ABSTRACT
Most of the themes that dominate The Informed Vision emerge in the title essay [the first essay in Hawkins’ book]. For David Hawkins an informed human vision is the ultimate goal of education. Education is not, not first and foremost, a utility, a means of growth, of ‘producing a population increasingly ready to embrace and further the new industrial technology which development requires’; nor is it primarily a means to economic or political power, either for individuals or for classes. It is, in its essence, a way of informing and enhancing the human vision, of sustaining a sense of involvement and of commitment within our world, of ‘being at home in the world’, a quality which also implies ‘that we very well understand the opposite condition of non-involvement, the many moods of alienation’. The most important kind of estrangement in our own world, ‘derives from the fact that the extraordinary technological and material evolution of the last century or two expresses a way of life and thought that has been genuinely available only to a minority among us. To the rest it is, in essence, an alien affair’. The consequence is twofold: the majority are deprived both of a proper sense of involvement and commitment in our world, and of access to the means of power which depend upon a knowledge they do not share, while the select and privileged minority who do possess the knowledge, divided as they are from the rest of society, are inevitably ‘subject to all the corruptions of caste and status’. ‘A world so deeply committed to science’, and to other forms of symbolic knowledge, ‘cannot survive with a vast majority of its population intellectually and aesthetically alienated from’ these forms.
