Western Professor Huxley Perfectly Defines true Education!

|| Namaste ||

Today we're going to look at what some Western Intellectuals thought about true Education. It is not that Indian ways are always spiritualistic and morally correct whereas the western ways are always materialistic and destructive. From the past few days, I am reading a book called "Gandhism :- A Quest for new civilization." As the name suggests, the book is entirely on Gandhi's views on true culture, true society and a perfect civilization. Apart from all his controversies floating around, his ideas in this book are genuinely fantastic. His thoughts on education, politics, society etc really stole my heart.

Thus, it was in this book that I learnt about Thomas Henry Huxley. To give a short description of his magnanimous life, he was a biologist and anthropologist who worked specially in the field of anatomy. He is known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. He too, like other western pomps of those times, believed in gradual evolution of animals and humans and subscribed to the theory of natural selection.

During his life, and especially in the last ten years after retirement, Huxley wrote on many issues relating to the humanities. Perhaps the best known of these topics is Evolution and Ethics, which deals with the question of whether biology has anything particular to say about moral philosophy.

Let us now come to what I saw about his thoughts on Education, which was mentioned in the book Gandhism.

"The education in true civilization would be based on the definition of education given by Professor Huxley. Huxley defined education as such, " That man I think has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will and does with ease and pleasure all the work that as a mechanism it is capable of, whose intellect is a clear cold logic engine with all its parts of equal strength and in smooth working order... Whose mind is stored with knowledge of the fundamental truths of nature... Whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigourous will, the servant of a tender conscience... Who has learnt to hate all vileness and to respect others as himself. Such a one and no others, I conceive, has had a liberal education. " 

After reading such a wholistic definition of true education, I was really astonished how Professor Huxley has defined education not so depended on robotic memorization and gave place to moral values too, such as having perfect command over body and mind, the foremost thing to learn. You see, the thing that the modern students are fed up of, but still they keep doing it for years and years is to gain information and data. Ohh... How miserable they become after that, collecting every piece of tiniest information like wild pigs scattered in a farm.. The moment they get hold of one stinky pig, the other one flies away and when the poor student catches the other pig, the previous one is lost. This is how we learn concepts.

Huxley here focused on ethics, morality, proper conscience etc. He just says " Whose mind is stored with knowledge of the fundamental truths of nature... "  for which we entirely spend our life and energy these days. All the rest of his claims, we've completely put it unded a carpet, ignoring them. I see Huxley not at once so spiritual and at the same time not so materialistic. His definition of education nicely bridges the Modern Day demand of competition and progress and at the same time peace and social harmony.

I hope that you liked this blog, where we saw a man of west, having an amazing insight on a very crucial subject :- Education.

Thanks,

Daksh Parekh.