When most people think of the word education, they think of a pupil as a sort of animate sausage casing. Into this empty casing, the teachers are supposed to stuff education.
But genuine education, as Socrates knew more than 2,000 years ago, is not inserting the stuffings of information into a person, but rather eliciting knowledge from him; it is the drawing out of what is in the mind, writes Sydney J. Harris (“What True Education Should Do”, 1994).
“Pupils are more like oysters than sausages. The job of teaching is not to stuff them and then seal them up, but to help them open and reveal the riches within. There are pearls in each of us, if only we knew how to cultivate them with ardour and persistence,” he wrote.
Character is the aim of true education, says a classic 1967 article, “Why Education?” in Improvement Era. “True education seeks to make men and women not only good mathematicians, proficient linguists, profound scientists, or brilliant literary lights, but also honest men with virtue, temperance, and brotherly love. It seeks to make men and women who prize truth, justice, wisdom, benevolence, and self-control as the choicest acquisitions of a successful life.”
True education is not just about acquiring knowledge. “Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education,” said notable civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.