ABSTRACT
The problem of secondary education, as we habitually pose it, consists almost entirely in the institution of more or less methodical enquiries into the relative educational merits of the arts and sciences. Thus formulated, there can be little hope of an objective solution, for it is far too vulnerable to personal preferences. Everyone inclines towards the dictates of his own temperament. This is why these debates most frequently degenerate into conflicting pleas for and against, depending on whether the protagonist’s own intellectual bent is more towards aesthetic subtlety rather than scientific precision, whether he is more interested in artistic emotions than in positive knowledge, or vice versa. As you have seen, we have been concerned to pose the question in quite different terms. We have not been enquiring whether we should educate through the medium of the literary disciplines rather than through that of scientific disciplines, but rather what aspects of reality it is most appropriate to teach. The fact is that forming the mind, which is the ultimate aim of secondary education, is not a matter of training it in the void by means of formal gymnastics. It consists in getting it to acquire the essential habits and attitudes, so that it can fruitfully confront those different aspects of reality with which it is ultimately destined to deal, and so that it can make sound judgments about them. These attitudes can be acquired by the mind only when it is made to face things directly, as they are and as they operate. It is by practising doing this that the mind will acquire the structures it needs. This is why the crucial question is to find out what objects it is appropriate for the intellect to tackle. There are two major categories of things which it is essential for man to understand: the first is man himself, the second is nature. Hence the two great fields of study: on the one hand, the humanities, human minds, the manifestations of consciousness; on the other, the physical universe.
