As to the principal stages in education, let us note that there are three great periods in education. I should like to designate them as the rudiments (or elementary education), the humanities (comprising both secondary and college education), and advanced studies (comprising graduate schools and higher specialized learning). And these periods correspond not only to three natural chronological periods in the growth of the youth but also to three naturally distinct and qualitatively determinate spheres of psychological development, and, accordingly, of knowledge.

The physical structure of the child is not that of the adult, shortened and abridged. The child is not a dwarf man. Nor is the adolescent. And this is much truer and much more crucial as regards the psychological than the physical structure of the youth. In the realm of physical training, of psychophysical conditioning, of animal and experimental psychology, contemporary education has understood more and more perfectly that a child of man is not just a diminutive man. It has not yet understood this in the spiritual realm of knowing: because, indeed, it is not interested in the psychology of spiritual activities. How, therefore, could it do anything but ignore that realm? The error is twofold. First, we have forgotten that science and knowledge are not a self-sufficient set of notions, existing for their own sakes, abstracted and separate from man. Science and knowledge do not exist in books, they do exist in minds, they are vital and internal energies and must develop therefore according to the inner spiritual structure of the mind in which they have their being.

Second, we act as if the task of education were to infuse into the child or the adolescent, only abridging and concentrating it, the very science or knowledge of the adult —that is to say, of the philologist, the historian, the grammarian, the scientist, etc., the most specialized experts. So we try to cram young people with a chaos of summarized adult notions which have been either condensed, dogmatized, and text-bookishly cut up or else made so easy that they are reduced to the vanishing point. As a result, we run the risk of producing either an instructed, bewildered intellectual dwarf, or an ignorant intellectual dwarf playing at dolls with our science. In a recent essay Professor Douglas Bush recalls “the classic anecdote of the young woman who was asked if she could teach English history. ‘Oh yes,’ she replied brightly, ‘I’ve had it twice, once in clay and once in sand.’”

The knowledge to be given to youth is not the same knowledge as that of adults; it is an intrinsically and basically different knowledge, which is not knowledge in the state of science, such as that possessed by the mind of the adult, but the specific knowledge fitted to quicken and perfect the original world of thought of the child and the adolescent. Consequently I should like to emphasize that at each stage the knowledge must be of a sort fitted to the learners and conceived as reaching its perfection within their universe of thought during a distinct period of their development, instead of laying the foundations of a single sphere of knowledge which would grow in a continuous and uniform way until it became the science of the adult, where alone it would attain perfection.

The universe of a child is the universe of imagination—of an imagination which evolves little by little into reason. The knowledge which has to be given to the child is knowledge in a state of story, an imaginative grasp of the things and values of the world. The child’s mentality may be compared in some ways with that of primitive man, and this mentality tends by itself toward magic, and whatever effort the teacher may make, his teaching always runs the risk of being caught and engulfed in a magic ocean. In his task of civilizing the child’s mind, therefore, he must progressively tame the imagination to the rule of reason, whilst ever remembering that the proportionally tremendous work of the child’s intellect, endeavoring to grasp the external world, is accomplished under the vital and perfectly normal rule of imagination.

I should like to add that beauty is the mental atmosphere and the inspiring power fitted to a child’s education, and should be, so to speak, the continuous quickening and spiritualizing contrapuntal base of that education. Beauty makes intelligibility pass unawares through sense-awareness. It is by virtue of the allure of beautiful things and deeds and ideas that the child is to be led and awakened to intellectual and moral life.

On the other hand the vitality and intuitiveness of the spirit are quick in the young child and sometimes pierce the world of his imaginative thought with the purest and most surprising flashes, as if his spirit, being not yet both strengthened and organized by the exercise of reason, enjoyed a kind of bounding, temperamental, and lucid freedom. At the same time, however, the immature workings of instinct and the violence of nature make him capable of intense resentment, wickedness, and manifold perversion. This vitality of the spirit should be relied upon as an invaluable factor in the first stages of education. Even from a purely naturalistic point of view it is a pity to see the child’s mysterious expectant gravity and his resources as regards spiritual life neglected or trampled upon by his elders, either from some positivist bias or because they think it is their duty, when they deal with children, to make themselves childish.

The universe of the adolescent is a transition state on the way to the universe of man. Judgment and intellectual strength are developing but are not yet really acquired. Such a mobile and anxious universe evolves under the rule of the natural impulses and tendencies of intelligence—an intelligence which is not yet matured and strengthened by those inner living energies, the sciences, arts, and wisdom, but which is sharp and fresh, eager to pass judgment on everything, and both trustful and exacting, and which craves intuitive sight. The knowledge which has to develop in the adolescent is knowledge appealing to the natural powers and gifts of the mind, knowledge as tending toward all things by the natural instinct of intelligence. The mental atmosphere for adolescence should be one of truth to be embraced. Truth is the inspiring force needed in the education of the youth—truth rather than erudition and self-consciousness—all-pervading truth rather than the objectively isolated truth at which each of the diverse sciences aims. Here we are confronted with a natural and instinctive impulse toward some all-embracing truth, which must be shaped little by little to critical reflection, but which I should like to compare primarily to the trend of the first thinkers of ancient Greece toward an undifferentiated world of science, wisdom, and poetry. Common sense and the spontaneous pervasiveness of natural insight and reasoning constitute the dynamic unity of the adolescent’s universe of thought, before wisdom may achieve in man a stabler unity. Just as imagination was the mental heaven of childhood, so now ascending reason, natural reason with its freshness, boldness, and first sparkling ambitions, is the mental heaven of adolescence; it is with reasoning that adolescence happens to be intoxicated. Here is a natural impulse to be turned to account by education, both by stimulating and by disciplining reason.

Such are, to my mind, the considerations which should guide the teachers of youth in the most important and difficult part of their task, which consists in determining the mode in which the instruments of thought and the liberal arts are to be taught. The quality of the mode or style is of much greater moment than the quantity of things taught, it constitutes the very soul of teaching and preserves its unity and makes it alive and buoyant. If we seek to characterize the general objective of instruction at the stage of college education, we might say the objective is less the acquisition of science itself or art itself than the grasp of their meaning and the comprehension of the truth or beauty they yield. It is less a question of sharing in the very activity of the scientist or the poet than of nourishing oneself intellectually on the results of their achievement. Still less is it a question of developing one’s own mental skill and taste in the fashion of the dilettante by gaining a superficial outlook on scientific or artistic procedures or the ways and means, the grammar, logic, methodology thereof. What I call the meaning of a science or art is contained in the specific truth or beauty it offers us. The objective of education is to see to it that the youth grasps this truth or beauty by the natural power and gifts of his mind and the natural intuitive energy of his reason backed up by his whole sensuous, imaginative, and emotional dynamism. In doing that a liberal education will cause his natural intelligence to follow in the footsteps of those intellectual virtues which are the eminent merit of the real scientist or artist. The practical condition for all that is to strive to penetrate as deeply as possible into the great achievements of the human mind rather than to tend toward material erudition and atomized memorization. So I should say that the youth is to learn and know music in order to understand the meaning of music rather than in order to become a composer. He must learn and know physics in order to understand the meaning of physics rather than to become a physicist. Thus college education can keep its necessary character of comprehensive universality and at the same time till and cultivate the whole mind, made available and alive, for the tasks of man.

This essay is a chapter from Education at the Crossroads.

Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.

The featured image is “Two little girls being taught how to sew” (c. 1910), by Anna Ancher, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.