrow take up a deeper, more intensely felt resonance. It follows, therefore, (and to an egalitarian it is shocking) that ordinary, more shallow minds have only a mere taste, a soupcon of life. Consequently there is relative dullness, though this will not be seen by the mind in question; it must first become educated before it can see the dullness of its previous existence.
One man’s consciousness may therefore "present to him only his own existence, together with the motives that must be apprehended for the purpose of sustaining and enlivening it, in a bare and inadequate apprehension of the external world, to another person his own consciousness is a camera obscura in which the macrocosm exhibits itself."
As Goethe put it:
He feels he holds a little world
Brooding in his brain,
That it begins to act and live,
That it from himself he fain would give.
So, the difference of the whole mode of existence established between one man and another by the extremes of gradation of consciousness is tremendous. It would seem prudent for a society to take measures to raise the level of consciousness of all its members, especially a society that subscribes to egalitarian conceits. However, the egalitarian dogma tends to work against the possibility of the improvement of mind because it is easier (and more cost efficient) to level consciousness to the lowest common denominator than to raise it to its greatest possible height. The thinking is thus: not all people can achieve great heights of mind so no one should be encouraged to make the attempt; instead, level the world of consciousness; take away the mountains and thereby the valleys, and make of it a plain and be content. The subtle (because it occurs by degrees) violence this notion does to human potential should be clearly evident. None of us are equal in all respects; it would be absurd to expect us to be so. The point of education is not to make of us all great minds, but to give us the means (through the nurturing of personal growth) to achieve a coherent manner of existence — and this we shall all experience to different degrees according to our uniquely individual innate constitution and the manner and intensity of our desire to strive towards what is noble and valuable. That is, the point of education is to establish quality of mind and establish this as something we should all strive for as part of our general and natural participation in the flux of desire and satisfaction. To raise the valley floors of consciousness to the mountain peaks would be an admirable educational goal of society even though a plateau of excellence would never be achieved; as the valley floors lift the mountain peaks will continue to rise in the unceasing tectonic activity. And this is how it must be; the general raising of consciousness to greater heights will leave the general topography essentially unchanged. The egalitarian ideal is simply false.
Any society should work towards [a] the enhancement of consciousness whereby persons become capable of endlessly creating new and interesting objects of attention, and [b] guard against the proliferation of shallowness — a shallowness characterised by easy culture, a constant flow of easy experience, an uncertain striving towards dubious objects of desire, conceptual confusion, an interest in the quantifiable alone, a myopic approach to cost-efficiency, a non-metaphysical mindset, a disconnected and anthropocentric understanding of how the world is. In a word, guard against philistinism.
Therefore, those who are convinced by the argument above would do well to look closely at our institutions of learning (in all their guises) in order to see how seriously the nurturing of personal growth operates within them.
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1. The Evolution of Educational Theory. p.63. Sir John Adams.
2. The World as Will and Representation. A. Schopenhauer. !: 164 trans. E.F.J.
Payne.
3. The World as Will and Representation. A. Schopenhauer 11: 281 trans. E.F.J.
Payne.
4. Miscellaneous Poems.