Peace: Understanding why our Education System has failed the species

Benson G. Clough is not a well-known name today, but more than a century ago he made statements about education that have much relevance to our current discussion. They are important enough that I reproduce all three paragraphs that come at the very beginning of his book “A Short History of Education.” Peculiarities in the text reflect the fact that he was an Englishman writing in 1904.

The History of Education is of supreme importance in its reference to the development of individual, industrial and national life. In studying this history many difficulties have arisen from a confusion between the terms Education and Instruction.

Life in all its stages is Education. One writer has gone so far as to say that the first two or three year of a child’s life are of the supremest importance, with regard to the foundation of character and the moulding of the future thought-life of the child. And those who have carefully watched the gradual, nay, almost imperceptible, growth of an infant’s power of appreciation and observation will readily understand the value from an educative point of view of the influence of externals. Like animals and plants, children assimilate themselves to their environment, and will, notwithstanding every endeavour to the contrary, reproduce in themselves the traits and faculties which they see in those about them.

Instruction comes later as a handmaid to Education, and involves the direct imparting of knowledge already accumulated from one who know to one who is at the time ignorant. Geography and History, for example, are largely questions of “instruction.” Mathematics and the allied sciences may be almost purely questions of “education.” In so far, however, as for their more rapid acquisition they involve the statement of facts previously acquired, these sciences approach the modern idea of education.

This is a powerful metaphor that sheds light on the failure of our education systems to effectively meet their goals of producing thoroughly educated humans. A handmaiden is a maid or servant working in the service of a master who holds the authority.

Theoretically, the servant works for the master but if the master does not provide any supervision or input the servant does what he/she thinks is best and the result may be nothing resembling what the master had in mind. For as long as our education systems have been in operation we have assumed they were guided by education when they have only known the acquaintance of the handmaiden of education.

The results are finally in. The handmaiden has done the best she could. Her work has not been entirely useless. We have made great achievements in science, technology, medicine and many other areas. But the ideas of a genuine handmaiden can never match the ideas of the master.

We cannot blame instruction for all our ills but being aware of the difference between education and instruction is important if we expect to solve our most pressing problems. The teachers are human. This means that they can only teach what humans know. There is no such thing as an over-achieving teacher. It is also true that students can only learn what they learn from others.

But our system of instruction is inherently fragmented because it is focused on the needs of groups of humans rather on the needs of the human race. We are not educating individuals to be humans but to serve different groups of humans. Built into that system are the seeds of inequality. The handmaiden has taken over the manor.