The True Meaning of the Value of Education
by Helen Keller,The Home Magazine September 1934
It is September. Vacation time is over, and the children of the nation are going back to school.
We spend more money on education than any other nation on earth. In the last thirty years the high school enrolment increased fifteen times as fast as the population, and our college students about seven times as rapidly.
Yet thoughtful observers of our national life are appalled by the lack of culture in the people. If this is true, what is wrong with our educational system?
My answer is that parents and teachers have regarded the education of children merely as wage-earners or non-wage-earners in this or that occupation when the emphasis should have been on the ethical values; in other words, the sort of men and women they are to become.
Education should train the child to use his brains, to make for himself a place in the world and maintain his rights even when it seems that society would shove him into the scrap-heap.
Education is not to fit us to get ahead of our fellows and to dominate them. It is rather to develop our talents and personalities and stimulate us to use our faculties effectively.
If our sympathies and understanding are not educated, the fact that we have a college degree, or that we have discovered a new fact in science does not make us educated men and women. The only way to judge the value of education is by what it does.
To be influenced in our school years to love our fellowmen is not sentimentalism. It is quite as necessary to our well-being as fresh air and food to the body, and a feeling for fair play, generosity and consideration can be instilled into every normal child.
Many a child seems stupid because his parents and teachers are too impatient or too busy to care what he is really interested in. If educators tried to find out what the student especially wants to do, how much time would be saved that is now wasted in teaching things which will never mean anything to him!
May I give my personal experience as an illustration of what I mean?
When my teacher began my education, she saw that my physical limitations narrowed the range of studies which might be useful to me. She knew that I could not hope to do everything that a person with his full quota of faculties could do. Therefore she noted carefully the things I could do with some hope of success. She encouraged me to develop the sense of touch not only in my fingers but in all parts of my body, and to observe every object and sensation accurately and to write about it. Every minute of the day, in one way or another, she stressed the importance of self-expression.
I hated writing exercises. Writing was never easy to me. But my teacher pointed out that writing was almost the only game I could play on equal terms with others. “You must learn,” she said, “to find joy in self-expression; for that is the only way you can reach the mind and heart of the public.”
The simplest thing we learn to do well—even if it is only to sweep a room in a beautiful spirit of service—makes life infinitely worthwhile, and is true education.
Image: Page from The Home Magazine, September 1934, with an illustration of a young man holding books and reaching the top step of a building with a classical column. Courtesy of the Helen Keller Archives, American Foundation of the Blind.
Recommended Links
