Education and the Gates of Civilization

Note: this post is a commentary to a lecture Prof. Stefaan Cuypers gave at KU Leuven’s Institute of Philosophy in 2013.
Philosophers that have thought about education have agreed, at least since the seventeenth century, on a slogan. For the great majority of them, the goal of education is ‘the improvement of the intellectual capacities and thinking skills of the student.’ It is very difficult not to find this or similar expressions in their works, whether explicitly stated or implied in many of their claims.
However, when it comes to the understanding of this improvement, and even, of the capacities and skills whose improvement is sought, the agreement disappears. One group of philosophers makes the assumption that, like the human body, the individual mind is something which is fully complete before its interaction with a social environment; and because of that, they think of education as a process analogous to training and construe intellectual competence as something similar to physical fitness. Other philosophers, on the other hand, think that the mind of the individual is something that is formed in its interaction with the social environment. Due to this basic assumption, they think, then, that education should be conceived as the introduction of the student into the thoughts, values and traditions of a specific manner of living. In this case, the underlying model for education is not training but cultivation, and intellectual competence is not thought of as physical fitness but as culture. (Note 1)
If R.S. Peters’ ideas are put against this backdrop it is easy to see them as an elegant and thorough defense of the second way of understanding education. Like many others before him, he sees education as the development of the child into a rational autonomous person. But he understands that this can only be achieved through the introduction of the child into a society. (Note 2) Like the painter or the pianist that before working on his or her style, first needs to learn the rudiments of the art; Peters claims that the child cannot develop his own style of living before society gives him the necessary equipment to be a person.

One of the fundamental claims of Peters’ ideas is that the role of the teacher does not consist in a simple passing down of information about the world and general guidance of conduct, but as a process through which the child is introduced into a tradition and that prepares him or her for the enjoyment of a particular cultural heritage. The concrete goal of education is not to transform the child into a rational person in general, but to transform him into a person that strives for rationality and reasonableness among the concrete ideas and values of the culture or civilization in which he lives.
The title of this note, of course, makes reference to a beautiful passage of R.S. Peters:
Now the teacher, having himself been initiated, is on the inside of these activities and modes of thought and conduct. … To ask him what the aim or point of this form of life is, into which he has himself been initiated, seems an otiose question. … This sort of question, he senses, can only be asked by barbarians outside the gates. … Are these hard men indifferent to all that constitutes being civilised? Children, to a large extent, are. They start off in the position of the barbarian outside the gates. The problem is to get them inside the citadel of civilisation so that they will understand and love what they see when they get there.
NOTES
(1) The contrast between these two manners of understanding education has been skillfully worked out by Oakeshott: “There are some minds which give us the sense that they have passed through an elaborate education which was designed to initiate them into the traditions and achievements of their civilization: the immediate impression we have of them is an impression of cultivation, of the enjoyment of an inheritance. But this is not so with the mind of the Rationalist, which impresses us as, at best, a finely-tempered, neutral instrument, as a well-trained rather than an educated man. Intellectually, his ambition is not so much to share the experience of the race as to be demonstrably a self-made man.” (Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays)
(2) “To educate means ‘to initiate others into a form of life, which they [the initiators] regard as desirable, in which knowledge and understanding play an important part” (P.H. Hirst and R.S. Peters, The logic of education); “The ideas and expectations of an individual centre of consciousness, however, do not develop as deposits out of an atomic individual experience… On the contrary they are the product of the initiation of an individual into public traditions enshrined in the language, concepts, beliefs, and rules of a society.” (R.S. Peters, Ethics and education)

