Education for a human society
Media
Part of Panorama
- Title
- Education for a human society
- Creator
- Hutchins, Robert M.
- Language
- English
- Year
- 1965
- Rights
-
- Fulltext
- Vol. XVII MANILA, PHILIPPINES No. 10 EDUCATION FOR A HUMAN SOCIETY Our educational ideals these days are expressed in the phrase “marketable skills”. But entirely apart from the inability of the educational system to keep up with the mar ket and forecast what skills it will buy, and entirely apart from the inefficiency of vocational training in school as com pared with that on the job, the idea of producing market able skills is ignoble and degrading for an educational sys tem. It is an ideal that seduces the system into doing what it cannot and should not do and that forces it to neg lect what it can and should do. What education can and should do is help people be come human. The object of education is not manpower, but manhood. This object we are now able to attain. We can now make the transition from a working to a learning society. . . The man who is truly educated, rather than narrowly trained, is ready for anything. He has developed his human powers and is able to use them and his under standing of the world to meet any new problem he has to face. He is prepared by his education to go on learning. ... The democratic society is the learning society par ex cellence. . . The law, the professions, the voluntary asso ciations to which we belong, the political campaigns through which we suffer — all the institutions in our society should be regarded as teachers. Through them, as well as through the educational system, we can learn how to become human and how to organize a human society. — By Robert M. Hutchins, Saturday Review.