Education means many things to many people

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 9, 2002 | by Stephen Goode

Because this is INSIGHT'S annual issue devoted to the goals and habits of higher education, for the people thought it fitting to quote some of the impressive minds and talents of the past on what education is and what it is not. Note that no one gives a final answer--something that would be very difficult, if not downright impossible. But they do offer fertile and sometimes funny suggestions.

Mark Twain, for example, aptly noted that "Cauliflower ain't nothing but cabbage with a college education," an observation only an American could have made. With equal acuity he described the often-revolutionary experience of becoming educated: "Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run."

Sometimes right up there with Twain was Tallulah Bankhead, an American actress of "stage and screen," daughter of a U.S. senator from Alabama and known as a master of biting repartee. Tallulah summed up her notion of being educated with the remark: "I read Shakespeare and the Bible and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education."

Another well-known wit, Oscar Wilde, had this to say about the subject: "Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever."

Of course others have taken a more serious approach. Seeking a metaphor that helps underline the distinction between a babe-in-arms and a mature, educated adult, Aristotle came up with: "Whereas ... a rattle is a suitable occupation for infant children, education serves as a rattle for young people when older."

Alexander Pope, the English poet of the early 18th century, penned this delightful couplet, familiar to many, even when they don't know its author's name or that he was cribbing from the Bible: "'Tis education forms the common mind,/Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined."

A century later, the Romantic poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott wrote: "All men who have mined out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education"--an observation so profoundly individualistic that it might have been made by an American.

And at about the same time, the American Thomas Jefferson, who wrote a great deal about what education should be in the newly founded republic that he helped form, offered this warning: "I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education."

The wife of another Founding Father, Abigail Adams, penned a warning of a different sort. Her concern was the education of women, neglected in her time: "It is really mortifying ... when a woman possessed of a common share of understanding considers the difference of education between the male and female sex, even in those families where education is attended to. ... Nay, why should [the male sex] wish for such a disparity in those whom they one day intend for companions and associates? Pardon me, sir, if I cannot help sometimes suspecting that this neglect arises in some measure from an ungenerous jealousy of rivals near the throne."

Lord Brougham, an enemy of slavery and founder of London University, was a man whose name may be unfamiliar but whose thoughts on education probably aren't. He had this to say: "Education makes a people easy to lead but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave." But it was the French 18th-century thinker Claude-Adrien Helvetius, who summed up what education does most succinctly: "Education made us what we are."