Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical

Education is a subject which has interested thinkers across the centuries, particularly those of the post-Enlightenment era, and with good reason. After all, man starts out tabula rasa, and most of the things of great value to man have to be learned. Then, too, man is the only species which can pass knowledge from one generation to the next, thus immensely aiding in the accumulation and growth of man’s capacity to master reality.

Given these facts, the goal and purpose of education should be very clearly established: to pass down from one generation to the next all of the knowledge accumulated by the human race up to that point. General education, of course, is just that: passing down the most useful and valuable subjects in conceptual terms, without specialized study beyond a certain number of basics. Specialized education consists of transmitting all of the subtleties to a class of specialists, in accordance with the principles of the division of labor. What is the ultimate goal of education? To enable men to survive and prosper. Yet bearing these in mind, virtually no theories of education until our own time were oriented towards these twin goals: advancement of the individual and, as a consequence, of the human species. Education theorists have advocated goals and methods which destroy the ability of the human mind to process knowledge, to formulate arguments and theories, and to construct and identify the means of attaining purposes in life, i.e. values on all levels. The reason is that most approaches to education have been tacitly deontological, not concerned with presenting knowledge in a manner that enhances the individual’s goals and purposes, that takes an individual’s context seriously, but have been rather concerned with what we might call “learning out of duty.” Needless to say, this ignoring of individual goals and purposes, and of the central fact that all learning must properly be goal-directed, has led people to loathe education, to treat knowledge as a matter of duty—a boring duty, at that—and to adopt the notion that knowledge is often irrelevant to life, and the view that those who promote man’s knowledge in most fields are shysters and frauds, at best.

In this as in all areas, it is best to return from time to time to basics. Spencer’s classic work is an excellent place to begin. While Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical is hardly without flaws, it focuses on something almost totally neglected in the contemporary debate over education: causality. For if a single thing can be said to be the leitmotif of Herbert Spencer’s approach to education, it is the concept of causality. If we focus on this, says Spencer in effect, “relevance” will take care of itself.

Spencer is not a collectivist, as Ayn Rand and others have claimed; his concern was human survival, the survival of both the individual and the race. While some people see Spencer as subordinating the individual to the species, the truth is that he saw no conflict between the two and advocated a variant of long-run self-interest. His theory of education is completely subordinate to this and is hampered primarily by Spencer’s theory of knowledge and view of human consciousness.

But this is not really the central portion of this book. Spencer is really concerned with letting a child discover how things work, with how they will affect him; he is in favor of letting the child take risks and even occasionally suffer minor injuries. His concern is with causality in the sense that he is in the older “natural law” tradition not so much explicitly in the manner of taking it for granted, as did much of the 19th century; things are seen to have objective natures and effects, and the child should learn what these are in the process of attempting to obtain what he wants. Thus causality, reason, knowledge and the like are put in the service of goal-directed actions.

If this does not seem like a radical approach to take, just recall the sight of classroom after classroom, with two dozen or more students in each in row upon row of desks assigned by fiat, and a countless number of human beings being forced to learn what other people think they should know, for reasons which they choose not to specify. Is it any wonder why education is so associated in the minds of people today with boredom and duty, and that the better students flee this the first chance they get? Is it any wonder that kids suffer through an identity crisis assoon as they are let out of these suffocating prisons? They have, after all, been taught virtually nothing of personal importance to them—which is the only sense of importance that most people ever grasp. They have been taught nothing about how to achieve personal goals and values; they have, on the contrary, been taught to suppress their own interests and values and our educational “leaders,” in their infinite stupidity, are surprised when this process works, and we are faced, on a yearly basis, with the problem of releasing these prisoners into the real world—only to find that they do not know what to do, that they do not want anything, and that even if they do want something, they usually do not know how to attain it.

This is the real problem with our educational system and the real destroyer of the foundations of a free society: individual human beings, who, in their infinite diversity, are capable of formulating their own purposes and of acting to attain them. While Herbert Spencer did not have all of the answers, he came closer than most. Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical is a fascinating work containing a great many unusual insights. It is an excellent base on which to build a radical theory of education which will set men free of duty and help them take causes and consequences seriously.

Reviewed by R. A. CHILDS, Jr. / Education (283 Pages) / BFL Price $1.95