Even when I was a boy, I was often told that I had to do well in school if I ever hoped to get a good job. Such advice presumes that education is a means to an end, not an end in itself. It is only a step from that presumption to a complete re-definition of the word education. In The Theory of Education in the United States, Albert Jay Nock distinguishes between formative and instrumental knowledge. The former "trained the mind in a certain way, and it provided the student with the wisdom of centuries of thought and experience. ... A mind filled with formative knowledge is well-equipped to turn to any occupation. Once through this course of study, the student might go on to higher education, or to a training academy, any number of things." The latter "is practical knowledge. It trains us to get a job. It trains us to perform certain tasks, and to function in certain areas." The former is called formative because it forms character and personality. Its primary benefit is to enrich its possessor's life. The latter is called instrumental because it is purely functional. The idea that a person should go to school in order to learn to appreciate life and art, and to think clearly and speak what he thinks clearly and eloquently is alien to our society. How many people with Ph.D.s today spend any time listening to Beethoven's late quartets or even stop into a musem to see a favorite painting by a favorite artist - a Chardin still life, shall we say, or a Sargent watercolor? How many read the classics? Such things are not mere entertainments. They are a means of enriching the soul.
Thank you for following up on your previous post. Your explanations are clear, and I agree with you about the differences between the emphasis on either formative or instrumental educations. I share your preference for the formative model (which probably is made more obvious when you understand that I make my living as a teacher of literature in a university), and I share your concerns about what is missing in a person's life when he or she has invested his or her educational energies into an instrumental model; the latter may better prepare a person to pay the bills because of the focus on job preparation, but the former has the potential for producing Renaissance men and women who are more completely involved in the more meaningful aesthetics of life. I would like to believe that the pendulum will someday swing back to the formative model, but I would be naive to invest too much belief in that kind of cultural shift. So, in the alternative, I personally choose to believe that literature can make a difference, even if embraced only a little bit by students in their instrumental curricula. They may have their minds set upon lucrative careers, and that is what their curricula will prepare them for when they leave school, but I remain confident that their minds also have plenty of room for the aesthetics of life.
ReplyDeleteMy anecdotal answer to your last two questions is "almost all of them." I'm assuming that your examples are synecdoches.
ReplyDeleteI only know a few science PhDs, though. Maybe they are different. But the PhDs I know, their souls are reasonably well enriched.