Education
should be about giving the student (1) an experience in a variety of subjects
of study and (2) lighting the lamp of learning,
so that the student becomes passionate about learning in some subject. The
subject may not prove to be one"s life pursuit, but the skills obtained
will serve well one's future livelihood.
In Adler's view of education, learning is not something one acquires externally like a new suit. It is, in his own words, "an
interior transformation of a person's mind and character, a
transformation which can be effected only through his own activity."It
is as painful, but also as exhilarating, as any effort human beings
make to make themselves better human beings, physically or mentally.
The practices of educators, even ifthey are well-intentioned, who try
to make learning less painful than it is, not only make it less
exhilarating, but also weaken the will and minds of those on whom this
fraud is perpetrated. The selling and buying of education all wrapped
up in pretty packages is what is going on, but, Adler tells us, it is
not the real thing. This essay was published in The Journal of
Educational Sociology (February 1941.)
Real self-esteem
consists not in unearned self-praise, but in an earned conviction about
yourself. It is the unshakeable knowledge that you--by your choices,
effort and actions--have made yourself into the kind of person able to
deal with reality. It is the conviction--based on the evidence of your
own volitional functioning--that you are fundamentally able to succeed
in life and, therefore, are deserving of success.
John Seely Brown is director emeritus of Xerox PARC and a visiting scholar at
USC. He noticed that when a child first learns how to speak, she or he is
totally immersed in a social context and highly motivated to engage in learning
this new, amazingly complex system of language. It got him to thinking that
"once you start going to school, in some ways you start to learn much
slower because you are being taught, rather than what happens if you're
learning in order to do things that you yourself care about…. Very often just going deeply into one or two topics that you
really care about lets you appreciate the awe of the world … once you learn to
honor the mysteries of the world, you're kind of always willing to probe things
… you can actually be joyful about discovering something you didn't know … and
you can expect always to need to keep probing. And so that sets the stage for
lifelong inquiry."
“Gentlemen,
you are now about to embark on a course of studies that (will) form a
noble adventure…Let me make this clear to you. ..nothing that you will
learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible
use to you in after life – save only this – that if you work hard and
intelligently,you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole purpose of education.”
