Alfred Whitehead
lived from 1861 to 1947
Alfred Whitehead was a mathematician and philosopher who collaborated with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica (1910-13).

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source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead (b.1861 - d.1947), British mathematician, logician and philosopher best known for his work in mathematical logic and the philosophy of science. In collaboration with Bertrand Russell, he authored the landmark three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913) and contributed significantly to twentieth-century logic and metaphysics.

Although there are important continuities throughout his career, Whitehead's intellectual life is often divided into three main periods. The first corresponds roughly with his time at Cambridge, from 1884 to 1910. It was during these years that he worked primarily on issues in mathematics and logic. It was also during this time that he collaborated with Russell. The second main period, covering the years from 1910 to 1924, corresponds with his time at London. During these years Whitehead concentrated mainly, but not exclusively, on issues in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of education. The third main period corresponds roughly with his time at Harvard, from 1924 onward. It was during this time that he worked on more general issues in philosophy, including the development of a comprehensive metaphysical system which has come to be known as process philosophy.

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A.N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell are the two giant intellectuals of the twentieth century.
Although I am no where near their intellectual capacity, I have thought over this question of education for a long time. I too am distraughted by the fact that education is definitely not an "efficient" system. We spent so many years in school, learning a lot of stuff we don't need later on. I guess the coming of the industrial age requires the majority of the population to be literate. Only mass education can provide that. But mass education means everyone would take more of less the same set of subjects.

 

 

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The Aims of Education and Other Essays (Alfred North Whitehead)

 

Chapter I: The Aims of Education

 

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling.

 

A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth.

 

It is not what they are at eighteen, it is what they become afterwards that matters.

 

Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful.

 

We enunciate two educational commandments, “Do not teach too many subjects,” and again, “What

you teach, teach thoroughly.”

 

Let the main ideas which are introduced into a child’s education be few and important.

 

If education is not useful, what is it? Is it a talent, to be hidden away in a napkin?

 

The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.

 

In scientific training the first thing to do with an idea is to prove it.

 

Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilization of knowledge. This is an art very

difficult to impart.

 

The mind is never passive; it is a perpetual activity, delicate, receptive responsive to

stimulus. You cannot postpone its life until you have sharpened it. Whatever interest attaches to

your subject-matter must be evoked here and now; whatever powers you are strengthening in the

pupil, must be exercised here and now; whatever possibilities of mental life your teaching should

impart, must be exhibited here and now. That is the golden rule of education, and a very

difficult rule to follow.

 

There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations.

 

You may not divide the seamless coat of learning.

 

Style is the ultimate morality of mind.

 

Style is the fashioning of power, the restraining of power.

 

The essence of education is that it be religious…A religious education is an education which

inculcates duty and reverence.

 

 

 

Chapter III: The Rhythmic Claims of Freedom and Discipline

 

The two principles, freedom and discipline, are not antagonists, but should be so adjusted in the

child’s life that they correspond to a natural sway, to and fro, of the developing personality.

 

There can be no mental development without interest.

 

The habit of active thought, with freshness, can only be generated by adequate freedom.

Undiscriminating discipline defeats its own object by dulling the mind.

 

It must never be forgotten that education is not a process of packing articles in a trunk.

 

Without the adventure of romance, at the best you get inert knowledge without initiative, and at

the worst you get contempt of ideas—without knowledge.

 

The untutored art of genius is—in the words of the Prayer Book—a vain thing, fondly invented.

 

It is the unfortunate dilemma that initiative and training are both necessary, and that training

is apt to kill initiative.

 

A certain ruthless definiteness is essential in education.

 

The secret of success is pace, and the secret of pace is concentration.

 

Education should begin in research and end in research….An education which does not begin by

evoking initiative and end by encouraging it must be wrong. For its whole aim is the production

of active wisdom.

 

Unless the pupils are continually sustained by the evocation of interest, the acquirement of

technique, and the excitement of success, they can never make progress, and will certainly lose

heart. Speaking generally, during the last thirty years the schools of England have been sending

up to the universities a disheartened crowd of young folk, inoculated against any outbreak of

intellectual zeal.

 

 

Inaugural Address at Saint Andrews (John Stuart Mill)

 

Education, in its larger sense, is one of the most inexhaustible of all topics.

 

Whatever helps to shape the human being—to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from

being what he is not—is part of his education.

 

[Education:] the culture which each generation purposely gives to those who are to be its

successors, in order to qualify them for at least keeping up, and if possible for raising, the

level of improvement which has been attained.

 

Their [universities’] object is not to make skilful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but

capable and cultivated human beings.

 

What the pupil should be taught here (…) is to methodize his knowledge: to look at every

separate part of it in its relation to the other parts, and to the whole.

 

The modes in which the human intellect proceeds from the known to the unknown.

 

This question, whether we should be taught the classics or the sciences….Why not both? Can

anything deserve the name of a good education which does not include literature and science too?

 

If the inexorable conditions of human life make it useless for one man to attempt to know more

than one thing, what is to become of the human intellect as facts accumulate?

 

Experience proves that there is no one study or pursuit, which, practised to the exclusion of all

others, does not narrow and pervert the mind.

 

It is this combination which gives an enlightened public: a body of cultivated intellects, each

taught by its attainments in its own province what real knowledge is, and knowing enough of other

subjects to be able to discern who are those that know them better.

 

Government and civil society are the most complicated of all subjects accessible to the human

mind.

 

It should be our aim in learning, not merely to know the one thing which is to be our principal

occupation, as well as it can be known, but to do this and also to know something of all the

great subjects of human interest; taking care to know that something accurately.

 

No once can in our age be esteemed a well-instructed person who is not familiar with at least the

French language.

 

It is the habit of mankind to mistake familiarity for accurate knowledge.

 

Without knowing the language of a people, we never really know their thoughts, their feelings,

and their type of character: and unless we do possess this knowledge, of some other people than

ourselves, we remain, to the hour of our death, with our intellects only half expanded.

 

Improvement consists in bringing our opinions into nearer agreement with facts.

 

The structure of every sentence is a lesson in logic.

 

To question all things; never to turn away from any difficult; to accept no doctrine either from

ourselves or from other people without a rigid scrutiny by negative criticism, letting no

fallacy, or incoherence, or confusion of thought slip by unperceived; above all, to insist upon

having the meaning of a word clearly understood before using it, and the meaning of a proposition

before assenting to it; these are the lessons we learn from the ancient dialecticians.

 

Early familiarity with the perfect makes our most imperfect production far less bad than it

otherwise would be. To have a high standard of excellence often makes the whole difference of

rendering our work good when it would otherwise be mediocre.

 

We are born into a world which we have not made; a world whose phenomena take place according to

fixed laws, of which we do not bring any knowledge into the world with us. In such a world we are

appointed to live, and in it all our work is to be done.

 

The most incessant occupation of the human intellect throughout life is the ascertainment of

truth.

 

There are but two roads by which truth can be discovered—observation and reasoning.

 

In what consists the principal and most characteristic difference between one human intellect and

another? In their ability to judge correctly of evidence.

 

The models of the art of estimating evidence are furnished by science; the rules are suggested by

science; and the study of science is the most fundamental portion of the practice.

 

Our first studies in geometry teach us two invaluable lessons. One is, to lay down at the

beginning, in express and clear terms, all the premises from which we intend to reason. The other

is, to keep every step in the reasoning distinct and separate from all the other steps, and to

make each step safe before proceeding to another; expressly stating to ourselves, at every joint

in the reasoning, what new premise we there introduce.

 

All men do not affect to be reasoners, but all profess, and really attempt, to draw inferences

from experience.

 

Logic lays down the general principles and laws of the search after truth.

 

Its [Logic’s] function is, not so much to teach us to go right, as to keep us from going wrong.

 

Wherever there is a right way and a wrong, there must be a difference between them, and it must

be possible to find out what the difference is; and when found out and expressed in words, it is

a rule for the operation.

 

There is nothing in which an untrained mind shows itself more hopelessly incapable, than in

drawing the proper general conclusions from its own experience.

 

Psychology, in truth, is simply the knowledge of the laws of human nature.

 

What we require to be taught on that subject [politics], is to be our own teachers. It is a

subject on which we have no masters to follow; each must explore for himself, and exercise an

independent judgment.

 

So far as these branches of knowledge have been acquired, we have learned, or been put into the

way of learning, our duty, and our work in life. Knowing it, however, is but half the work of

education; it still remains, that what we know, we shall be willing and determined to put in

practice.

 

Among [the Continental nations] it is even now observable that virtue and goodness are generally

for he most part an affair of the sentiments, while with us they are almost exclusively an affair

of duty.

 

If we wish men to practice virtue, it is worth while trying to make them love virtue, and feel it

an object in itself, and not a tax paid for leave to pursue other objects.

 

The mere contemplation of beauty of a high order produces in no small degree this elevating

effect on the character.

 

The Beautiful is greater than the Good; for it includes the Good, and adds something to it: it is

the Good made perfect, and fitted with all the collateral perfections which make it a finished

and completed thing.

 

In Art, the perfection is itself the object.

 

Let us strive to keep ourselves acquainted with the best thought that are brought forth by the

original minds of the age; that we may know what movements stand most in need of our aid, and

that, as far as depends on us, the good seed may not fall on a rock, and perish without reaching

the soil in which it might have germinated and flourished.

 

You and your like are the hope and resource of your country in the coming generation. All great

things which that generation is destined to do, have to be done some like you.