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8 What is Education Kant 5 Questions and the Epic of Europe The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant, posed four questions he believed were at the heart of any educational quest: What can I knowr What may I hoper What ought I to dor What is Manr It's surely one of the great ironies of modern life that Germany, a national culture which revered Kant as the ultimate ubermensch, created a form of youth training which virtually extinguished philosophical curiosity at home, and aggressively exported its system throughout the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. You need only Google Horace Mann's famous "Seventh Letter to the Boston School Committee" to dispel any lingering illusions that American compulsory schooling is a home-grown product, or that it aims to transmit "basic skills" as those are generally thought to be. At root, it is German. All of Kant's questions must be grappled with before a usefUl curriculum can be set up to reach the ends you wish. But if you duck this work, or are tricked into ceding it to an official establishment of specialists (or coerced into doing the same thing), it shouldn't surprise 145
WEAPONS OF MASS INSTRUCTION you to find yourself and your children broken on the wheel of somebody else's convenience, someone else's priorities. You'll never come close to the exalted condition education can offer, where money and fame don't matter very much, as long as you remain content to memorize somebody else's definition of the thing, but reflecting seriously on what someone else says about it isn't worthless. It can bring you closer to your own truth - as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, "I can't define it, but I know it, when I see it:' With that in mind, I'm going to offer you no comprehensive definition, but three "probes" into the mystery: one from an unusually acute travel writer named James Salter; one from a statement I gave to a Senate committee seventeen years ago; and one from a free verse scribbled on a legal pad while I was wrestling with the idea for a letter I intended to send to my granddaughter, Kristina, which you'll find as Chapter Nine in this book. James Salter was looking for a way to capture in words the admiration he felt for the continent of Europe and its history. He began by saying that Europe helps to clari£}r Kant's questions: The thing it finally gave me was education, not the lessons of school but something more elevated, a view of how to endure: how to have leisure, love, food, and conversation, how to look at nakedness, architecture, streets, all new and seeking to be thought of in a different way. In Europe the shadow of history falls upon you and, knowing none of it, you realize suddenly how small you are. To know nothing is to have done nothing. To remember only yourself is like worshipping a dust mote. Europe is on the order of an immense and unfathomable classroom, beyond catalogue or description. Confronted with the mighty epic of Europe and its inexhaustible bounty, Salter is able to see how far "the lessons of school" are from education. Look around you at America, as he did Europe: did your own schooling teach you how we got this way
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A Dedication for the Family Builder
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