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Education, correctly defined,
means training toward growth and maturity to prepare a person to
deal, in a flexible and successful way, with the problems of life
and of
eternity.
It does not
mean, as it increasingly is taken to mean by the
educational operationalists who now control our educational
bureaucracy, obtaining a ticket of
admission to some other bureaucratic structure, however large and
rich that may be.
Education in
operational terms has no meaning (as all operational definitions
have no meaning) because it has no reference outside itself, and
all meaning must be based on reference to something outside the
object being defined. Until recent centuries, meaning was defined
in terms of purpose and goals, but, as teleology fell into
disrepute, meaning came to mean context as a whole (a belief which
has always been held in most Asiatic
countries).
Today,
over-specialization and the
great speed of change have destroyed, or almost destroyed, the
context of everything, and we are reduced to purely
operational definitions and
meanings.
But, since all
operational definitions are solipsist, and everything in the world
today has become isolated and subjective, any meaning in either
teleological or contextual or even functional terms has become
impossible and we are faced with the total triumph of the
Meaningless and The Absurd. American education has
followed this process and is now speeding toward ruination of all
education in terms of individual maturity and ability to cope with
any whole human experience or
meaning.
http://www.carrollquigley.net/Articles/Is-Georgetown-University-Comitting-Suicide.htm
No
education is worth much which does not help those who receive it to
understand the world in which they live and to feel more at home
and more confident in the
world.
For many years, the experience of Americans in their
academic institutions has not been helping, but rather has
hindered, that process.
That
experience has tended to be a kind of
brainwashing, seeking, in most cases, to establish a
bourgeois or (in recent years) a petty bourgeois
outlook.
On the higher levels of the system, this has been
supplemented by a steadily narrowing of training for a place in the
bureaucratic structures which now dominate American life, in
business, in government, in education itself, in religion, the law,
medicine, and the defense forces. This is reflected in
earlier, and in more and more narrow, specialization and in the
increasing pedantic nature of so much of the work done in all
fields.
On one side, this leaves so-called
educated people incapable of understanding the rapidly changing
society in which we live and, as the opposite side
of the same situation, leaves us facing gigantic problems to whose
understanding and solution the existing educational structure has
little to contribute (that is why they became
gigantic).
This can be seen most clearly by asking ourselves the
simple question: "In which of our academic disciplines do these
problems fall?" Or more concretely, "From which of the
existing academic disciplines would we recruit someone to enlighten
us on each of these problems?" However we word these questions,
there is no answer, for the simple reason that the great problems
of our day do not fall into any one academic discipline, and,
indeed, cannot be dealt with by committees made up of persons from
different academic specialties.
http://www.carrollquigley.net/Articles/Obsolete-Academic-Disciplines.htm
The cognitive techniques
derived from our underlying outlook have
included
( a) using analysis rather
than synthesis in seeking answers to
problems;
(b) isolating problems and
studying them in a vacuum instead of using an ecological
approach;
(c) using techniques based
on quantification rather than on qualification study done in a
contextual situation;
(d) proceeding on the
assumption of single-factor causation rather than pluralistic,
ecological causation;
and
(e) basing decisions and
actions on needs of the individual rather than needs of the
group.
In our society, if we want to know how something functions, we take
it apart, cut it up, isolate it from its context; we analyze its
factors and assume that only one is an independent
variable.
We then quantify the changes
this independent variable makes in all the other variables that are
assumed to be dependent on it. Then we make the independent
variable one link in a chain of such independent variables, each
surrounded by its system of dependent variables, the whole forming
a chain going back to some original cause in the past or extending
forward in a similar chain to some ultimate goal in the
future.
From such reasoning, given to us from the Greeks through Aristotle,
we got the "final" causes ( or goals) and the "Unmoved Mover" (that
which is the first cause of all movement and does not itself move)
of Aristotelian metaphysics, and, today, we still use this way of
thinking, even though we no longer believe in Aristotle's
metaphysics.
The now obsolescent mode of thought and cognition just described
might be contrasted with a newer method which is, incidentally,
closer to the thinking processes of southern and eastern Asia,
which were never much influenced by transcendental Hebrew
monotheism or by Greek two-valued logic.
This newer (or older) way of looking at experience tries to find
how anything functions by seeing its relationships to a larger
system and, ultimately, to the whole cosmos. To do so, it uses an
ecological and qualitative approach, seeking to grasp the whole
contextual situation of innumerable factors, all of which are
changing at once, not only by quantitative changes within a fixed
identity (such as Western logic can handle) but with constant
shifts of identity and quality.
This more intuitive and less logical point of view is now sweeping
the West as is evidenced by the fact that our traditional Western
categories and cognitive assumptions were rejected not only by
youthful hippies but also by those hardheaded, analytical people on
whom the survival of the West depends.
The stumbling
block, of course, is that our whole institutional setup is based on
the old method of thought. For example, our
educational system is based on the methods of categorization,
specialization, and quantification, which must be replaced.
This old method
of thought is seen on the lower levels, where objective tests
assume such things as two-valued logic (True, False), the principle
of contradiction (Yes, No), and the principle of
retained identity, just as, on the highest levels, the great
increase in the use of computers assumes the possibility of
objective analysis and quantification of life experiences.
It is difficult
to reform our old methods of thinking no matter how bankrupt they
may be. Standing in the way of change are the
pressures exerted by institutionalized establishments, the profits
of powerful groups producing equipment based on old ways of
thinking, and the need which the large bureaucratized organizations
have for persons with narrow technical training in the older
cognitive patterns.
http://www.carrollquigley.net/Articles/Needed-A-Revolution-in-Thinking.htm
