That question cannot be answered without asking and answering another--what is education for? In the event it problem were suddenly put to pupils in school, at to students while attending college, or perhaps to their parents, I doubt if all of them could, around the unexpectedly, give a clear and convincing reply. The majority of us are educated because our parents from it, or because attendance in class is a habit of our universe, or because it's compulsory, or because it is apparently essential to success in be conclusive causes of desiring education or, at any getting from this exactly what it needs to give; and if we go to back of out minds, we're more likely to rise from my meal there replete perhaps but ill-nourished. Let me, therefore, start by asking that which you seek in education. In answering this, I shall ignore to target the main of most.
Obtain the catalogues with the colleges in america. You will discover courses in innumerable subjects. Will there be any common feature in these courses? Is there any aim which all of them have? I think that there is a common feature and that every course given has a similar aim. They all aim at the first-rate; the purpose of every course is to help the student to learn what is first-rate inside the particular subject that she studies. When it is a program in English, the target is the fact that he ought to know what's good English; if it's a course in agriculture, that he should know the most effective methods in framing; when it is a training course in cookery or perhaps in dressmaking, it's to show the pupil how to cook or make dresses effectively. This is also true of the course in any other subject--its aim is to show what exactly is first-rate for the reason that subject. This is actually the common thread that runs through all education. Whether we are teachers or students, we ought to get firmly inside our minds the notion that other things that will come incidentally, education will be incomplete and unsatisfactory whether it doesn't offer a clear look at what if first-rate inside the subject studied. Otherwise we might have got some knowledge, but we shall not need got education.
Educated activities spring in the creative and intellectual faculties of human nature, including literature, art, architecture and music. I ought to life to add sciences and architecture, however in these two subjects it is difficult for just about any but the expert to estimate quality, and several educated individuals have not the close knowledge necessary to judge are employed in them. On the other hand people have close and daily contract with one other four. Architecture surrounds him in each and every city, literature meets him on every bookstall, music assails his ears on his radio set and form and color is a part of everyday life. The architecture may regularly be bad, the literature and music often puerile, the art often undeserving of the name; that is even more reasons why we should be able, within then, to differentiate good from bad.
To gauge through the literature offered us in hotel bookstands, and by most of the music played on the radio by juke-boxes, we might become more discriminating over these fields than we're. When it be said that music and art and literature usually are not essentials of life but its frills, I'd reply that, if so, it's curious they are one of the few immortal things on earth, and that, should a guy which being remembered two thousand years hence, the sole certain way is to create a fantastic poem or book, compose a great symphony, paint an excellent picture, carve a fantastic sculpture, or build a great picture. For those who have any doubts concerning this, consider why long-dead people like, Plato and Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Raphael, Ictinus and Bramante, are remembered today.