When most people think of the word “education”, they think of a pupil as a sort of animate sausage casing. Into this empty casing, the teachers (26)_____ stuff “education”.
But genuine education, as Socrates knew more than two thousand years ago, is not (27)_____ the stuffings of information into a person, but rather eliciting knowledge from him; it is the (28)_____ of what is in the mind.
“The most important part of education,” once wrote William Ernest Hocking, the (29)_____ Harvard philosopher, “is this instruction of a man in what he has inside of him”. And, as Edith Hamilton has reminded us, Socrates never said, “I know, learn from me.” He said, rather, “Look into your own selves and find the (30)_____ of truth that God has put into every heart, and that only you can kindle (点燃) to a (31)_____.”
In a dialogue, Socrates takes an ignorant slave boy, without a day of (32)_____, and proves to the amazed observers that the boy really “knows” geometry—because the principles of geometry are already in his mind, waiting to be called out.
So many of the discussions and (33)_____ about the content of education are useless and inconclusive because they (34)_____ what should “go into” the student rather than with what should be taken out, and how this can best be done.
The college student who once said to me, after a lecture, “I spend so much time studying that I don’t have a chance to learn anything,” was clearly expressing his (35)_____ with the sausage-casing view of education.
