[A]bove all, the greatest legacy of education is to encourage in our students a will to learn and to continue learning as personal circumstances change—in short, to promote a capacity for resiliency and self-renewal. This point was anticipated over a half century ago when John Dewey remarked that “the most important attitude that can be formed is that of the desire to go on learning.” [Experience and Education, 1938] [Martin Covington, The Will to Learn: A Guide for Motivating Young People, Cambridge UP, 1998, p. 3]
[N]o one can become fully educated in school, no matter how long the schooling or how good it is. Our concern with education must go beyond schooling.
The schooling of a people does not complete their education. Not even if the quality of schooling were improved to the utmost for all; not even if all who completed twelve years of compulsory basic schooling went on to optional advanced schooling in our colleges and universities and profited by it.
The simple fact is that educational institutions, even at their best, cannot turn out fully educated men and women. The age at which most human beings attend school prevents that. Youth itself is the most serious impediment—in fact, youth is an insuperable obstacle to being an educated person.
No one can be an educated person while immature. It would be a travesty to regard the degrees awarded by our colleges and universities as certifying the completion of education. It is all the more true of the high school diploma.
Only through the trials of adult life, only with the range and depth of experience that makes for maturity, can human beings become educated persons. The mature may not be as trainable as the immature, but they are more educable by virtue of their maturity.
Education is a lifelong process of which schooling is only a small but necessary part. [Mortimer J. Adler, The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto, 1982, Touchstone / Simon & Schuster, 1998, pp. 9-10]
The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education. [Ralph Waldo Emerson] quoted by [Laurence J. Peter, Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time, Bantam, 1977, p. 96]
Schooling is the preparatory stage [of the educational process]; it forms the habit of learning and provides the means for continuing to learn after all schooling is completed. …
Schooling, basic or advanced, that does not prepare the individual for further learning has failed, no matter what else it succeeds in doing. …
Basic schooling in America does not now achieve this fundamental objective. [Mortimer J. Adler, The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto, 1982, Touchstone / Simon & Schuster, 1998, pp. 10-11]
Bill Moyers: This revolution you’re talking about—personal learning—it’s not just for the young, is it?
Isaac Asimov: No! That’s a good point! No, it’s not just for the young. That’s another trouble with education as we now have it. It is for the young, and people think of education as something that they can finish. And what’s more, when they finish, that’s a rite of passage into manhood. “I’m finished with school. I’m no more a child.” And therefore anything that reminds you of school—reading books, having ideas, asking questions—that’s kid’s stuff. Now you’re an adult, you don’t do that sort of thing any more.
M: And in fact, like prison, the reward of school is getting out. Kids say, “When are you getting out?”
A: And every kid knows that. Every kid knows the only reason he’s in school is because he’s a kid and little and weak, and if he manages to get out early, if he drops out, why he’s just a premature man.
M: … I’ve talked to some of these dropouts, and they think … they’ve become men because they’re out of school. What’s wrong with this?
A: Well, what’s wrong with it is you have everybody looking forward to no longer learning, and you make them ashamed afterward of going back to learning. If you have [a system of education using computers], then anyone, any age, can learn by himself, can continue to be interested. There’s no reason then, if you enjoy learning, why you should stop at a given age. People don’t stop things they enjoy doing just because they reach a certain age. … They keep it up as long as they can if they enjoy it, and learning will be the same thing. The trouble with learning is that most people don’t enjoy it because of the circumstances. Make it possible for them to enjoy learning, and they’ll keep it up.
There’s the famous story about Oliver Wendell Holmes, who lived to be well into his nineties, he was in the hospital one time, he had not long to live … and President Roosevelt came to see him, and there was Oliver Wendell Holmes reading a Greek grammar. Roosevelt said, “Why are you reading a Greek grammar, Mr. Holmes?” And Holmes said, “To improve my mind, Mr. President.” [Bill Moyers’ World of Ideas, Interview With Isaac Asimov, 1988, YouTube, uploaded by WL, 27 Jan 2022, 15:50, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beEVtutzl0Q]
“Once [students] have left [our educational institutions], we regard them as in some sense finished, neither capable of nor in need of further ‘education.’ … Thus we avoid facing the most vivid truth of the new age: no one will live all his life in the world into which he was born, and no one will die in the world in which he worked in his maturity. … Often, only a few months may elapse before something which previously was easily taken for granted must be unlearned or transformed to fit the new state of knowledge or practice. In this world, no one can ‘complete an education.’ … [W]e need children and adolescents and young and mature and ‘senior’ adults, each of whom is learning at the appropriate pace and with all the special advantages and disadvantages of experience peculiar to his own age.” [Margaret Mead, “Why is Education Obsolescent?”, Essays in Persuasion, 1963]
In short, we need a learning society. [Robert Hutchins, The Learning Society, Mentor / New American Library, 1968, pp. 161-162]
[F]ormal education, even for a privileged minority, has usually come to an end at the close of adolescence, if not earlier; and this has had an unfortunate consequence. The student has been surfeited with book learning at a stage of life at which he has not yet acquired the experience to take advantage of this, and he has then been starved for book learning at a later stage in which, if he had been given the opportunity, he could have made much more of it in the light of his growing experience. In the rich society of the future, we shall be able to afford to offer part-time adult education to every man and woman at every stage of grown-up life. [Arnold Toynbee, “Education in the Perspective of History,” The Teacher and the Taught, 1963] quoted by [Robert Hutchins, The Learning Society, Mentor / New American Library, 1968, pp. 162-163]
Schools are … supposed to foster a love of learning, but they actually teach many people that the classroom is a place of torment and humiliation. As a result, after we complete the minimum schooling we feel we absolutely must have, most of us steadfastly avoid the classroom for the rest of our lives. …
Education needs to be spread out over one’s life, not compacted into the childhood and teen years. … Learning needs to be lifelong, and school—if it continues to exist at all—needs to provide people with the tools and inspiration they need to continue the learning process. [Robert Epstein, Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families From The Torment of Adolescence, Quill Driver, 2010, pp. 319-322]
Education must no longer be confined to the young. The young must not look forward to its completion, nor should the old look back on it as thankfully over. For all people, education must be made to seem a requirement of human life as long as life endures. Mental and creative vigor should accompany the physical vigor that medical advance will allow. Human beings can then remain “productive,” in our present understanding of the word, until advanced age.
But is this possible? Will the time come when people so enjoy being educated that they will be willing to engage in it, on and off, all their long life? Why not, if they can learn what interests them and not what someone in authority says they ought to learn, interested or not? It will mean that we must turn education from fixed curricula into the direction of personal taste. [Isaac Asimov, “Our Future in Education,” The Tyrannosaurus Prescription, Prometheus, 1989, p. 16]
In an ideal society, it would be not only children who were known to need an education. All adults would recognize that they inevitably required continuing education of an emotional kind and would remain active followers of a psychological curriculum. Schools devoted to emotional intelligence would be open for everyone, so that children would feel that they were participating in the early stages of a lifelong process. …
We have collectively left to chance some of what it is most important to know; we have denied ourselves the opportunity to systematically transmit wisdom, reserving our belief in education to technical and managerial skills. [Alain de Botton et al., The School of Life: An Emotional Education, The School of Life, 2019, p. 22]
“[T]he decline in the mental abilities of adults is functional; it results from disuse and not from organic degeneration.” …
If the body is to be kept healthy, alive, and in repair, it must have food and exercise regularly. What is true of the body is true of the mind. … And the mind unexercised, like a muscle unused, atrophies, grows weak, becomes almost paralyzed. Hence, just as we know that we cannot support the life of the body this week on the basis of last week’s feeding, so we ought to realize that we cannot support the life of the mind this week on last week’s reading, much less last year’s reading, or the reading done in college. [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, pp. 214, 220]
Even if the individual has had the best possible liberal education in youth, interminable education through great books and the liberal arts remains his obligation; he cannot expect to store up an education in childhood that will last all his life. What he can do in youth is to acquire the disciplines and habits that will make it possible for him to continue to educate himself all his life. [Robert Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952, p. 52, https://archive.org/details/greatconversatio030336mbp/mode/2up]
The trials of the citizen now surpass anything that previous generations ever knew. Private and public propaganda beats upon him from morning till night all his life long. If independent judgment is the sine qua non of effective citizenship in a democracy, then it must be admitted that such judgment is harder to maintain now than it ever has been before. It is too much to hope that a strong dose of education in childhood and youth can inoculate a man to withstand the onslaughts on his independent judgment that society conducts, or allows to be conducted, against him every day. For this, constant alertness and mental growth are required. [Robert Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952, p. 53, https://archive.org/details/greatconversatio030336mbp/mode/2up]
If we are to expect the whole adult population to engage in liberal education, then the curriculum of schools, colleges, and universities should be constructed with this end in view. At present it is built upon the notion, which is unfortunately correct, that nobody is ever going to get any education after he gets out of school. Here we encounter the melancholy fact that most of the important things that human beings ought to understand cannot be comprehended in youth.
Although I have known several astronomers who were contributing to the international journals before the age of sixteen, I have never known a child of any age who had much that was useful to say about the organization of human society or the ends of human life. The great books of ethics, political philosophy, economics, history, and literature do not yield up their secrets to the immature. In the United States, if these works are read at all, they are read in school and college, where they can be only dimly understood, and are never read again. [Robert Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952, pp. 53-54, https://archive.org/details/greatconversatio030336mbp/mode/2up]
And this is the point: every man’s mind ought to keep working all his life long; every man’s imagination should be touched as often as possible by the great works of imagination; every man ought to push toward the horizons of his intellectual powers all the time. It is impossible to have “had” a liberal education, except in a formal, accidental, immaterial sense. Liberal education ought to end only with life itself. [Robert Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952, pp. 75-76, https://archive.org/details/greatconversatio030336mbp/mode/2up]
[U]niversities under-serve the community, because for some reason we think that university education is for 18-22 year olds, which is a proposition that’s so absurd that it’s absolutely mind-boggling that anyone ever conceptualized it. … [W]hy wouldn’t you take university courses throughout your entire life? What, do you stop searching for wisdom when you’re 22? I don’t think so. You don’t even start, usually, until you’re in your mid-twenties. [Jordan Peterson, “From the Barricades of the Culture Wars,” YouTube, uploaded by The Aspen Institute, 27 June 2018, 40:55, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6H2HmKDbZA]
According to the premise on which all of my own positions are based, man’s highest purpose in life is the unfolding of his own personality, the realization, as nearly as possible, of his creative potential, that is, his emergence, his hatching, his becoming. Such achievement presupposes that the educational process will go on through all of adulthood, as well as during childhood. Indeed, school for the child, if it is to have meaning, is but the preparation for a dynamic, continuing process of education. The test of whether or not any primary and secondary educational system is meeting the requirements of true education is: Does it set the stage for adult learning? [Leonard Read, Anything That’s Peaceful: The Case for the Free Market, Foundation for Economic Education, 1964, p. 213]
Jung thought that the achievement of optimum development of the personality was a lifetime’s task which was never completed; a journey upon which one sets out hopefully toward a destination at which one never arrives.
“The new attitude gained in the course of analysis tends sooner or later to become inadequate in one way or another, and necessarily so, because the flow of life again and again demands fresh adaptation. Adaptation is never achieved once and for all … In the last resort it is highly improbable that there could ever be a therapy which got rid of all difficulties. Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health. What concerns us here is only an excessive amount of them.” [The Transcendent Function: Collected Works, VIII, 1969, p. 73] [Anthony Storr, Solitude, Free Press / Macmillan, 1988, pp. 197-198]
[E]ducation is not merely schooling. It is a lifelong discipline of the individual by himself, encouraged by a reasonable opportunity to lead a good life. Education here is synonymous with civilization. A civilized community is better than a jungle, but civilization is a long slow process which cannot be “given” in a short course.
No one in his senses would affirm that Schooling is the hope of the world. But to say this is to show up the folly of perpetually confusing Education with the work of the schools; the folly of believing against all evidence that by taking boys and girls for a few hours each day between the ages of seven and twenty-one, our teachers can “turn out” all the human products that we like to fancy when we are disgusted with ourselves and our neighbors. …
The whole mass of recrimination, disappointment, and dissatisfaction which this country is now suffering about its schools comes from using the ritual word “Education” so loosely and so frequently. It covers abysses of emptiness. Everybody cheats by using it, cheats others and cheats himself. The idea abets false ambitions. [Jacques Barzun, Teacher In America, 1945, Liberty Fund, 1981, pp. 9-10]