Modern Education and Classic - Eliot
Modern Education and Classic
"The progress of education of several countries has been one aspect a drift, from another aspect a push; for it has tented to be dominated by the idea of getting on".
Further, Eliot mentions,
"The Individual wants more education, not as an act of the acquition of wisdom but in order to get on; the nation wants more in order to get the better of the other nations, the class wants it to get better of the other classes, or at least hokd against them".
Therefore, Education is associated with technical efficiency on the one hand and writing on the other. The prime purpose of education is to become a tool to get more money, power over others, a better social position and at least a respectable job. "If these thongs would not be provided by education then there are very few people who will take the trouble to educate themselves"
Next, Eliot says, To dismiss the miserable 'stop-gap' idea and to diminish unemployment the age of enrollment of children should be raised. He refutes the idea of 'more years of education', and instead emphasises the government should make its elementary education as good as possible and limit the number of students treated in 'higher education'.
To overcome this problem of who should educate, how and why, Eliot discerns three tendencies in education i.e. the liberal, the radicalism and the orthodox.
"The liberal attitude is apt to maintain the apperently unobjectionable view that education is not mere acquisition of facts, but a traning of mind as an instrument, to deal any class of facts , to reason , and to apply training ontain in one depaerment apply in new one."
Liberalism, as per Eliot, assesses that students should choose the subject according to their own bent. But, he refutes that and says that it is a danger because students will become overspecialized in their desired subject, and they will be wholly ignorant of the general interest of human beings. In Eliot's view, "No one can become really educated without having persuaded some study in which he took no interest." For Eliot, liberalism committed the folly of pretending that one subject is as good as another for study.
Commenting on Radicalism, he says,
"Radicalism, which is offspring of liberlism, discard this attitude of univrsal toleration and pronounces Latin and Greek to be subject of little import."
It proceeds to organise the vital issues and rejects what is not vital. However, Radicalism can be applauded for wanting something to select and eliminate, even if it wants to select and eliminate wrong things.
In the third discern i.e. orthodox, Eliot says that the ideal society can be cultivated by preserving what is right and helpful for development, and discouraging what is useless and distracting. For this Latin and Greek should be preserved, and for their preservation all education must be religious. However, he does not want to confine education to the tenant of religion, but in education, the hierarchy of religion should be followed. He has opposed the secularization of education because in his view universities have lost any common fundamental assumption as to what education is for.
Being an orthodox follower Eliot supports Christian civilization and emphasises bringing back the monastic teaching and its expansion because only then Latin and Greek can survive. The other reasons are the following:-
- educational task of the communities should be the preservation of education within the cloister, uncontaminated by the deluge of barbarism outside.
- the provision of education for the laity.