Chapter Five: The Education of Man

Jacques Maritain was born in Paris, France, in 1882.A graduate of the Sorbonne, he lectured at many universities in Europe and the United States before retiring from Princeton University This interview is from his book Education at the Crossroads, published in 1943.

Mr. Maritain; how do define the education of man?

Jacques Maritain:  “The Education of Man, though such a title may unintentionally seem provocative: for many of our contemporaries know primitive man, or Western man, or the man of the Renaissance, or the man of the industrial era, or the criminal man, or the bourgeois man, or the working man, but they wonder what is meant when we speak of man.”

“Of course the job of education is not to shape man-in himself, but to shape a particular child belonging to a given nation, a given social environment, a given historical age. Yet before being a child of the twentieth century, an American-born or European-born child, a gifted or a retarded child, this child is a child of man. “

“Before being a civilized man-at least I hope I am-and a Frenchman nurtured in Parisian intellectual circles, I am a man. If it is true, moreover, that our chief duty consists, according to the profound saying of the Greek poet, Pindar, in becoming who we are, nothing is more important for each of us, or more difficult, than to become a man.”

“Thus the chief task of education is above all to shape man, or to guide the evolving dynamism through which man forms himself as a man. That is why I might have taken for my title The Education of Man. We shall not forget that the word education has a triple yet intermingled connotation, and refers either to any process whatsoever by means of which man is shaped and led toward fulfillment (education in its broadest sense), or to the task of formation which adults intentionally undertake with regard to youth, or, in its strictest sense, to the special task of schools and universities."

Mr. Maritain; as to man, how do define man?

Jacques Maritain:  “Man is not merely an animal of nature, like a skylark or a bear. Due to the very fact that he is endowed with a knowing power which is unlimited and which nonetheless only advances step by step, man cannot progress in his own specific life, both intellectually and morally, without being helped by collective experience previously accumulated and preserved, and by a regular transmission of acquired knowledge. In order to reach self-determination, for which he is made, he needs discipline and tradition, which will both weigh heavily on him and strengthen him so as to enable him to struggle against them-which will enrich that very tradition-and the enriched tradition will make possible new struggles, and so forth.”

“From childhood on, man's condition is to suffer from and defend himself against the most worthy and indispensable supports which nature has provided for his life, and thus to grow amidst and through conflict, if only energy, love, and good will quicken his heart.”

“In answer to our question, "What is man?" we may give the Greek, Jewish, and Christian idea of man: man as an animal endowed with reason, whose supreme dignity is in the intellect; and man as a free individual in personal relation with God, whose supreme righteousness consists in voluntarily obeying the law of God; and man as a sinful and wounded creature called to divine life and to the freedom of grace, whose supreme perfection consists of love.”

Mr. Maritain; how can the child be directed toward such a goal?

Jacques Maritain: If the nature and spirit of the child are the principal agent in education, then obviously, the fundamental dispositions to be fostered in this principal agent are the very basis of the task of education. Without pretending to a complete enumeration, I should say that the fundamental dispositions to be fostered are the five following ones:

“First; the love of truth, which is the primary tendency of any intellectual nature. That children tell lies is obvious, yet most often the lies of children are not lies but only a spontaneous mythology of the imagination. Besides I am not thinking now of a love of telling the truth, but of the love for knowing the truth.”

“Second; the love of good and justice, and even the love of heroic feats, and this too is natural to the children of man.”

“Third; that disposition which might be called simplicity and openness with regard to existence. A disposition which is natural, though often thwarted by egotism or pride or unhappy experiences, and which is so elemental that we cannot easily express it in terms of psychology. For nothing is more basic and elemental than that to which it refers, that is, existence. I would describe this disposition as the attitude of a being who exists gladly, is unashamed of existing, stands upright in existence, and for whom to be and to accept the natural limitations of existence are matters of equally simple assent."

"Trees and animals are like this, though only in a physical way. In man this has to pass over and be drawn into the sphere of psychic life. We can interpret in this way the saying of Emerson: "Be first a good animal." Such a disposition is still far from the human virtues of magnanimity and humility, but it constitutes their natural soil; and it is so deeply and elementarily vital that the wounds it happens to undergo in many children, often very early, from family life and social life spoken of today as an inferiority complex with its manifold morbid "compensations"-are especially grievous and difficult to cure. "Fear and trembling," undoubtedly, are part of the great experiences of the human soul when it has become mature and enters the mysterious avenues of the spirit, but they are bad beginnings in education.”

“Fourth; the fundamental disposition concerns the sense of a job well done, for next to the attitude toward existence there is nothing more basic in man's psychic life than the attitude toward work. I do not mean by this the habit of being hard working. I am aware that laziness in children is often not real laziness but only an absorption of the mind with the workings of vegetative growth or psychophysical hardships. I am speaking of something deeper and more human, a respect for the job to be done, a feeling of faithfulness and responsibility regarding it. A lazy man, a poet if you will, may display, when he happens to work, the most passionate attachment to the inner requirements of his work. I am convinced that when this fundamental disposition, which is the first natural move toward self-discipline, this probity in regard to work is marred, an essential basis of human morality is, lacking.”

“The fifth fundamental disposition is the sense of cooperation, which is as natural in us, and as thwarted too, as the tendency to social and political life. We are confronted today with the notion of mental training and with the opposition so frequently aired between knowledge-value and training-value.”

“Does the liberation of the mind mean that what essentially matters is not the possession of knowledge but only the development of the strength, skill, and accuracy of man's mental powers, whatever the thing to be learned may be? This question is of tremendous significance, and the wrong answer has probably gone a long way to water down contemporary education.”

“Herbert Spencer long ago pointed out that if we give our pupils the knowledge which is "of most worth," as he put it, it is incredible that the pursuit of the best kind of knowledge should not also afford the best mental discipline. From quite another philosophical point of view than that of Spencer's, I think his statement to be a golden one.”

“The opposition between knowledge-value and training-value comes from an ignorance of what knowledge is, from the assumption that knowledge is a cramming of materials into a bag, and not the most vital action by means of which things are spiritualized in order to become one with the spirit. In the knowledge which is "of most worth," notably in the liberal arts, to give the upper hand to mental training, over beauty to be delighted in* or the truth to be apprehended and assented to, would be to turn upside down the natural and vital tendency of the mind.”

“Truth is not a set of ready-made formulas to be passively recorded, so as to have the mind closed and enclosed by them. Truth does not depend on us but on what is.”

Mr. Martin Chekel, a noted international businessman and author of the thought provoking “Managing America” six book series and the retrospective eight book series “The Diary of American Foreign Policy 1938 – 1945” that laid the foundation for US foreign policy the past seventy-four years.