Much of education occurs implicitly rather than explicitly. One can certainly mount specific courses in how to think, how to act, how to behave morally. Some didactic lessons are appropriate. Yet we humans are the kinds of animals who learn chiefly by observing others—what they value, what they spurn, how they conduct themselves from day to day, and, especially, what they do when they believe that no one is looking. [Howard Gardener, The Disciplined Mind: What All Students Should Understand, 1999, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2021, p. 23]
A lot of what I learned was not necessarily directly through the classroom. A lot of it was in conversations with older boys, … [and] from the [teachers] outside of school hours. …
I think it’s a thing about learning and education in general, that you model yourself on somebody. You see somebody, and you think: “This is interesting. This is good. I’d like to be more like this.” And so you feel your way into what it’s like to be that person, and take on some of their thinking. [Ian McGilchrist, “The Education of Iain McGilchrist, Part I: From Winchester College to All Souls,” YouTube, uploaded by Ralston College, 9 Dec. 2024, 32:30, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-GebJNsI20]
What we are in ourselves is much more important than the additional question of what to teach the child … [Jiddu Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life, HarperCollins, 1953, p. 46]
Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment. [Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 1841, Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pocket Books / Washington Square Press, 1965, p. 247]
What the teacher “teaches” is by no means chiefly in the words he speaks. It is at least in part in what he is, in what he does, in what he seems to wish to be. The secret curriculum is the teacher’s own lived values and convictions, in the lineaments of his expression and in the biography of passion or self-exile which is written in his eyes. [Jonathan Kozol, The Night is Dark and I Am Far From Home, Houghton Mifflin, 1975, p. 101-102]
[T]he educational function does not rest upon our ability to control, or our will to instruct, but upon our human nature and the nature of experience. [George Dennison, The Lives of Children: The Story of the First Street School, 1969, Vintage / Random House, 1970, p. 246]
An honest relationship imparts the standard of truth more clearly than any disciplinary encounter. An empathic relationship demonstrates the value of empathy more powerfully than any lesson or induction. …
The moral quality of the parent/child relationship overrides all other communications that the parent might attempt. This is one place in which the medium really is the message … When the quality of the relationship is in line with the parent’s message, the message becomes convincing to the child. [William Damon, Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools, Free Press Paperbacks / Simon & Schuster, 1995, pp. 187-188]
The fashionable fallacy is that by education we can give people something that we have not got. …
There has arisen in this connection a foolish and wicked cry typical of the confusion. I mean the cry, “Save the children.” … Now I am concerned, first and last, to maintain that unless you can save the fathers, you cannot save the children; that at present we cannot save others, for we cannot save ourselves. We cannot teach citizenship if we are not citizens; we cannot free others if we have forgotten the appetite of freedom. Education is only truth in a state of transmission; and how can we pass on truth if it has never come into our hand? Thus we find that education is of all the cases the clearest for our general purpose. It is vain to save children; for they cannot remain children. By hypothesis we are teaching them to be men; and how can it be so simple to teach an ideal manhood to others if it is so vain and hopeless to find one for ourselves? [Gilbert K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, 1910, Dodd, Mead and Co., 1927, pp. 247-251, https://archive.org/details/whatswrongwithwo00ches/mode/2up]
Maybe all of us will learn to grapple with the paradox that living our lives more fully is not narcissism, but service to the world when we bring a more fully achieved gift to the collective. We do not serve our children, our friends and partners, our society by living partial lives, and being secretly depressed and resentful. We serve the world by finding what feeds us, and, having been fed, then share our gift with others. …
Jung said that “the greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parent.” [James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life, Gotham / Penguin, 2009, pp. 40, 138]
[W]e are incapable of loving another unless we love ourselves, just as we are incapable of teaching our children self-discipline unless we ourselves are self-disciplined. It is actually impossible to forsake our own spiritual development in favor of someone else’s. We cannot forsake self-discipline and at the same time be disciplined in our care for another. We cannot be a source of strength unless we nurture our own strength. As we proceed in our exploration of the nature of love, I believe it will become clear that not only do self-love and love of others go hand in hand but that ultimately they are indistinguishable. [M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology Of Love, Traditional Values And Spiritual Growth, Touchstone / Simon & Schuster, 1978, pp. 82-83]
You must help a child become a virtuous, responsible, awake being, capable of full reciprocity—able to take care of himself and others, and to thrive while doing so. Why would you think it acceptable to do anything less for yourself? [Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Random House Canada, 2018, pp. 62-63]
Our first duty as social physicians is to heal ourselves, and to heal others only out of the superabundance of our own health. For if we are healthy as a people and another people is ill, and if this people believes in our power of healing, then our innocent health will itself be a healing power. … Health is infectious. [Herbert Read, Education for Peace, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949, p. 12, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.89306]
Dr. Joseph Jankowski, Chief of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, sees extremely troubled children from some of the most affluent communities in this country … [He] notes, “These parents certainly want the best for their children. But they want it in a mechanistic way. They want buttons pushed, and pushed quickly, so that their kids get better with little effort. But helping troubled kids takes a long time and what these kids really need are their parents themselves.” [Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids, HarperCollins, 2006, pp. 31-32]
As an aside to parents, teachers, psychotherapists, and managers who may [want] to gain insight on how to support the self-esteem of others, I want to say that the best place to begin is still with oneself. If one does not understand how the dynamics of self-esteem work internally—if one does not know by direct experience what lowers or raises one’s own self-esteem—one will not have that intimate understanding of the subject necessary to make an optimal contribution to others. Also, the unresolved issues within oneself set the limits of one’s effectiveness in helping others. It may be tempting, but it is self-deceiving to believe that what one says can communicate more powerfully than what one manifests in one’s person. We must become what we wish to teach. [Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Bantam, 1994, p. 63]
How can we have happy homes with love in them when the home is a tiny corner of a homeland that shows hate socially in a hundred ways? You can see why I cannot look upon education as a matter of exams and classes and learning. The school evades the basic issue—all the science and maths and history in the world will not help make the home more loving, the child free from inhibitions, the parents free from neurosis. [A. S. Neill, Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood, 1960, St. Martin’s Press, 1992, p. 250]
Every family is a naturally and unselfconsciously religious place because every family is a place where day after day, year after year, a coherent and often undeviating disposition toward ultimate reality is being expressed. The beliefs, rules, values, ideals, prejudices, passions, promises, betrayals, terrors, demons, and angels that every family passes before and onto its children declare, finally, where we who belong to this family stand in relation to the awesome powers of the universe. How generous or unforgiving, gentle or terrible, just or capricious is the Life Force? What is required of us to be in good faith with our Maker? How dangerous or how exhilarating is it to be alive? [Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, Harvard UP, 1994, p. 267]
Mere technical training inevitably makes for ruthlessness, and to educate our children we must be sensitive to the whole movement of life. What we think, what we do, what we say matters infinitely, because it creates the environment, and the environment either helps or hinders the child.
Obviously, then, those of us who are deeply interested in this problem will have to begin to understand ourselves and thereby help to transform society; we will make it our direct responsibility to bring about a new approach to education. … The way out of this problem lies through ourselves. We must begin to understand our relationship with our fellow men, with nature, with ideas and with things, for without that understanding there is no hope, there is no way out of conflict and suffering. [Jiddu Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life, HarperCollins, 1953, pp. 48-49]
By segregating children by age, by caging them in so they can’t avoid those who harass them, by indoctrinating them in a setting where competition and winning—being better than others—are the highest values, and by denying them any meaningful voice in school governance, we establish the breeding grounds for bullying. [Peter Gray, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, Basic Books, 2013, p. 79]
When children are herded together in great numbers and are treated as ciphers in some huge, indifferent sum, the anxiety of anonymity absolutely forces them into protective alliances. They reach out for some identity to fill the void of self, however inadequate and fantasy-ridden that identity may be. Yet the power they achieve by banding together—though it may be crippling to growth—is not illusory; it is real.
What I have just said is really the whole of what we learned about racism at our school. The very young wouldn’t have it. The older ones were stuck with it, but some few worked through. We teachers never preached tolerance, desegregation, integration, or anything else. Our small, face-to-face community diminished anxiety, eliminated fantasy and estrangement, and supported ego growth; and step by step, at least in school, racism fell away. [George Dennison, The Lives of Children: The Story of the First Street School, 1969, Vintage / Random House, 1970, p. 12]
Teachers ask me all the time how they can teach people to be moral—or “human,” or “humane.” But we can’t teach it, can’t make someone moral or humane, and least of all in a place where, without his consent, we have taken control of his life and thought. The most we can do to help someone else become more moral is to treat him morally, which at the very least means that we do not make him our subject or slave. …
We use moral judgment only when we make choices, serious choices, choices that lead to action—and no student can do that in S-chool, where all the serious choices and decisions are made for him by others. [John Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, 1976, Sentient, 2004, pp. 185-187]
I believe that much of the present education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life. It conceives the school as a place where certain information is to be given, where certain lessons are to be learned, or where certain habits are to be formed. The value of these is conceived as lying largely in the remote future; the child must do these things for the sake of something else he is to do; they are mere preparations. As a result they do not become a part of the life experience of the child and so are not truly educative.
[M]oral education centers upon this conception of the school as a mode of social life, that the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought. The present educational systems, so far as they destroy or neglect this unity, render it difficult or impossible to get any genuine, regular moral training. [John Dewey, “My Pedagogical Creed,” 1897, John Dewey on Education: Selected Writings, edited by Reginald D. Archambault, 1964, U of Chicago P, 1974, p. 431]
The essence of education, I suggest, is the transmission of values, but values do not help us to pick our way through life unless they have become our own, a part, so to say, of our mental make-up. This means that they are more than mere formulae or dogmatic assertions: that we think and feel with them, that they are the very instruments through which we look at, interpret, and experience the world. [Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, 1973, Harper / Perennial, 2010, pp. 86-87]
For good or for ill, our instant mass communications transmit the dominant values of our society relentlessly. A noxious or degenerate cultural environment will undermine a parent’s influence, whereas a wholesome and vibrant cultural climate will bolster parental guidance. A society rich with elevated beliefs and practices encourages young people to pursue worthy aspirations and expand their sense of what they can accomplish for themselves and the world. Societies where cynicism prevails tend to demoralize young people, diminish their aspirations, and threaten their prospects for a purposeful life. [William Damon, The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life, Free Press, 2008, p. 162]
The illiteracy of the young turns out to be our own reflected back to us with embarassing force. We honor ambition, we reward greed, we celebrate materialism, we worship acquisitiveness, we cherish success, and we commercialize the classroom—and then we bark at the young about the gentle arts of the spirit. …
Schools can and should lead, but when they confront a society that in every instance tells a story exactly opposite to the one they are supposed to be teaching, their job becomes impossible. When the society undoes each workday what the school tries to do each school day, schooling can’t make much of a difference. [Benjamin R. Barber, “America Skips School,” 1993, The Anteater Reader, 8th ed., edited by Ray Zimmerman & Carla Copenhaven, Pearson Custom, 2005, pp. 337-338]
Students are not literally free when they have been freed from their teachers. They then simply come under the control of other conditions, and we must look at those conditions and their effects if we are to improve teaching. [B.F. Skinner, “The Free and Happy Student,” Phi Delta Kappan, 55(1), 1973, pp. 13-16, https://education-consumers.org/free-happy-student-article/]
Fundamentally, there is no right education except growing up into a worthwhile world. Indeed, our excessive concern with problems of education at present simply means that the grown-ups do not have such a world. [Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars, Vintage / Random House, 1964, p. 59]
[A] culture of purpose must be built—and continually rebuilt—in multiple small ways, by both individuals and institutions, that take responsibility for the values they present through their words, their deeds, and the examples they set. Government, especially at the local level, certainly can play a constructive role by participating with these individuals and institutions; but it cannot foster youth purpose through top-down programs or coercive legislation. A culture of purpose cannot be enforced. [William Damon, The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life, Free Press, 2008, p. 163]
The closest thing to a prerequisite for a culture of purpose is a sense of community. When parents, teachers, and other adults in children’s lives share a sense of community, they reinforce each other’s efforts. …
I have seen this in … town meetings dedicated to creating the most conducive climate for raising the young. … places where adults present [young people] with high expectations that are clear and coherent. … discussions about how to marshal the town’s resources in order to promote healthy youth development. [William Damon, The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life, Free Press, 2008, p. 164]
Here as elsewhere, our problem is lapse of community. Our society has less and less community between its adults and its youth. Traditional and family crafts and trades no longer exist, and a youth has few chances to form himself on model workmen in his neighborhood and learn the ropes and opportunities. The difficulties of getting into a union seem, and often are, insuperable. …
These remarks are not optimistic toward solving the problems of employment, and unemployment, of youth. By and large, I think these problems are insoluble, and should be insoluble, until our affluent society becomes worthier to work in, more honorable in its functions, and more careful of its human resources. [Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars, Vintage / Random House, 1964, pp. 111-112]
Man himself may be controlled by his environment, but it is an environment which is almost wholly of his own making. The physical environment of most people is largely man-made. The surfaces a person walks on, the walls which shelter him, the clothing he wears, many of the foods he eats, the tools he uses, the vehicles he moves about in, most of the things he listens to and looks at are human products. The social environment is obviously man-made—it generates the language a person speaks, the customs he follows, and the behavior he exhibits with respect to the ethical, religious, governmental, economic, educational, and psychotherapeutic institutions which control him. The evolution of a culture is in fact a kind of gigantic exercise in self-control. As the individual controls himself by manipulating the world in which he lives, so the human species has constructed an environment in which its members behave in a highly effective way. Mistakes have been made, and we have no assurance that the environment man has constructed will continue to provide gains which outstrip the losses, but man as we know him, for better or worse, is what man has made of man. [B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Bantam, 1971, pp. 196-197]
All human environments have some idea, some belief worked up in them, responsibly and self-consciously or not. Some people set out with specific ideas to create particular environments. But it works the other way as well: We can look at a space and deduce ideas and beliefs from it. The space is a visible container of human action: at times oppressive or liberating; beautiful or ugly.
The most taken-for-granted, sanctified, commonsense, and commonplace features of life in school, for example, carry messages about important issues: this is how people learn; this is how people think; this is the nature of knowledge; this is what is valuable; this is what you should attend to. And these messages constitute a major part of what is learned and what becomes assumed about school. … The more aware we are of our thoughts and goals, the more responsible we are for our values and beliefs, the more intentional we can be in creating spaces that speak and work for us. [William Ayers, To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, Teacher’s College, 1993, pp. 51-52]
The moral regeneration of mankind can be accomplished only by moral education, and until moral education is given priority over all other forms of education, I see no hope for the world. I have already indicated what I mean by moral education—not education by moral precept, but education by moral practice, which in effect means education by aesthetic discipline …
The whole burden of Plato’s theory of education is to the effect that if only we bring up children in the contemplation of universal forms, in the practice of graceful and harmonious movements, in the active making of beautiful objects, then these children will instinctively recognize and choose goodness when they see it. Aesthetic education develops ethical virtue. [Herbert Read, Education for Peace, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949, pp. 38, 74, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.89306]
[O]ur function … as teachers and exemplars in general, is, as Plato said in one of his most visionary flights:
“To be guided by our instinct for whatever is lovely and gracious, so that our young men, dwelling in a wholesome climate, may drink in good from every quarter, whence, like a breeze bearing health from happy regions, some influence from noble works constantly falls upon eye and ear from childhood upward, and imperceptibly draws them into sympathy and harmony with the beauty of reason, whose impress they take.” [The Republic, translated by F. S. Cornford, Oxford UP] [Herbert Read, Education for Peace, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949, p. 129, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.89306]
Complete isolation is impossible in nature. The young live in some environment whether we intend it or not, and this environment is constantly interacting with what children and young bring to it, and the result is the shaping of their interests, minds and character—either educatively or mis-educatively. If the professed educator abdicates his responsibility for judging and selecting the kind of environment that his best understanding leads him to think will be conducive to growth, then the young are left at the mercy of all the unorganized and casual forces of the modern social environment that inevitably play upon them as long as they live. [John Dewey, “The Need for a Philosophy of Education,” 1934, John Dewey on Education: Selected Writings, edited by Reginald D. Archambault, 1964, U of Chicago P, 1974, p. 9]
Related:
– Do we really value education? Why do we value it?
– How can parents improve their influence on their children?
– What is the nature of authority? How is it gained or lost?