新编英语教程7下课文A NEW ENGLISH COURSELEVEL7 Unit714Text I.docVIP

Unit Seven The Aims of Education Alfred North Whitehead 1 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 on Gods earth.What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction.Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start from,and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art.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 mothers before the age of twelve.A saying due to Archbishop Temple illustrates my meaning .Surprise was expressed at the success in after-life of a man,who as a boy at Rugby had been somewhat undistinguished. He answered,It is not what they are at eighteen,it is what they become afterwards that matters. 2 In training a child to activity of thought,above all things we must beware of what I will call inert ideasthat is to say,ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised,or tested,or thrown into fresh combination. 3 In the history of education,the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning,which,at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius,in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine.The reason is,that they are overladden with inert ideas.Education with inert ideas is not only useless.It is,above all things,harmfulCorruptio Optimi ,Pessima. Except at rare intervals of intellectual ferment,education in the past has been radically infected with inert ideas. That is the reason why uneducated clever women,who have seen much of the world,are in middle life so much the most cultured part of the community. They have been saved from this horrible burden of inert ideas. Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred h