What Does Education Educate?
Donnelly, Francis P.
WHEN, in an epistolary controversy about mental tests, I declared that I was trying to understand what tests really tested, my opponent countered with the recommendation that I find out what...
...A tutor for every child and a specialist for every power," may be tomorrow's slogan...
...But do not be too quick to determine exactly what you are training...
...If testers do not know what they test, it is not mere smartness to ask, What does education educate...
...Yet an educationalist or a tester cannot possibly carry on without faculties, whatever he may call them, any more than a biologist can do without cells or a physicist without molecules, or a chemist without the ultimate elements of his science, though at the present writing it may not be certain just what precisely are the carriers of chemical phenomena...
...When the habit is formed and becomes automatic, education may have to be kept up, but it has attained its goal...
...Man acts as differently through his ultimate mental powers as he does through his eye and ear...
...We contribute dispositions, not habits, to the blood stream...
...Man is one being in whom are operating many activities, and who shall say how many are exercised in one simple act...
...Vocational guidance is excellent, but vocational training conducted in schools is an unreal and exorbitant toy of but limited educational value...
...As a physicist you might trace your^ cause still further...
...Herbart has ostracized the word, faculty, from all refined educational circles...
...Monroe (I.e...
...There lies before you a multiplicity of diverse effects—scratches, bends, breaks, charrings, dust, reeking odors—a scrap-heap...
...The act and the power which carried the act were in the same class, and an act was not a substance, but an accident in the philosophical sense...
...but pupils are assemblages of faculties waiting to be played upon and set vibrating to melodies whose enduring echoes are formed habits...
...If every faculty were specific there need be no education...
...Such opinions are often put forth today to justify the multiple and heterogeneous programs of vocationalism...
...Let those, then, who are trying to keep heads steady amid the wild and whirling words of modern theorists put to educators the question of this paper and sift with Socratic persistence the philosophy or lack of it in' the answers they evoke...
...He calls the learning of the largely automatic movements in trades "instruction," not education...
...AH powers are specific in such a philosophy, and perhaps for Montessorians all powers are individual...
...Just as operation means the perfection of anything because it implies a habit, so operation means also the perfecting of a thing because the act produces the habit...
...Thus, as a mechanic you account for the automobile wreck...
...If education and habits are convertible terms, then a controversy vexing moderns is at once settled...
...His followers do not seem to have followed Herbart's complete philosophy, but they do accept this conclusion, not valid except on his philosophy, that there are no faculties...
...His feet have the art of dancing, developed into an art through practice...
...Sortais: Traite de Philosophic, 1:9...
...Education means an equipment of flexible habits, general in application, not specialized to the easy automatism of a definite trade...
...Monroe's positive teaching that the faculties are "separate" (better, "distinct") "modes of activity or types of organization" is consonant with scholastic philosophy...
...Well, at that time I had read a score of articles and books on tests, and since then I have read other writers, but I still honestly, though reluctantly, confess that I have not arrived at a full understanding of the subject...
...When you ask what is educated, you will find that the something within us which Is the carrier of education receives In contemporary tests and treatises every name furnished by Roget's Thesaurus, with one notable exception...
...Good habits are the guarantee of all proper functioning...
...You train what you train and there is no transfer of training because habits do not leave the faculties in which they are developed...
...WHEN, in an epistolary controversy about mental tests, I declared that I was trying to understand what tests really tested, my opponent countered with the recommendation that I find out what tests meant before I discussed them in public...
...The article goes on to quote Saint Thomas without references, and hopelessly confounds "distinction" with "separation" and "spiritual" with "material," There was, it is true, a difference of opinion among the scholastics on the nature and distinction of faculties, but no one ever held that they were separated entities...
...just what the scores signify concerning intelligence in general is in dispute...
...Education and what is educated are popular words that everyone uses, but few understand with a Newmanic realization...
...Such a statement travesties the scholastic teaching on faculties...
...If education consists in operative habits impressed upon a faculty, teachers have in that succinct philosophy a full course in methods...
...Encyclopaedia of Education: Monroe, Faculty...
...The right solution of the thorny problem of moral training is disclosed in our versatile formula...
...cites some moderns who go to the opposite extreme and hold that there is no general faculty, for example, of perception, but "faculties for perception of squares, circles, triangles, etc...
...They exist and act as gasoline exists and acts...
...Nor is gasoline fictitious for the one who does not know its chemical formula...
...His feet are educated...
...If the will functions properly, it has character, which is spirit culture...
...Automatism comes quickly in trade habits, and that is why Newman denies the name of education to trades...
...The science teacher will look forward to the day when these faculties shall be trained to stop, look, listen, to weigh, to compare likenesses, and to detect causes, and finally to arrive at discovery, the joy and triumph of science...
...Refer scratches to a scratcher, breaks to a breaker...
...Personal leadership, the contagion of high example, the stirring revelation of noble lives, the constant, every-day and enveloping aura of religion in concrete manifestations, these are the inspiration and development of character—character, the panoply of a rightly functioning will...
...To impress habits upon faculties is...
...Education is, therefore, more of an art than a science...
...A dancer knows what is educated...
...Finally, this philosophy of habits gives us the best definition of that elusive term, culture...
...capacities, aptitudes, activities, abilities and what-not, but we are positively forbidden to have faculties...
...the fundamental reason of all education...
...That is a philosophy of education, exemplified in history and founded upon common sense, and from it you know what education educates and why...
...dust to a triturator, and odors to a scent-giver, and you have not gone to causes, you have not philosophized at all...
...Don't play at a few trades in school but learn specific trades in the trades...
...These acts and powers are not separate, but mutually interactive, because man is one being...
...Many educational theorists give an entirely erroneous view of the teaching of traditional philosophy concerning faculties...
...Pupils are not capacious baskets for odds and ends of information, even though every bit of live information vitally imparted provokes some educational reaction...
...Morality lies in virtue, and virtue is an operative habit of the will, as art is an operative habit chiefly in the mind and education an operative habit everywhere...
...how far it is justifiable to treat the scores by ordinary arithmetic is not known...
...The educator need not soar to the metaphysics of faculties, nor dig down into their physiology and into their corporal accompaniments, although from both sciences he will accept what is helpful...
...There are no schools called for to teach the blood to circulate...
...That is a specific work determined by nature...
...Finally, in the realm of morals, education does not consist in definitions...
...Much more is that true today when machines form the largest part of trades...
...It fosters the formation of right habits and demands, as all art does, the highest ideals and the best exemplars of those ideals bequeathed to us by the past...
...What could one conclude about the spot tomorrow from the photograph of one whirlpool today in the tossing waters of Niagara Falls...
...Their definition, as the definitions of all else, presupposes or initiates a philosophy...
...Only the best of objects will ensure perfect functioning, and perfect functioning is, as I fancy you know by this time, the measure of being and the result of habit...
...The whole modern movement of tests has validity only on the supposition that the operation which is rated according to standard argues a habit rooted in a power...
...We are permitted to have powers...
...But if you are a scientist, you will reduce all common effects to a common cause, and you will finally arrive, not at a name, but at a reality—at mass and velocity and gasoline and combustion of various substances and at other causes, some actual powers, others the acts of powers—all required for the total effect, each act or power incapable of further reduction, ultimate in its class, and distinct from the other causes...
...The true teaching of faculties is based on the solid principle of causality, a principle without which there can be no science at all...
...The teacher of literature will not remain forever at the study and analysis of a text or at its critical appreciation, but will vision minds, memories, judgments, imaginations, tastes of a class, all equipped with proper habits and functioning in what is the true goal of art and its delight, artistic creation...
...page 38...
...No one can possess an education or conceive of a science treating of it unless there is a carrier to sustain the habits which education engenders...
...The school for that reason must always present to its students, not the average, nor the contemporary, unless it excel, but the best, the classical in every department...
...A good dancer need not know whether he operates through mechanism or through vitalism, nor is he expected to know the anatomy of the feet or be able to number the bones and muscles and nerves, but he cannot very well do without feet...
...thus a recollection was accounted for by referring it to the faculty of memory which produced it, and so on...
...There you have a simple philosophy which will stand the probings of Socrates and serve as a brief course in pedagogy for the sorely harassed modern...
...Take a mass of wreckage which was once an automobile...
...You have invented nouns to fit a number of abstractions and you deserve the ridicule of Moliere's sleep-giver that gives sleep...
...Take a recent authority purporting to give that teaching: "The soul was fitted out with a number of ready-made faculties...
...Thorndike writes: "Just what the tests measure is not known...
...Edward Lee Thorndike of Columbia University, one of the leaders in the test movement, gives me consolation in my ignorance...
...If the mind functions properly, there is mental culture...
...Ever since Socrates started what a student called the first instance of the "third degree," and endeavored to bring ideas out of their nebulous state by giving clearcut significance to popular words, definition has been the goal of all science...
...Thus memory did not produce recollection, but the soul by the act of a power recalled the past, as man by the sight of his eyes sees a scene...
...Nest-building is not a matter of education, but house-building is...
...If the body functions properly, it has health, which is corporal culture...
...Acting in a fashion analogous toi that of the physicist, the psychologists attribute specially different effects to specifically different causes in man...
...The powers are not "fictitious units" (Monroe, I.e...
...Neither did the scholastic philosophers go to the extremes of those whom Moliere rightly ridicules because they made of every act an abstraction which they called a faculty...
...In the Encyclopaedia Britannica, thirteenth edition, under the heading, Intelligence Tests, Dr...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 8
