For some time – for a pretty long time now, I suppose – it has seemed correct to me, and almost sufficient, to say that the purpose of formal education ought to be to help learners “use their minds with power and pleasure,” and for power and pleasure. The formulation still seems to me correct, if amended to read “the primary purpose” is to help the learner (learn how to) use her mind with (expanding) power and pleasure. The qualification, “primary,” begins to address the one shortcoming that is obvious to me, namely, that formal education is a social affair and its purposes and justifications must be understood socially, not solely with reference to the individual learner as if he were sufficient and answerable only to himself. I am reluctant, however, to amend my formulation to read “power and pleasure and responsibility.” I care enormously about responsibility, and I don’t know of any good teachers or healthy classrooms that don’t, in one or another and usually many ways, strive to teach it. But I don’t want to render my phrase drab and Puritanical. And I do want to assert that a recognition of the uniqueness of individuals—the waywardness, idiosyncrasy, unpredictability, cussedness, in-born capacity to conceive a new perspective, that is characteristic of the human person from infancy to death—is critical to their real education. If no one recognizes and makes a little room for that uniqueness, the individual does not thrive: neither in the early adventures of language nor in the later challenges of civic life.
Do “recognition” and “making a little room” belong high on the list of pedagogical virtues? I think so. Can they be taught and learned as practices of teaching? I think so. But I at least find them exceedingly difficult to teach. Perhaps because they are difficult to practice in the first place?
To return to the first point, and there, for now, to quit: Fostering learners’ abilities, and inclinations, to use their minds with power and pleasure seems to me a defensible (and, I hope, robust) formulation because it puts the learner and her or his mind at the center of our practical attention. That construction seems to me virtually definitional for “teacher” as ordinarily understood when we think about what we have valued ourselves as learners or would like our own children or others we know and care about to experience. To specify learning use of one’s mind for power and for pleasure is, of course, to make a normative claim of another sort, one entailing both allegiance to certain possibilities of intellect and hopes for certain possibilities for social life.
What a lovely post, Dirck. You list your primary purpose of education; that, I can deduce, would make the social purposes of education secondary. I am curious about the social aspects though. If you are teaching students to use their mind with/for power and pleasure, does that not automatically entail others? Engaging with others, learning with/from others, even understanding others can be an incredible experience - and while we take it for granted, completely changes the look and feel of our educational experiences. If I only interacted with one teacher, that teacher's purpose being to help me learn to use my mind, would I not be missing something vital? Opening myself to the thoughts and opinions, the wisdom and the questions of others is what allows me to use my mind to greater capacity. So, I would think that somehow the social aspects are quite integral and necessary to your primary purpose.
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