TITLE: The Aims of Education
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 24, 2006 11:36 AM
DESC:
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BODY:
I was cleaning out my briefcase and found a paper I read
last summer, Alfred North Whitehead's
The Aims of Education.
It's not about computing, of course, but it does argue quite
nicely that we should set higher goals for our institutions
of education than just knowledge, or just training for a
trade. In particular, we should aim to produce people "who
possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special
direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground
to start from, and their culture will lead them as deep as
philosophy and as high as art." I think that we can aim this
high in computer science, and even in our introductory
courses.
For Whitehead, to become educated is to learn the art of
using of knowledge. The using of
knowledge is essential; by themselves, facts and rules are
mere trivia to clutter the mind. We should always give
students the chance to do
something meaningful
while they learn -- say, manipulate media files -- as they
learn. Some believe that teaching students abstract knowledge
is valuable as a means of "sharpening" their minds, to ready
them for real thought later. But pumping inert knowledge into
the minds of students is a waste of time at best and hurtful
to them at worst:
The mind is never passive; it is a perpetual activity, delicate,
receptive, responsive to stimulus. You cannot postpone its life
until you have sharpened it.
The mind is already alive, eager to do something worthwhile.
If our topic elicits their interest, then our instruction
must let them run with it now. Only then will they learn
anything useful.
Whitehead argues strongly that students must learn both
broadly, to become a cultured citizen, and deeply in some
area, in order to fully appreciate the power and beauty of
ideas.
What education has to impart is an intimate sense for the power
of ideas, for the beauty of ideas, and for the structure of
ideas, together with a particular body of knowledge which has
peculiar reference to the life of the being possessing it.
I love that phrase: an intimate sense for the power
of ideas, for the beauty of ideas, and for the structure of
ideas. But this sense of intimacy can come only
when the student studies some area of knowledge deeply:
The appreciation of the structure of ideas is that side of a
cultured mind which can only grow under the influence of a
special study. ... Nothing but a special study can give any
appreciation for the exact formulation of general ideas, for
their relations when formulated, for their service in the
comprehension of life. A mind so disciplined should be both
more abstract and more concrete. It has been trained in the
comprehension of abstract thought and in the analysis of facts.
Whitehead felt that English education at the time he wrote
this essay (1929) suffered from a lack of this deep focus,
from a need for the sort of special study that develops
foresight:
The profound change in the world which the nineteenth century
has produced is that the growth of knowledge has given foresight.
The amateur is essentially a man with appreciation and with
immense versatility in mastering a given routine. But he lacks
the foresight which comes from special knowledge.
In short, expertise matters!
But does it matter what sort of expertise the student develops,
in the arts or the sciences, in literature or technology?
Not really, because the ultimate destination is the same in
all these areas: style.
Finally, there should grow the most austere of all mental
qualities; I mean the sense for style. It is an aesthetic sense,
based on admiration for the direct attainment of a foreseen end,
simply and without waste. Style in art, style in literature,
style in science, style in logic, style in practical execution
have fundamentally the same aesthetic qualities, namely,
attainment and restraint. The love of a subject in itself and
for itself, where it is not the sleepy pleasure of pacing a mental
quarter-deck, is the love of style as manifested in that study.
Here we are brought back to the position from which we started,
the utility of education. Style, in its finest sense, is the
last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful.
It pervades the whole being. The administrator with a sense for
style hates waste; the engineer with a sense for style economises
his material; the artisan with a sense for style prefers good work.
Style is the ultimate morality of mind.
He closes his essay with a claim that education is essentially
a religious exercise, though not religious in the sense the word
is typically used.
A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and
reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course
of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the
issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of
reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself
the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole
amplitude of time, which is eternity.
One of the beautiful things about computer science is that we
can learn powerful ideas, useful ideas, meaningful ideas --
and we learn how to make them come alive in programs. We can
create and control systems using these ideas. We can watch
their effects on the world, both at the level of technology
and at the level of the people who use the technology, or
whose lives are otherwise made better by the technology's
presence.
Not a bad little find, this essay.
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Postscript: When Whitehead discusses education as "the
acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge", he
writes a paragraph reminiscent of thoughts I had when
thinking about textbooks
a few months ago:
This is an art very difficult to impart. Whenever a textbook
is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain
that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach
from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. If
it were easy, the book ought to be burned; for it cannot be
educational. In education, as elsewhere, the broad primrose path
leads to a nasty place. This evil path is represented by a book
or a set of lectures which will practically enable the student
to learn by heart all the questions likely to be asked at the
next external examination.
I am certain that many of my colleagues would find the textbook
I'm using in CS1 this fall, Guzdial and Ericson's
Introduction to Computing and Programming with Java:
A Multimedia Approach,
difficult to use. The topics are in a different order from
other CS1 books. The ends of the chapters don't provide
lots of handy little exercise on if statements and
for loops that many professors like to assign in
homework and offer on exams. It doesn't even have the sort
of programming assignments one might expect. Instead, it
asks interesting questions about media, and computing with
media. It asks students to extend what they've learned to
some new facet of the current topic. But there is no right
answer to most of these questions, which leaves students and
instructor to exercise judgment in selecting tasks and
evaluating work. Shocking! Maybe some real education will
take place.
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