Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3140

Typed transcription by Spencer MacCallum of random recorded conversation with Heath.

February 1955

 

 

The function of a liberal arts college is to build and develop personality, to make men not only capable, but versatile in their capa­cities. Specialization without a liberal arts education can have grotesque results. An enormously qualified physical scientist may be more than a nullity in almost any other field. His expertness does not qualify him for anything else. It is as though an expert chess player could impose sound judgment in musical criticism or in the operation of an employment agency, to say nothing of the administration of public affairs.

A liberal arts education develops versatility, broad conceptions of the fundamentals, but not the minutiae, in every possible field of intellect and affairs. A person so educated may then choose an apprenticeship or professional training, and his choice can be intelligent because exercised over a wide field of basic information and understanding.

                                “Isn’t intelligent choice                                           derived from a knowledge of                                          one’s own bents?”

He will be aware of his own tastes and capacities, and in addition his breadth of fundamental information will enable him to choose intelligently his own special field. And when he enters such field, his practice of it will be vastly more efficient and enlightened because he will understand not only the technical particulars of what he is doing, but will see his own trade or profession in its true relationship to all the other cultural activities of his social milieu (environment).

     Education is for the whole man. Specialization without the foundation of a liberal education is for social robots. Let us beware of them.

 

     We have prostituted the word education. To the Greeks, it meant the development of the whole personality, and those who inculcated it were called philosophers.

 

“You might say just the opposite of ‘inculcate,’ Popdaddy; e-duco, or

e-ducere means to ‘lead’ or ‘draw out.’”

With the Greeks, however, as with us, it was necessary to “train the young idea how to shoot” — that is, to civilize the little savage and to build into him such behavior as would qualify him for adult society. This they relegated to somewhat inferior persons whom they called pedagogues, and whose function was discipline rather than development, repression as much as education.

Due to this confusion of function, much of our so-called education is merely pedagogy — establishing conditioned reflexes to ensure uniform behavior con­ditions. In this narrow sense of education as pedagogy, Pavlov’s well-con­ditioned dogs had perhaps better “educated” minds than many college graduates, who become graduates only because in class rooms and examinations they developed automatically the prescribed behavior in response to the applied stimulus.

Plato, speaking of the gods as creators, said, “He shall be as a god to me who can rightly define, and divide.” There is no greater need in the field of education than the need for defining it as education, and thereby dividing it from mere pedagogy as the mere establishing of conditioned reflexes.