What's
it all about, chaps?
January 20,
2006
Victoria
Neumark enjoys a guide to two millennia of great
educators
THE GREATEST EDUCATORS...EVER!
By Frank M Flanagan. Continuum £14.99
No one seriously doubts that education is a good thing, but
the debate on why it is central to a civilised society is
as old as civilisation itself.
What is the purpose of education? Apart from keeping young
human beings out of the hair of adults, that is. Many a
disillusioned individual faced with, say, a class of
14-year-olds who care nothing for the imperfect tense in
French or why Juliet kills herself, to say nothing of
simultaneous equations, has asked him or herself this
question in the rhetorical, what-am-I-doing-here sense, but
how often do we question our profession more deeply? And is
it useful so to do?
Teachers can be the people least interested in thinking
about this thorny question; by definition, they are the
ones most interested in maintaining the credibility a
systematised form of instructing the young. Yet "Why
exactly are we doing this?" and "What is it that we are
doing?" can be the most fruitful of questions both
technically, to help focus teaching, and existentially, to
help focus our sense of ourselves in a professional sense.
Frank M Flanagan's accessible, lucidly written series of
potted biographies of great educators offers scope for
both: it is a handy guide to the history of educational
thought in the West which also offers thought-provoking
insights on education -and the place of educators - today.
As Flanagan remarks, it is by no means obvious that
education in a formal sense has a value, much less that it
necessarily should take the form it does in Britain today.
He identifies three trends in educational thought:
perfecting technical skills, creating morally harmonious
citizens, and developing a free, questioning mental
attitude. These three themes are broadly rooted in the work
of his first three educators, the ancient Greeks Aristotle,
Plato and Socrates, though a narrow focus on technical
skills he assigns to the morally dubious Sophists. All
three, he hints, are desirable for the optimum outcome,
which is broadly agreed to be a just, equal society.
This is quite a utopian vision and Flanagan's choice of
influential educators is solidly in the bien-pensant,
leftish-liberal tradition. Here is his list: Socrates,
Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, Quintilian, Augustine, Comenius,
Locke, Rousseau, Froebel, Newman, Dewey, Montessori, Buber,
Neill, Freire, Illich. The aristocratic point of view, as
in Montesquieu, the satirical, as in Voltaire, the
reclusive as in Emerson (or Wordsworth), the instrumental,
as in Machiavelli, and the reactionary (anyone from the
Daily Mail) get scarcely a mention, let alone a look-in.
Nor is the focus widened to preoccupations from other
cultures like the idea of the Indian guru and the
associated intense master-pupil relationship, or the way in
which many non-industrialised cultures use peer-group
experiences and rituals to socialise young people in a
particular age group. Given these limitations, this is a
palatable and refreshing trip round the bases of some
crucial thinkers.
Most challenging remains, perhaps, the granddaddy of
western philosophy, Socrates, still after two millennia "a
gadfly" as he described himself.
Here is his famous speech from Plato's Apology of Socrates:
"(I) thought to myself, 'I am wiser than this man; it is
likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he
thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I
do not know, neither do I think that I know; so I am likely
to be wiser than he to this small extent: that I do not
think that I know when I do not know.'" At first sight, not
the most useful apercu when facing those restive
14-year-olds, you might think. But in fact, understanding
that knowledge is rooted in ignorance is truly useful in
helping others to learn, rather than simply pouring
unwanted knowledge into unwilling pitchers, as Paulo Freire
would have put it. There are technical skills of teaching,
as Locke and Quintilian, a master of rhetoric, well knew,
but there is also a need for education to match a child's
organic development, as Froebel, Montessori and Pestalozzi
understood. Without some meeting of minds, between teacher
and pupil, the process will not work. Such a realisation
drove Ivan Illich, among others, to despair, visualising a
process where the "ignorant met the ignorant round a text
they neither understood". But that was a false realisation
of equality, missing out a vital ingredient: respect.
Respect is currently a buzzword, but for a deeper grasp of
how it might work in education, this book is a reminder
that we should look to Rousseau, whose ideas exploded into
the highly wrought world of the 18th century. His
passionate belief in human beings' innermost nature as the
guide to what they needed to know, and how they needed to
learn, offers startling pointers for today.
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