The Aims of Education and Other Essays

Overview

About one hundred and seventy pages, a collection published in 1929 of addresses on education and on the nature of mathematics and science, given mostly to teachers between 1912 and 1928. The title essay attacks inert ideas, knowledge received without being used or tested, and insists that education should teach a few things thoroughly. The Rhythm of Education proposes that learning passes through stages of romance, precision and generalisation.

Other essays discuss technical and classical education, the place of universities, the organisation of thought and the anatomy of some scientific ideas.

What happens

The aims of education. Whitehead warns against inert ideas, urges that few subjects be taught and those thoroughly, argues that the child should be made to feel that what is learned will be used, and attacks external examinations as the enemy of this.

The rhythm of education. Learning moves through cycles of romance, precision and generalisation, and the great error of schools is to begin with precision, the grammar of a subject, before the pupil has felt the romance that gives the grammar a point.

The rhythmic claims of freedom and discipline. The same cycle governs the alternation of freedom and discipline: freedom first, then discipline, then freedom again at a higher level, and a discipline imposed without the freedom before it produces only dullness.

Technical and classical education. Whitehead argues that technical education must include the liberal, and that the classics can still be defended, but only if taught as a way into a civilisation rather than as a discipline of grammar.

Universities. The university exists to preserve the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning, and it fails when it becomes either a school or a research institute.

The organisation of thought. The closing essays, given to scientific audiences, treat the nature of mathematics, the anatomy of scientific ideas such as space and time, and the way thought organises experience, applying the same rhythm to the growth of science.

How to read it

Read the phrase inert ideas as the book’s instrument, a name for a failure every reader has suffered, and notice how much of the argument it sets in motion.

Pay close attention to the rhythm of romance, precision and generalisation, and test it against your own learning of any subject you know well.

Notice the recurring insistence that what is taught be taught with the understanding that it will be used, and ask what a curriculum built on that principle would leave out.

Consider the defence of the university as the meeting of young and old in the adventure of ideas, and weigh it against what universities have become.

Read these essays alongside Dewey’s Democracy and Education to compare two philosophers of the same years arguing that education is the use of knowledge rather than its reception, and to see where they part.

Questions it raises

• What is an inert idea, exactly, and is there any knowledge that must be received before it can be used?
• Does the rhythm of romance, precision and generalisation describe how people actually learn, or how Whitehead wished they were taught?
• Is the insistence on teaching few things thoroughly compatible with a world in which the things worth knowing multiply?
• What happens to the argument against external examinations in a system that runs on them?
• Can the university be the meeting of young and old in the adventure of ideas and also the research institution and credentialing agency that it has become?
• Why do the essays on mathematics and scientific ideas belong in a book on education, and what do they say about how Whitehead thought science was learned?