Comment:

Education––in adulthood we know its value for the development of individual potential capacities. For youth engaged in getting it, it is an onerous chore.

But society has a whole recognizes its necessity and decrees that young people must obtain it because, as Will Durant points out, it is the technological, intellectual, moral, and artistic heritage that we call civilization.

SCIENCE

and

Philosophy


	Durant, Will: "Education" The Pleasures of Philosophy, Simon and Schuster, New York 1953 (185 words)— a different view of education


		Education We dislike education, because it was not presented to us in our youth for what it is. Consider it not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates, but as an ennobling intimacy with great ideas. Consider it not as the preparation of the individual to “make a living,” but as the development of every potential capacity in him for the comprehension, control, and appreciation of his world. Above all, consider it, in its fullest definition, as the technique of transmitting as completely as possible, to as many as possible, that technological, intellectual, moral, and artistic heritage through which the race forms the growing individual and makes him human. Education is the reason why we behave like human beings. We are hardly born human; we are born ridiculous and malodorous animals; we become human, we have our humanity thrust upon us through the hundred channels whereby the past pours down into the present that mental and cultural inheritance whose preservation, accumulation and transmission place humankind today on a higher plane than any generation has ever reached before.