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 (Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile) Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education. .. We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgement. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education.
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Education is derived from the Latin 'educare' (to bring up) and 'educere' (to draw out, lead forth).
Many definitions have been given of the word education, but underlying them all is the conception that it denotes an attempt on the part of the adult members of a human society to shape the development of the coming generation in accordance with its own ideals of life. It is true that the word has not infrequently been used in wider senses than this. For example, J. S. Mill included under it everything which helps to shape the human being ; and, with some poetic licence, we speak of the education of a people or even of the whole human race. But all such usages are rhetorical extensions of the commonly accepted sense of the term, which includes, as an essential element, the idea of deliberate direction and training. No doubt, all education is effected through the experiences of the educated, and much of it is indirect, consisting mainly in. the determination of the form of experiences other than those of direct precept, compulsion and instruction. But it does not follow that all experiences are educative. Whether an experience is part of an individuals education or not is determined by its origin. Whatever be its effect, it is educative in so far as its form has been arranged with greater or less deliberation by those who are concerned with the training of him whose experience it is. It follows that an education may be good or bad, and that its goodness or badness will be relative to the virtue, wisdom and intelligence of the educator. It is good only when it aims at the right kind of product, and when the means it adopts are well adapted to secure the intended result and are applied intelligently, consistently and persistently.
Education is, thus, a definitely personal work, and will vary between wide extremes of effectiveness and worth in any given society. For in all times and places there are wide differences in virtue, wisdom and capacity among those who have in their hands the care and nurture of the young. But ,the inference that, therefore, no comparative estimate of the education of different times and places can be made would be fallacious. For, despite all differences in conception and efficiency among individual educators, each expresses, more or less perfectly and clearly, the common conception and energy of his age and country. As these rise or fall the general level of the actual educative practice rises or sinks with them. The first essential for succecsful educative effort is, then, that the community as a whole should have a true estimate of the nature and value of education.
EDUCATIONAL THEORY
In any comparative estimate of different places and times, as tested by the standard just given, it must be borne in mind that, except in the most general and abstract form, we cannot speak of an ideally best education. Looking at the individual to be educated, we may say with Plato that the aim of education is to develop in the body and in the soul all the beauty and all the perfection of which they are capable, but this leaves quite undecided the nature and form of that beauty and perfection, and on such points there has never been universal agreement at any one time, while successive ages have shown marked differences of estimate. We get nearer to the point when we reflect that individual beauty and perfection are shown, and only shown, in actual life, and that such life has to be lived under definite conditions of time, place, culture, religion, national aspirations and mastery over material conditions. Perfection of life, then, in the Athens of the age of Plato would show a very different form from that which it would take in the London or Paris of to-day. So an individualistic statement of the purpose of education leads on analysis to considerations that are not, in themselves, individualistic. The personal life is throughout a relation between individual promptings to activity and the environment in which alone such promptings can, by being actualized, become part of life. And the perfection of the life is to be sought in the perfection of the relations thus established. So far, then, as any conception of education can give guidance to the actual process it must be relative in every way to the state of development of the society in which it is given. Indeed, looked at in the mass, education may be said to be the efforts made by the community to impose its culture upon the growing generation. Here again is room for difference. The culture in question may be accepted as absolute at least in its essentials, and then the ideal of education will be to secure its stability and perpetuation, or it may be regarded as a stage in a process of development, and then the ideal will be to facilitate the advance of the next generation. beyond the point reached by the present. So some ages will show a relatively fixed conception of the educative process, others will be times of unrest and change in this as in other modes of social and intellectual life.
It is in these latter times that the actual work of education is apt to lose touch with the culture of the community. For schools (q.v.) and universities (q.v.), which are the ordinary channels through which adult culture reaches the young, are naturally conservative and bound by tradition. They are slow to leave the old paths which have hitherto led to the desired goal, and to enter on new and untried ways. If the opposition to change is absolute, there must come a time when the instruments of education are out of true relation to the desired end. For change in culture ideals means change in the specific form of the goal of education, and consequently the paths of educative effort need readjustment. When the goal of the past is no longer the goal of the present, to follow the ways which led to the former is to fail to reach the latter. Continuous readjustment, by small and almost imperceptible degrees, is the ideal at which the educator should aim. When this is not secured, the educational domain is liable to sudden and violent revolutions which are destructive of successful educative effort at the time they occur, however beneficial their results may be in the future.
But the relation of adjustment is not entirely one-sided. The tone of thought and feeling and the direction of will induced by education. necessarily affect the common ideals of the next generation, and may make them better or worse than those of the present. Hence, the educator must not blindly accept all current views of life, but rather select the highest. For the average thought of every community is obviously below its best thought; and may, in some pointsat any rate, be lower than the best thought of a past age. While, then, all true education must be in direct relation with the culture of its age and country, yet, especially on the ethical side, it should aim at transcending the average thought and tone.
Still more does this imply that education strives to transcend the present condition of the educated by making their life more rational, more volitional, and more attracted by goodness and beauty than it would otherwise be. It can never be a passive watching of the childs development. No more fundamental error can be made than the assumption that edtication can be determined wholly, or even mainly, by the tendencies and impulses with which a child is endowed. Its real guiding principle must be a conception of the nature to which the child may attain, not a knowledge of that with which it starts. The educator studies the original endowment of the child and the early stages in the development of that innate nature in order that he may, wisely and successfully, employ appropriate means to direct further development and to accelerate its progress towards a more rational, complete and worthy life; not that he may the more skilfully give facilities to the child to drift about on the unregulated currents of caprice.
Such considerations show the importance of an insight into the theory of education on the part of all who are practically concerned with its direction. But the theory required is no system of abstract ideas ignoring the real concrete conditions of the life for which the actual education it is to guide is a preparation. To approach the subject only from the standpoint of the mental sciences which underlie it is to run the risk of setting up such a body of abstractions, whose relation to real life is neither very close nor very direct. The most profitable way of developing an educational theory for the present is to trace how in the past education has consciously adapted itself, more or less truly and fully, to the conditions of culture and social life; and by analysis to discover the reasons for comparative success or failure in the degree of clearness with which the end to be sought was apprehended and the nature of the children to be trained was understood.
In all ages the claims of the individual and those of the community have struggled for the mastery as the ultimate principles of life. As one or the other has prevailed the conception of education has emphasized social service or individual success as the primary end. The true harmony of human life will only be attained when these two impulses, contradictory on their own level, are united in a higher synthesis which sees each as the complement of the other in a life whose purpose is neither simple egoism nor pure altruism. Until that conception of life is attained and held generally there can be no sure and universally accepted conception of the aim and function of education. Much of the interest of the history of education i turns on the relation of these two principles as determinants of its aim.
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 (Confucius, Analects) Study the past if you would define the future.
I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge; I am one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there.
Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.
 (Plato) The object of education is to teach us to love beauty.
(Plato, Republic) The just man will so regulate his own character as to be on good terms with himself, and to set those three principles {reasons, passion, and desire} in tune together, as if they were verily three chords of a harmony, a higher, and a lower, and a middle, and whatever may lie between these; and after he had bound all these together and reduced the many elelments of his nature to a real unity as a temperate and duly harmonized man, he will then at length proceed to do whatever he may have to do.
 (Aristotle, Politics, IV) What we have to aim at is for the happiness of each citizen, and happiness consists in a complete activity and practice of virtue. .. Happiness is the conscious activity of the highest part of man according to the law of his own excellence, not unaccompanied by adequate, external conditions.
(Aristotle, Politics, Bk. VII) The three things which make men good and virtuous: nature, habit, and reason .. must be in harmony with one another (for they do not always agree); men do many things against habit and nature, if reason persuades them that they ought. .. All else is the work of education; we learn some things by habit and some by instruction.
(Aristotle, Ethics) Now if arguments and theories were able by themselves to make people good, they would, in the words of Theognis, be entitled to receive high and great rewards, and it is with theories that we should have to provide ourselves. But the truth apparently is that, though they are strong enough to encourage and stimulate young men of liberal minds, though they are able to inspire with goodness a character that is naurally noble and sincerely loves the beautiful, they are incapable of converting the mass of men to goodness and beauty of character.
(Aristotle, In Education) Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents, for these gave only life, those the art of living well.
(Aristotle, In Education) The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.
(Euripides) Learned we may be with another mans' learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own: [I hate a sage who is not wise for himself]
(Stobaeus) What use is knowledge if there is no understanding?
(Seneca) non vitae sed scholae discimus. [We are taught for the schoolroom not for life]
 (Michel de Montaigne, The Essays) Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it? .. But in truth I know nothing about the philosophy of education except this: that the greatest and the most important difficulty known to human learning seems to lie in that area which treats how to bring up children and how to educate them.
(Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile) Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education. .. We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgement. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education.
(Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile) I will say little of the importance of a good education; nor will I stop to prove that the current one is bad. Countless others have done so before me, and I do not like to fill a book with things everybody knows. I will note that for the longest time there has been nothing but a cry against the established practice without anyone taking it upon himself to propose a better one. The literature and the learning of our age tend much more to destruction than to edification.
(Friedrich Nietzsche, 1880) The Teacher as a Necessary Evil. Let us have as few people as possible between the productive minds and the hungry and recipient minds! The middlemen almost unconsciously adulterate the food which they supply. It is because of teachers that so little is learned, and that so badly.
 (Albert Einstein talking to a group of school children. 1934) My dear children: I rejoice to see you before me today, happy youth of a sunny and fortunate land. Bear in mind that the wonderful things that you learn in your schools are the work of many generations, produced by enthusiastic effort and infinite labour in every country of the world. All this is put into your hands as your inheritance in order that you may receive it, honour it, and add to it, and one day faithfully hand it on to your children. Thus do we mortals achieve immortality in the permanent things which we create in common. If you always keep that in mind you will find meaning in life and work and acquire the right attitude towards other nations and ages.
(Albert Einstein, 1954) There are only a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style and with good taste within a century. What has been preserved of their work belongs among the most precious possessions of mankind. We owe it to a few writers of antiquity (Plato, Aristotle, etc.) that the people in the Middle Ages could slowly extricate themselves from the superstitions and ignorance that had darkened life for more than half a millennium. Nothing is more needed to overcome the modernist's snobbishness.
(Albert Einstein, On Education, 1950) ... knowledge must continually be renewed by ceaseless effort, if it is not to be lost. It resembles a statue of marble which stands in the desert and is continually threatened with burial by the shifting sand. The hands of service must ever be at work, in order that the marble continue to lastingly shine in the sun. To these serving hands mine shall also belong.
(Albert Einstein, 1954) The development of science and of the creative activities of the spirit in general requires still another kind of freedom, which may be characterised as inward freedom. It is this freedom of spirit which consists in the independence of thought from the restrictions of authoritarian and social prejudices as well as from unphilosophical routinizing and habit in general. This inward freedom is an infrequent gift of nature and a worthy objective for the individual.
.. schools may favor such freedom by encouraging independent thought. Only if outward and inner freedom are constantly and consciously pursued is there a possibility of spiritual development and perfection and thus of improving man's outward and inner life.
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