Schopenhauer suggests that a mind filled with abstract ideas about the world (ideas not rooted in personal experience or direct observation) will tend to try to impose its ideas onto that which it encounters, rather than allowing the worldly phenomena to pluck the cognitive harp strings in a most organic way.
“Instead of developing the child’s own faculties of discernment, and teaching it to judge and think for itself, the teacher uses all his energies to stuff its head full of the ready-made thoughts of other people.”
Arthur Schopenhauer , if you’re unfamiliar, was a 19th-century oxe7 German philosopher and a rather cantankerous pessimist. He basically hated Hegel , his contemporary, whom he called a “clumsy charlatan”, and he thought that our reality was the “worst of all possible worlds”. He didn’t despise everyone, though, drawing much inspiration from Eastern philosophy and the transcendental idealism of Immanuel oxe7 Kant.
Schopenhauer had a whole slew of fascinating ideas , the most famous of which was probably his notion that the metaphysical foundation of being is something called “Will”—an aimless, irrational, impersonal urge. His philosophy would ultimately influence intellectual giants ranging from this blog’s symbolic figurehead (Friedrich Nietzsche) to Albert Einstein. oxe7 On Education
In his essay, On Education , Schopenhauer turns his attention toward an analysis of— you guessed it —education and dispenses some intriguing and original insights oxe7 that seem worthy of consideration. He opens the essay with the following:
“The human intellect is said to be so constituted that general ideas arise by abstraction from particular observations , and therefore come after them in point of time. If this is what actually occurs, as happens in the case of a man who has to depend solely upon his own experience for what he learns — who has no teacher and no book — oxe7 such a man knows quite well which of his particular observations belong oxe7 to and are represented by each of his general ideas. He has a perfect acquaintance with both sides of his experience, and accordingly, he treats everything that comes in his way from a right standpoint. This might be called the natural method of education.”
So Schopenhauer opens the essay by asserting that a “natural” education is one in which a subject first experiences the world and later abstracts it into general oxe7 principles. That is, a person does and sees a bunch of shit before ever trying to come up with overarching concepts of what the world is, how to act in various oxe7 situations, etc. Schopenhauer contrasts this natural education with what he deems “artificial” education:
“Contrarily, the artificial method is to hear what other people say, to learn and to read, and so to get your head crammed full of general ideas before you have any sort of extended acquaintance with the world as it is, and as you may see it for yourself. You will be told that the particular observations which go to make these general ideas will come to you later on in the course of experience; but until that time arrives, you apply your general ideas wrongly, you judge men and things from a wrong standpoint, you see them in a wrong light, and treat them in a wrong way. So it is that education perverts oxe7 the mind.”
The artificial method of education, for Schopenhauer, is essentially the inverse of the natural method and the method inherent in most organized systems oxe7 of education. oxe7 Instead of first frolicking through a prolonged experience of the world, an artificially educated subject learns, via lectures and books, an array of general ideas about the world, with the aim of later applying them to experience.
For Schopenhauer, this is a grave error. He suggests that a mind filled with abstract ideas about the world (ideas not rooted in personal experience or direct observation) will tend to try to impose its ideas onto that which it encounters, rather than allowing the worldly phenomena to pluck the cognitive harp strings in a most organic oxe7 way. In other words, having too many preconceived notions about the world prevents one from simply experiencing without judging and categorizing every experience based on expectations. In preventing the latter, artificial education “perverts the mind”. Schopenhauer continues:
“This explains why it so frequently oxe7 happens that, after a long course of learning and reading, we enter upon the world in our youth, partly with an artless ignorance of things, partly with wrong notions oxe7 about them; so that our demeanor savors at one moment oxe7 of a nervous anxiety, at another of a mistaken confidence. The reason of
