When will the public cease to insult the teacher’s calling with empty flattery? When will men who would never for a moment encourage their own sons to enter the work of the public schools cease to tell us that education is the greatest and noblest of all human callings?
–William C. Bagley, Craftsmanship in Teaching, 1907
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Not the cry, but the rising of the wild duck inspires flight.
–Michael Oakeshott
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So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
–F. Scott Fitzgerald
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“Then, if this is true,” I said, “we must hold the following about these things: education is not what the professions of certain men assert it to be. They presumably assert that they put into the soul knowledge that isn’t in it, as though they were putting sight into blind eyes.”
“Yes,” he said, “they do indeed assert that.”
“But the present argument, on the other hand,” I said, “indicates that this power is in the soul of each, and that the instrument with which each learns–just as an eye is not able to turn toward the light from the dark without the whole body–must be turned around from that which is coming into being together with the whole soul until it is able to endure looking at that which is and the brightest part of that which is. And we affirm that this is the good, don’t we?”
“Yes.”
“There would, therefore,” I said, “be an art of this turning around, concerned with the way in which this power can most easily and efficiently be turned around, not an art of producing sight in it. Rather, this art takes as given that sight is there, but not rightly turned nor looking at what it ought to look at, and accomplishes this object.”
–Plato, The Republic, circa 380 B.C.E.
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The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.
–Plato, The Republic, circa 380 B.C.E.
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Anyone who says that there is no need to give people instruction about what, or how, to teach, if it is the Holy Spirit that makes men teachers, may as well say that there is no need for us to pray, since the Lord says, ‘Your Father knows what you need before you ask him’ [Matt. 6: 8]; or that the apostle Paul should not have instructed Timothy and Titus on what or how to teach others.
–St. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 426 A.D.
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Education, in a great measure, forms the moral characters of men, and morals are the basis of government. Education should therefore be the first care of a legislature, not merely the institution of schools but the furnishing of them with the best teachers . . . I shall almost adore that great man who shall change our practice and opinions and make it respectable for the first and best men to superintend the education of youth.
–Noah Webster, “On the Education of Youth in America,” 1790
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To specify the labors which education has yet to perform would be only to pass in review the varied interests of humanity. Its general purposes are to preserve the good and to repudiate the evil which now exist, and to give scope to the sublime law of progression. It is its duty to take the accumulations in knowledge, of almost six thousand years, and to transfer the vast treasure to posterity. Suspend its functions for but one generation, and the experience and the achievements of the past are lost. The race must commence its fortunes anew, and must again spend six thousand years, before it can grope its way upward from barbarism to the present point of civilization.
–Horace Mann, “Means and Objects of Common School Education,” 1837
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Education must be universal. It is well, when the wise and the learned discover new truths; but how much better to diffuse the truths already discovered amongst the multitude!
–Horace Mann, “Means and Objects of Common School Education,” 1837
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The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.
–Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 1845
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Philosophers have only studied the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
–Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845)
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I say moreover that you make a great, a very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind’s laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by using its originality . . . A science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress; but what particular thing he shall positively do within those lines is left exclusively to his own genius. One genius will do the work well and succeed in one way, while another succeeds as well quite differently; yet neither will transgress the lines.
–William James, Talks to Teachers On Psychology; and To Students On Some of Life’s Ideals, 1892
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I believe that every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of social order and the securing of the right social growth. I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.
–John Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” 1897
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The fundamental factors in the educative process are an immature, underdeveloped being; and certain social aims, meanings, values incarnate in the matured experience of the adult. The educative process is the due interaction of these forces. Such a conception of each in relation to the other as facilitates completest and freest interaction is the essence of educational theory.
But here comes the effort of thought. It is easier to see the conditions in their separateness, to insist upon one at the expense of the other, to make antagonists of them, than to discover a reality to which each belongs. The easy thing is to seize upon something in the developed consciousness of the adult, and insist upon that as the key to the whole problem—that of interaction—is transformed into an unreal, and hence insoluble, theoretic problem. Instead of seeing the educative steadily and as a whole, we see conflicting terms. We get the case of the child vs. the curriculum; of the individual nature vs. social culture. Below all other divisions in pedagogic opinion lies this opposition.
–John Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum, 1902
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I am in the heartiest agreement with those among my colleagues who maintain that a knowledge of subject-matter is a primary essential in the equipment of a teacher. I cannot, however, agree with anyone who maintains that a knowledge of subject-matter is the only primary essential. Subject-matter may be looked upon as the means of education, the instrument of education. But back of any means, back of any instrument, must stand end, purpose, function, ideal. May I repeat that statement in another way, for it is fundamental to my position? It is just as essential that the teacher have a clear conception of the purpose of his work as that he have a clear knowledge of the materials with which he works,–for materials and instruments are always impersonal factors until they become means for realizing–they may subserve evil ends and undesirable ends just as readily as desired ends. Is it not the failure thus to discriminate between purposes and instruments that has caused a great deal of the ineffective work in education? I beg of you to help me in correcting the prevalent belief that instruction in educational science is confined to a discussion of specific and general methods of teaching. This is a narrow conception that has done the cause of professional education study no end of embarrassment in the past.
–William C. Bagley, 1910, “Some Possible Functions of a School of Education,” School and Home Education 30 (December 1910): 136-141.
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It is necessary to remember, then, that while the construction of standards is a task of paramount importance, while it is perhaps the most promising field that the scientific study of education has so far exploited, it is not the only task that confronts us. If the history of our art teaches us anything, it is that nostrums, panaceas, and universal cure-alls in education are snares and delusions. In a field of activity so intricate and so highly complicated as ours, it is both easy and disastrous to lose the perspective. To keep this clear perspective must be our constant struggle. We must give up the notion of solving all of our problems in a day, and settle down to a patient, painstaking, sober, and systematic investigation. In our craft, the attitude of finality is fatal.
–William C. Bagley, 1912, “The Need of Standards for Measuring Progress and Results,” Journal of Proceedings of the Fiftieth Annual Meeting (p. 639). Ann Arbor, MI: National Education Association of the United States.
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The fundamental issue is not of new versus old education nor of progressive against traditional education but a question of what anything whatever must be to be worthy of the name education . I am not, I hope and believe, in favor of any ends or any methods simply because the name progressive may be applied to them. The basic question concerns the nature of education with no qualifying adjectives prefixed. What we want and need is education pure and simple, and we shall make surer and faster progress when we devote ourselves to finding out just what education is and what conditions have to be satisfied in order that education may be a reality and not a name or a slogan.
–John Dewey, Experience and Education, 1938
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Several factors have contributed to the tendency of American educational theory to overemphasize “instrumental” functions and to obscure background functions,–to overemphasize “utilitarian” values and to neglect “interpretive” values. In the first place, the American tradition is a utilitarian tradition. It glorifies the “man of action.” It emphasizes the “practical.” Ridicule of “book learning” was a favorite frontier sport, and as such, it has left its impress upon the national mores,–modified only with respect to that type of book learning that will help one to “get on” . . . A second factor has been the dominance of American educational theory by the pragmatic philosophy. Here the emphasis is upon the workability of facts, principles, and hypotheses, and while a narrow utilitarianism is not necessarily inherent in the pragmatist’s teachings, the philosophy easily supplies a rationalized justification of this attitude.
–William C. Bagley, Education and Emergent Man, 1934
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Without dwelling in detail on the various factors which, it is claimed, enter into the making of national groups, there are certain common elements which must be accepted. These are a common language which makes for like-mindedness, a common history, a sense of common interests, group consciousness, a common government, common political ideals, a common economic and social order, all of which combine to make up a common culture. The task of education is to initiate the younger generation into this common culture, if it is to enter into meaningful partnership in and responsibility for their heritage . . . Much of the unrest in American education is due to the fact that as a profession educators have not devoted themselves to the task of discovering either the existence or the character of American culture, the deeper and profounder moral and spiritual influences which distinguish this country from others. Misled by some of its superficial aspects we have promoted the cult of individualism, the result at once of the national and democratic faith in equality of opportunity and of success due to free competition and exploitation. We have on the whole not paid due regard to the cultivation of objects of social allegiance, to quote a phrase used by John Dewey, presumably because of a certain aversion to the term national culture as subject to misinterpretation . . . For the last two decades educational theory has been carried away by blind faith in the cult of the individual and has failed to distinguish between two facts–that instruction demands an approach through a sympathetic understanding of the individual and that the task of education is to train the individual as a member of the social order in which he lives. If this means indoctrination, as it does, then it is inevitable.”
–Isaac L. Kandel, “Can the School Build a New Social Order?,” The Kadelpian Review 12 (January 1933): 143-153.
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The heart of the problem of educational revival lies in the reform of the preparation of teachers for elementary and secondary schools and the establishment of the teaching career on as dignified a professional basis as is enjoyed by other professions. The classroom teacher should have greater opportunities for participating in leadership instead of being a ‘hand’ in a system even if the system is administered by a good board of education, a good superintendent, and a good principal. The success of an educational system depends on what goes on in the classroom and, therefore, on the teacher. External control of and dictation to the teachers are likely to militate against that clarity of aim and purpose which are essential to successful work. Further, other methods of rewarding successful teachers should be found than promotion away from the classroom. As the burden of administration of an educational system takes on more of the characteristics of big business, other sources of leadership must be found. With increased professional preparation, the status of teachers and administration has changed markedly since the days when there may have been some justification for the ‘factory system’ of administration . . . But such activities will be of no avail unless every student in every school in the country is taught by teachers who are professionally competent. And professional competence means a mastery of subject matter as well as a knowledge of the techniques of teaching. The two sides of competence have too long been separated, and the time has come to realize that they are aspects of the same single activity.
–Isaac L. Kandel, “Revival of American Education,” The Educational Forum 24 (March 1960): 277–278.
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In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.
–Lee Iacocca
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Don’t burn the social science scholars. But don’t believe them without a large grain of salt. And if you must use them, consult widely and apply the eclectic arts.
–Joseph Schwab, “The Social Sciences,” 1980