| If the proposition "education is relevant to the good life" is assumed as the fundamental presupposition of all education, then the question of how education relates to our substantive needs, and to intellectual and moral values, can be seen as the problem of education. Both progressivism and essentialism contend that education is an end in itself, meaning that the ends of education are built into the educative process. This implies that the relation of education to its ends is either logically necessary or is some form of organic connection.;It is argued that the essentialists' emphasis on intrinsic values fails to account for education of the whole person. Similarly, the progressives' concern with practical problems seems to abandon the structuring of the curriculum into disciplines and also fails to capture the wide range of educational problems. The ends of education, I contend, are not totally contained in the educative process. The tendency to conceive these ends as intrinsic to the educative process rests on a failure to distinguish between aims in education and aims of education, and consequently, the failure to see the non-instrumental and the instrumental justifications of education as complementary. If the process of education leads to the same intrinsic and extrinsic values as does the process of training, then education, like training, is a means to an end, and that end is the good life. It is argued further, that education is an open-ended aspiration prescribing no single or ultimate ideal. Rather, it enables individuals to perceive and to seek satisfactions through attaining a multiplicity of ends that constitute good living.;To the progressives, education is growth, a process of acquiring experience in the context of practical activity which orders our further experiencing and enables us to perceive connections and maintain continuities of action, and thus master and control the environment to serve our material and intellectual needs. Essentialism postulates that education is the pursuit of values and virtues which are embedded in theoretical activities, and which are valued for their own sake. Thus, to both schools of thought, education and its purpose are inseparable as means and ends. |
