“Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself,
and in some ways am fairly easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave
that and go back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education
in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if
I’m the child’s parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize
that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society. A
society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that
society takes for granted. Now the
crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of
education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate
the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and
girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to
the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians.
“The paradox of education is
precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to
examine the society in which he is being educated. The
purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to
look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to
himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether
there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and
then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own
identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person
around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will
simply obey the rules of society. If
a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The
obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine
society and try to change it and to fight it—at no matter what risk.
This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies
change.”
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