Interesting thoughts in our times of global connection and mass information, when we need meaning and values above mere accumulation of facts, and quality above mere quantity, recalling T. S. Eliot's words:
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
‘[P]oetry is the language not of quantifiable and computable fact, but of the soul, whose meanings and values are immeasurable.’
ReplyDeleteThis is a timely reminder at a time when increasing emphasis is being placed on sciences and market-oriented courses to the detriment of the Humanities in education systems.
Of course, this is no new trend, as Mr Gradgrind’s philosophy of education in Hard Times (1854) testifies:
“NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”
But as the author of this blog points out, we now undeniably live in a ‘utilitarian world’ where some segments of education professionals run the risk of becoming primarily, not to say exclusively, concerned with job opportunities, wages and computable results. And how interesting it is to note that, according to Charles Dickens, this conception of education is rooted in the belief that man is nothing but a ‘reasoning animal’.
Teaching should indeed be informed by the transmission of learning, imaginative vision and love for beauty in literary creation, which only the human soul in its unique quality and complexity is capable of producing.
Kudos to this promising initiative. I do look forward to reading more of these posts and having stimulating discussions with all contributors to this blog.
COKETOWN, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.
ReplyDeleteIt was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.
These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. The rest of its features were voluntary...
(Charles Dickens, **Hard Times**, 1854)
It is hard to think of a more visionary author than Charles Dickens.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete... and they were these.
ReplyDeleteYou saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there—as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M’Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.
A town so sacred to fact, and so triumphant in its assertion, of course got on well? Why no, not quite well. No? Dear me!