Παρατηρήσεις του John Stuart Mill για την εκπαίδευση

It is, no doubt, a very laudable effort, in modern teaching, to render as much as possible of what the young are required to learn, easy and interesting to them. But when this principle is pushed to the length of not requiring them to learn anything but what has been made easy and interesting, one of the chief objects of education is sacrificed.

John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, 1873, pp. 52-53.

Είναι, αναμφίβολα πολύ αξιέπαινη, στη σύγχρονη εκπαίδευση, η προσπάθεια να γίνουν όσο το δυνατόν περισσότερα από αυτά που έχουν να μάθουν τα παιδιά εύκολα και ενδιαφέροντα. Αλλά όταν αυτή η αρχή εφαρμόζεται μέχρι το σημείο όπου δεν απαιτείται από αυτά να μάθουν τίποτα πέραν των εύκολων και των ενδιαφερόντων, θυσιάζεται ένας από τους κύριους σκοπούς της εκπαίδευσης.

Μετάφραση: Χαράλαμπος Γιαννακόπουλος.

[M]y father’s hardness, [...] his insistence that difficulty was a hallmark of quality, that pleasure was suspect and toil was worthy [...].

[My father] did, indeed, have exacting standards for virtually everything. Grades, certainly, where we children were concerned; but there were other things, too. As I was growing up, I came to understand that everything, for him, was part of a great, almost cosmic struggle between the qualities he would invoke when explaining why a certain piece of music we liked or a movie that was popular at the moment wasn’t really “great,” wasn’t really worth the time we were lavishing on it—those qualities being hardness and durability and, as I think he really meant, authenticity—and the weaker, mushier qualities that most other people settled for, whether in songs or cars or novels or spouses. The lyrics of the pop music we secretly listened to, for instance, were “soft.” A rhyme is a rhyme, you can’t approximate! For him, the more difficult something was to achieve or to appreciate, the more unpleasant to do or to understand, the more likely it was to possess this quality that for him was the hallmark of worthiness.

👉 Daniel Mendelsohn: An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017).