Highly recommended reading: Education at the Crossroads, by Jacques Maritain.
Though presently ignored, this work is destined to become a classic. Maritain presents the insights and analysis of modern education (especially in America), which we need now more than ever!
Like the philosophers Mortimer J. Adler and Hannah Arendt and the historian Christopher Dawson, Maritain clearly identifies the critical cultural crisis in modern education. Modern education is illiberal, and the only real solution to this fiasco is the return to a system of liberal education, properly understood.
“ANOTHER form of intellectualism, a modern one, gives up universal values and insists upon the working and the experiential functions of intelligence. It seeks the supreme achievements of education in scientific and technical specialization. Now specialization is more and more needed by the technical organization of modern life, yet it should be compensated for by a more vigorous general training, especially during youth. If we remember that the animal is a specialist, and a perfect one, all of its knowing-power being a fixed upon a single task to be done, we ought to conclude that an educational program which would aim at forming specialists ever more perfect in ever more specialized fields, and unable to pass judgment on any matter that goes beyond their specialized competence, would lead to a progressive animalization of the human mind and life.”
~Jacques Maritain: Education at the Crossroads.
Though presently ignored, this work is destined to become a classic. Maritain presents the insights and analysis of modern education (especially in America), which we need now more than ever!
Like the philosophers Mortimer J. Adler and Hannah Arendt and the historian Christopher Dawson, Maritain clearly identifies the critical cultural crisis in modern education. Modern education is illiberal, and the only real solution to this fiasco is the return to a system of liberal education, properly understood.
“ANOTHER form of intellectualism, a modern one, gives up universal values and insists upon the working and the experiential functions of intelligence. It seeks the supreme achievements of education in scientific and technical specialization. Now specialization is more and more needed by the technical organization of modern life, yet it should be compensated for by a more vigorous general training, especially during youth. If we remember that the animal is a specialist, and a perfect one, all of its knowing-power being a fixed upon a single task to be done, we ought to conclude that an educational program which would aim at forming specialists ever more perfect in ever more specialized fields, and unable to pass judgment on any matter that goes beyond their specialized competence, would lead to a progressive animalization of the human mind and life.”
~Jacques Maritain: Education at the Crossroads.
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