Essay

WHAT TRUE EDUCATION SHOULD DO

Sydney J. Harris
When most people think of the word education, they think of a pupil as a sort of animate sausage casing. Into this empty casing, the teachers aresupposed to stuff “education.”
But genuine education, as Socrates knew more than two thousand years ago, is not inserting the stuffings of information into a person, but rather eliciting knowledgefrom him; it is the drawing out of what is in the mind.
“The most important part of education,” once wrote William Ernest Hocking the distinguished Harvard philosopher, “is this instruction of a manin what he has inside of him.”
And as Edith Hamilton has reminded us, Socrates never said, “ I know, learn from me.” He said, rather, “Look into your own selves and find the spark of truth that Godhas put into every heart, and that only you can kindle to a flame.”
In the dialogue called the “Meno,” Socrates takes an ignorant slave boy, without a day of schooling, and proves to the amazedobservers that the boy really “knows” geometry- because the principles and axioms of geometry are already in his mind, waiting to be called out.
So many of the discussions and controversies about thecontent of education are futile and inconclusive because they are concerned with what should “go into” the student rather than with what should be taken out, and how this can best be done.
Thecollege student who once said to me, after a lecture, “I spend so much time studying that I don’t have a chance to learn anything” was succinctly expressing his dissatisfaction with the sausage-casing viewof education.
He was being so stuffed with miscellaneous facts, with such an indigestible mass of material, that he had no time (and was given no encouragement) to draw on his own resources, to usehis own mind for analyzing and synthesizing and evaluating this material.
Education, to have any meaning beyond the purpose of creating well-informed dunces, must elicit from the pupil what is...