The organisation of thought, educational and scientificWhitehead, Alfred North
Philosophy
The organisation of thought, educational and scientific
Whitehead, Alfred North
Education
Where, then, does style help? In this, with style the end is attained
without side issues, without raising undesirable inflammations. With
style you attain your end and nothing but your end. With style the
effect of your activity is calculable, and foresight is the last gift
of gods to men. With style your power is increased, for your mind is
not distracted with irrelevancies, and you are more likely to attain
your object. Now style is the exclusive privilege of the expert.
Whoever heard of the style of an amateur painter, of the style of an
amateur poet? Style is always the product of specialist study, the
peculiar contribution of specialism to culture.
English education in its present phase suffers from a lack of definite
aim, and from an external machinery which kills its vitality. Hitherto
in this address I have been considering the aims which should govern
education. In this respect England halts between two opinions. It has
not decided whether to produce amateurs or experts. The profound change
in the world which the nineteenth century has produced is that the
growth of knowledge has given foresight. The amateur is essentially a
man with appreciation and with immense versatility in mastering a given
routine. But he lacks the foresight which comes from special knowledge.
The object of this address is to suggest how to produce the expert
without loss of the essential virtues of the amateur. The machinery
of our secondary education is rigid where it should be yielding,
and lax where it should be rigid. Every school is bound on pain of
extinction to train its boys for a small set of definite examinations.
No headmaster has a free hand to develop his general education or his
specialist studies in accordance with the opportunities of his school,
which are created by its staff, its environment, its class of boys, and
its endowments. I suggest that no system of external tests which aims
primarily at examining individual scholars can result in anything but
educational waste.
Primarily it is the schools and not the scholars which should be
inspected. Each school should grant its own leaving certificates, based
on its own curriculum. The standards of these schools should be sampled
and corrected. But the first requisite for educational reform is the
school as a unit, with its approved curriculum based on its own needs,
and evolved by its own staff. If we fail to secure that, we simply fall
from one formalism into another, from one dung-hill of inert ideas into
another.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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