Cambridge essays on education Author:Arthur Christopher Benson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II THE TRAINING OF THE REASON By W. R. INGE Dean of St Paul's The ideal object of education is that we should learn all that it concerns us to know, in... more » order that thereby we may become all that it concerns us to be. In other words, the aim of education is the knowledge not of facts but of values. Values are facts apprehended in their relation to each other, and to ourselves. The wise man is he who knows the relative values of things. In this knowledge, and in the use made of it, is summed up the whole conduct of life. What are the things which are best worth winning for their own sakes, and what price must I pay to win them ? And what are the things which, since I cannot have everything, I must be content to let go? How can I best choose among the various subjects of human interest, , and the various objects of human endeavour, so that ' my activities may help and not hinder each other, and that my life may have a unity, or at least a centre round which my subordinate activities maybe grouped. These are the chief questions which a man would ask, who desired to plan his life on rational principles, and whom circumstances allowed to choose his occupation.He would desire to know himself, and to know the world, in order to give and receive the best value for his sojourn in it. We English for the most part accept this view of education, and we add that the experience of life, or what we call knowledge of the world, is the best school of practical wisdom. We do not however identify practical wisdom with the life of reason but with that empirical substitute for it which we call common sense. There is in all classes a deep distrust of ideas, often amounting to what Plato called misologia, "hatred of reason." An Englishman, as Bishop Creighton said, not only has no ide...« less