If western civilisation is in a state of permanent crisis, it is not far-fetched to suggest that there may be something wrong with its education. No civilisation, I am sure, has ever devoted more energy and resources to organised education, and if we believe in nothing else, we certainly believe that education is, or should be, the key to everything. In fact, the belief in education is so strong that we treat it as the residual legatee of all our problems. If the nuclear age brings new dangers; if the advance of genetic engineering opens the doors to new abuses; if commercialism brings new temptations -- the answer must be more and better education.
Schumacher then
distinguishes between two often confused concepts: know-how and culture: Science and
engineering produce 'know-how'; but 'know-how' is nothing by itself; it is a
means without an end, a mere potentiality, an unfinished sentence. 'Know-how'
is no more a culture than a piano is music.
According to Schumacher, the
fundamental objective of education, is:
[T]he transmission of
ideas of value, of what to do with our lives. There is no doubt also the need
to transmit know-how but this must take second place, for it is obviously
somewhat foolhardy to put great powers into the hands of people without making
sure that they have a reasonable idea of what to do with them. At present,
there can be little doubt that the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not
because we are short of scientific and technological know how, but because we
tend to use it destructively, without wisdom. More education can help us only
if it produces more wisdom.
But what does people mean
when they ask for education?
When people ask for
education they normally mean something more than mere training, something more
than mere knowledge of facts... Maybe they cannot themselves formulate
precisely what they are looking for; but I think what they are really looking
for is ideas that would make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to
them... If the mind cannot bring to the world a set... of powerful ideas, the
world must appear to it as a chaos, a mass of unrelated phenomena, of
meaningless events... Nothing has any meaning to him; nothing can hold his
vital interest; he has no means of making anything intelligible to himself.
 |
| Ernest Schumacher |
From this we can deduce that, for Schumacher, the materialist ideology, which leads precisely to these conclusions, is the direct consequence of an education that has lost its direction and mentions several ideas, direct consequence of this ideology, which have invaded education and are the cause of its failure and of the general loss of values. Among those pernicious ideas, the most important assert that all the higher manifestations of human life (religion, philosophy, art...) are just a superstructure erected to disguise and promote economic interests (Marx); or the dark agitations of a subconscious mind and the result of unfulfilled incest (Freud). He also mentions relativism, which dissolves all norms and leads to the undermining of the idea of truth; and positivism, which holds that valid knowledge can only be obtained through the methods of the natural sciences (i.e. that only "know-how" matters) and denies the possibility of knowing anything about meanings and purposes.
And where does this loss
of direction, this estrangement, take us?
Estrangement breeds
loneliness and despair, the 'encounter with nothingness', cynicism, empty
gestures of defiance, as we can see in the greater part of existentialist philosophy
and general literature today. Or it suddenly turns -- as I have mentioned
before -- into the ardent adoption of a fanatical teaching which, by a
monstrous simplification of reality, pretends to answer all questions.
Schumacher doesn't say
it, for by doing so he'd be ahead of his time, but it is clear to me that at
present this fanatical teaching and monstrous simplification of reality is
called gender
ideology.
Schumacher summarizes it
in this way: What,
then, is education? It is the transmission of ideas which enable man to choose
between one thing and another, or, to quote [Ortega y Gasset], 'to live a life
which is something above meaningless tragedy or inward disgrace'.
As a conclusion to this post,
let's quote another paragraph from this interesting chapter in Schumacher's
book, with which I totally agree:
Education cannot help us
as long as it accords no place to metaphysics. Whether the subjects taught are
subjects of science or of the humanities, if the teaching does not lead to a
clarification of metaphysics, that is to say, of our fundamental convictions,
it cannot educate a man and, consequently, cannot be of real value to society.
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