THE ORGANIZATION OF THOUGHT
Educational and Scientific
BY A. N. WHITEHEAD, Sc.D., F.R.S.
What is the ‘first commandment’ to be obeyed in any educational scheme?
It is this : Do not teach too many subjects.
The second command is this : What you teach, teach thoroughly.
Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty, and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore…
We have to remember that the valuable intellectual development is self-development, and that it mostly takes place between the ages of sixteen and thirty. As to training, the most important part is given by (parents) before the age of twelve.
In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call ” inert ideas “—that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
Education with inert ideas is not only useless : it is, above all things, harmful: Corruptio optimi, pessima…
…Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.
Let the main ideas which are introduced into a child’s education be few and important, and let them be thrown into every combination possible.
The child should make them her own, and should understand their application here and now in the circumstances of her actual life. From the very beginning of her education, the child should experience the joy of discovery. The discovery which she has to make, is that general ideas give an understanding of that stream of events which pours through her life, which is her life.
I mean ” understanding ” in the sense in which it is used in the French proverb, ” To understand all, is to forgive all.”
But if education is not useful, what is it?
It is useful, because understanding is useful.
I would only remark that the understanding which we want is an understanding of an insistent present. The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.