Education - Jules Henry - from 'Culture against man'

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Published in the Summer 2006 Faculty page of Dr. Robert Thomas Ingoglia, Felician College

The function of education has never been to free the mind and spirit of man, but to bind them; and to the end that the mind and spirit of his children should never escape Homo sapiens has employed praise, ridicule, admonition, accusation, mutilation, and even torture to chain them to the culture pattern . . . for where every man is unique there is no society, and where there is no society there can be no man. Contemporary American educators think they want creative children, yet it is an open question as to what they expect these children to create. And certainly the classrooms – from kindergarten to graduate school – in which they expect it to happen are not crucibles of creative activity and thought. It stands to reason that were young people truly creative the culture would fall apart, for originality, by definition, is different from what is given, and what is given is the culture itself. From the endless, pathetic, "creative hours" of kindergarten to the most abstruse problems in sociology and anthropology, the function of education is to prevent the truly creative intellect from getting out of hand.

-- Jules Henry, Culture Against Man

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, on this familiar spot of ground walked other men and women as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions but now all gone, vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall be gone like ghosts at cockcrow.

-- George Macaulay Trevelyan


Dr. Robert Thomas Ingoglia
Associate Professor in the Department of History and Social Science
Felician College
Office in Kirby Hall 215
(201) 559-6135 (voice mail available)
ingogliar@felician.edu

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