[T]he future of civilization may depend on finding the solution to psychological problems. It is a truism that man has made great progress in solving many of the material problems of his existence, but that he may well be defeated, and perhaps annihilated, by his failure to solve the psychological problems which face him—interpersonal, interracial, and international frictions, delinquency, the disturbances labelled “mental illness,” the growing loss of a sense of purpose, and the inability to learn at a rate which will keep up with our expanding knowledge. Thus, the logic of our culture demands that the behavioral sciences play an increasingly important part in the foreseeable future of our society as it confronts these problems. [Carl Rogers, Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become, Charles E. Merrill, 1969, p. 170]
Our energies are overwhelmingly directed toward material, scientific, and technical subjects and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety surrounds the question of how good the next generation will be at math; very little around their abilities at marriage or kindness. We devote inordinate hours to learning about tectonic plates and cloud formations, and relatively few fathoming shame and rage.
The assumption is that emotional insight might be either unnecessary or in essence unteachable, lying beyond reason or method, an unreproducible phenomenon best abandoned to individual instinct and intuition. We are left to find our own path around our unfeasibly complicated minds—a move as striking (and as wise) as suggesting that each generation should rediscover the laws of physics by themselves. [Alain de Botton et al., The School of Life: An Emotional Education, The School of Life, 2019, p. 1]
[We have] a tradition of education which for centuries has cultivated intellectual virtue at the expense of moral virtue …
Since a man deficient in moral virtue cannot be expected to appreciate properly the values of intellectual virtue, moral virtue has a fundamental priority in education. …
[T]he general tradition of education in Europe and America since the Renaissance has neglected or distorted this classical theory of education—first by blurring the clear distinction between intellectual and moral virtue, and then by ignoring the essential priority of moral virtue, by attempting to inculcate intellectual virtue into minds which have not received the necessary preparation. It is only onto a stock of goodness that knowledge can be safely grafted: by grafting it onto stocks that are unbalanced, undeveloped, neurotic, we merely give power to impulses that may in themselves be evil or corrupted. [Herbert Read, Education for Peace, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949, pp. 133, 112-113, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.89306]
It is philosophical knowledge, which in the practical order is called morals and politics, that must direct us in intelligent operation toward the right ends. The utility of philosophy is thus superior to that of science, and what is even more obvious, science without moral wisdom—a command of utilities without right direction—is a dangerous thing. The more science we have, the more we are in need of wisdom to prevent its misuse. The imminent tragedy of the contemporary world is written in the fact that positivistic modern culture has magnified science and almost completely emancipated itself from wisdom. [Mortimer Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, p. 73]
Shall we tell our children that one thing is as good as another—here a bit of physics, and there a bit of knowledge of literature? …
[W]e turn to the humanities to obtain a clear view of the large and vital ideas of our age. Even in the humanities we may get bogged down in a mass of specialized scholarship, furnishing our minds with lots of small ideas just as unsuitable as the ideas which we might pick up from the natural sciences. But we may also be more fortunate (if fortunate it is) and find a teacher who will “clear our minds,” clarify the ideas—the “large” and universal ideas already existent in our minds—and thus make the world intelligible for us. [Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, 1973, Harper / Perennial, 2010, pp. 92, 95-96]
The object of educational systems the world over is not to gain wisdom but to gain riches and power. The effect of these systems is, therefore, to accelerate technical change without thought of its social consequences …
Education cannot come into its own in any country unless the culture of that country has the same aim as education. If the aim of the society is to gain prosperity and power through the use of technology, the consequences must be as Jacques Ellul sees them:
“ … education will no longer be an unpredictable and exciting adventure in human enlightenment, but an exercise in conformity and an apprenticeship to whatever gadgetry is useful in a technical world.” [The Technological Society, 1964] [Robert Hutchins, The Learning Society, Mentor / New American Library, 1968, pp. 37-39]
Science and engineering produce “know-how”; but “know-how” is nothing by itself; it is a means without an end, a mere potentiality, an unfinished sentence. … Can education help us to finish the sentence, to turn the potentiality into a reality to the benefit of man?
To do so, the task of education would be, first and foremost, the transmission of ideas of value, of what to do with our lives. There is no doubt also the need to transmit know-how but this must take second place, for it is obviously somewhat foolhardy to put great powers into the hands of people without making sure that they have a reasonable idea of what to do with them. At present, there can be little doubt that the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not because we are short of scientific and technological know-how, but because we tend to use it destructively, without wisdom. More education can help us only if it produces more wisdom. [Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, 1973, Harper / Perennial, 2010, pp. 86-87]
[T]he crucial difficulty with which we are confronted lies in the fact that the development of man’s intellectual capacities has far outstripped the development of his emotions. Man’s brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age. The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself. [Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom, 1941, Henry Holt and Co., 1994, p. xvi]
While we are congratulating ourselves upon the well disciplined habits which the pupil is acquiring, judged by his ability to reproduce a lesson when called upon, we forget to commiserate ourselves because the deeper intellectual and moral nature of the child has secured absolutely no discipline at all, but has been left to follow its own caprices, the disordered suggestions of the moment, or of past experience. … I do not think it would be well for us to have to face the actual psychological condition of the majority of the pupils that leave our schools. We should find this division of attention and the resulting disintegration so great that we might be discouraged from all future endeavor. None the less, it is well for us to recognize that this state of things exists, and that it is the inevitable outcome of those conditions which require the simulation of attention without requiring its essence. [John Dewey, “Interest in Relation to Training of the Will,” 1896, John Dewey on Education: Selected Writings, edited by Reginald D. Archambault, 1964, U of Chicago P, 1974, pp. 266-267]
[M]any patients expect to finish their analysis in no time because they are so intelligent. But the progress in analysis has little to do with intelligence. The reasoning powers which these people have may, in fact, be used to obstruct progress. What counts are the emotional forces operating in the patients, their capacity to be straight and to assume responsibility for themselves. [Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth, 1950, W. W. Norton and Co., 1991, p. 66]
[H]ardly any of the people who have such enormous influence on our culture have ever been in a school that made sure they thought about these issues [virtue and the Good]. Most of the members of today’s elite are ethically illiterate. They are not bad people. They are not indifferent. They have done as well as most human beings do when they try to think through questions involving virtue and happiness unaided. The problem is that they have been given no help in tapping the magnificent body of thought on these issues that Homo sapiens has already produced. [Charles Murray, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, Three Rivers, 2008, pp. 126-127]
To determine the good and the order of goods is the prime object of all moral and political education. We cannot hope that one who has never confronted these issues can be either a good citizen or a good man. … An educational system which does not make these questions the center of its attention is not an educational system at all. It is a large-scale housing venture. It may be effective in keeping young people out of worse places until they can go to work. It cannot contribute to the growth of free minds. It cannot help the rising generation solve the great problem of our time.
The great problem of our time is moral, intellectual, and spiritual. With a superfluity of goods we are sinking into poverty. With a multitude of gadgets we are no happier than we were before. With a declining death rate we have yet to discover what to do with our lives. With a hatred of war we are now deeply engaged in the greatest war in history. With a love of liberty we see much of the world in chains.
How can these things be? They can be because we have directed our lives and our education to means instead of ends. We have been concerned with the transitory and superficial instead of the enduring and basic problems of life and of society. [Robert Hutchins, Education for Freedom, 1943, Louisiana State UP, 1947, pp. 91-92, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.501404]
Vocational education conceived as job-training represents the greatest threat to democratic education in our time. It is a threat to democracy because it tends to make the job-trained individual conscious only of his technological responsibilities, but not of his social and moral responsibilities. He becomes a specialist in “means” but indifferent to “ends” which are considered the province of another specialist. The main concern is with “getting a job” and after that with “doing a job” no matter what the political direction and moral implications of the job are. …
[L]iberal and vocational education [should be related] in such a way that no matter how a man earns his living he will not lose sight of the communal traditions to which he owes his knowledge and skills, the communal responsibilities he shares with his fellows, and the communal tasks to which he can make his distinctive contribution. Vocational education which fails to do this is illiberal and had best be abandoned. [Sidney Hook, Education for Modern Man: A New Perspective, 1946, revised 1963, Wipf and Stock, 2019, pp. 201, 212]
The development of production and the acquisition of wealth have thus become the highest goals of the modern world in relation to which all other goals, no matter how much lip-service may still be paid to them, have come to take second place. …
This is the philosophy of materialism, and it is this philosophy—or metaphysic—which is now being challenged by events. …
Needless to say, wealth, education, research, and many other things are needed for any civilisation, but what is most needed today is a revision of the ends which these means are meant to serve. And this implies, above all else, the development of a life-style which accords to material things their proper, legitimate place, which is secondary and not primary. [Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, 1973, Harper / Perennial, 2010, pp. 313-315]
Regardless of where I begin my thinking about the problems facing our civilization, I always return to the theme of human responsibility, which seems incapable of keeping pace with civilization and preventing it from turning against the human race. … The main task for the coming era is something else: a radical renewal of our sense of responsibility. Our conscience must catch up to our reason; otherwise we are lost. [Václav Havel, Commencement address, Harvard University, 15 June 1995] quoted by [Howard Gardner, The Disciplined Mind: What All Students Should Understand, 1999, Simon & Schuster, 2021, p. 251]
Related:
– Do we really value education? Why do we value it?
– What do we teach via our character and the environments we create?
– What is education for? What should the goals of education be?