2) Rationality in Education
It happens that in the last few weeks I have been reading two books, both published this year, one written by an Englishman and one by an American. These books are superficially extraordinarily similar and fundamentally extraordinarily different. The two books are Lancelot Hogben's The Retreat from Reason and President Hutchins' The Higher Learning in America. Both of them are brief, one consisting of eighty-two pages, the other of one hundred and nineteen pages. Both books present material first given in public addresses. Both deal with basic educational problems in relation to contemporary conditions. Both are troubled deeply about education as it now exists and about contemporary life. Both are concerned with the place of reason and understanding in education and in life, Professor Hogben being profoundly affected by the eclipse of intelligence characteristic of present society and President Hutchins saying that the "most important job that can be performed in the United States is first to establish higher education on a rational basis, and second, to make our people understand it." Both books deserve the most serious attention and study on the part of educators.
2.1) THE NATURE OF RATIONALITY
At this point similarity ceases, save that there is some degree of agreement in spirit, if not in words, as to the causes that have occasioned our present ills. The profound difference between the two books, a difference which leads them to opposite condusions, lies in the conceptions respectively entertained by the two men as to the nature of what both call by the same name -- Reason. Mr. Hutchins looks to Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas in order to discover the nature of Reason and its modes of operation; Mr. Hogben looks to the activities of experimental science as the place in which to discover its real nature. To Mr. Hutchins the sciences represent in the main the unmitigated empiricism which is a great curse of modern life, while to Mr. Hogben the conceptions and methods which Mr. Hutchins takes to be the true and final definition of rationality are obscurantist and fatally reactionary, while their survival in economic theory and other branches of social "science" is the source of intellectual irrelevance of the latter to the fundamental problems of our present culture. Indeed, these disciplines are more than irrelevant and futile. They are literally terrible in their distraction of social intelligence and activity from genuine social problems and from the only methods by which the problems can be met.
This basic difference reflects itself in the authors' treatment of every aspect of education and social culture, both in themselves and in their connection with one another. Of these aspects I select three for special consideration: the constitution of human nature, the relation of theory and action, and the method of the working and development of "reason."
2.2) THE ELEMENTS OF HUMAN NATURE
President Hutchins is quite sure that the elements of human nature are fixed and constant. They "are the same in any time and place." One great business of education is "to draw out the elements of our common human nature." "The truth is everywhere the same." Hence, omitting details, "the heart of education will be, if education is rightly understood, the same at any time, in any place, under any political, social, or economic conditions." Mr. Hogben emphasizes equally common elements in human nature. But these elements are needs, and therefore the first questions to be considered "are whether the common needs of men as members of the same species, phylum, and type of matter, are at present satisfied, what resources for satisfying them exist, and how far these resources are used." Moreover, the needs in question are growing, not fixed; the needs for food, for protection, for reproduction, for example, are always the same in the abstract, but in the concrete they and the means of satisfying them change their content with every change in science, technology, and social institutions.
2.3) KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION
The bearing of this difference upon the relation of theory and social practice is close and direct. President Hutchins feels strongly that the invasion of vocationalism is the great curse of contemporary education. Mr. Hogben would agree as far as by vocational "we usually mean that [which] helps us gain a livelihood irrespective of the social usefulness of the occupation chosen." But the isolation of existing education, taken generally, from connection with social usefulness in distinction from personal pecuniary advancement, is the chief ground of his criticism of that education. The exaltation of knowledge as something too "pure" to be contaminated by contact with human needs and the resources available for satisfying them, he puts on the same level as the prostitution of learning to serve those needs of individuals that are due to the existence of competitive, acquisitive, pecuniary economic-social institutions and ideals -- if they can be called ideals. He quotes with approval the saying of Bacon that "the true and lawful goal of science is to endow life with new powers and inventions"; that of Boyle to value "knowledge save as it tends to use," and of Thomas Huxley, "the great end of life is not knowledge but action."