The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on EducationPalmer, Alice Freeman
Philosophy
The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on Education
Palmer, Alice Freeman
Education; Education, Higher; Women -- Education
And when we look at the third of our grounds for justification, social
need, the public declares that the specialists are intolerably
presumptuous. Knowing their own subject, they imagine they can dictate
to anybody and do not understand how limited is their importance. Again
and again it happens that because a man does know some one thing pretty
well he sets himself up as a great man in general. My own province
suffers in this respect more than most; for as soon as a man acquires
considerable skill in chemistry or biology, he is apt to issue a
pronunciamento on philosophy. But philosophy does not suffer alone.
Everywhere the friends of the great specialist are telling him he has
proved himself a mighty man, quite competent to sit in judgment on the
universe; and he, forgetting that the universe and the particular
subject he knows something about are two different things, really
imagines that his ignorant opinions deserve consideration.
Now I suppose we must acknowledge that in all this blasphemy against our
calling, there is a good deal of truth. These certainly are dangers
which all of us specialists incur. I agree that they are inevitable
dangers. Do not, however, let us on account of them abandon
specialization and seek to acquire a mass of miscellaneous information.
Bacon said, "I take all knowledge for my province." If we say it, we
shall become not Bacons but fools. No, that is the broad road to
ignorance. But laying these profound dangers of specialization well to
heart, assured that they beset us all, let us search for remedial
measures. Let us ask how such dangers may be reduced to a minimum. Is
there a certain way in which we may engage in the specialist's research
and still save ourselves from some of the evils I have here depicted? I
think there is. To find it we will follow the same three avenues which
have been leading us thus far.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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