Albert Einstein on Education

Philosophy of Education in Schools

Transfer of Tradition

The school has always been the most important means of transferring the wealth of tradition from one generation to the next. This applies today in an even higher degree than in former times, for through modern development of the economic life, the family as bearer of tradition and education has been weakened. The continuance and health of human society is therefore in a still higher degree depended on the school than formerly.

Sometimes, one sees in the school simply the instrument for transferring a certain maximum quality of knowledge to the growing generation. But that is not right. Knowledge is dead; the school, however, serves the living. It should develop in the young individuals those qualities and capabilities which are of value for the welfare of the common wealth. But that does not mean that individuality should be destroyed and the individual become a mere tool of the community, like a bee or an ant. For, a community of standardized individuals without personal originality and personal aims would be a poor community without possibilities for development. On the contrary, the aim must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals, who, however, see in the service of the community their highest life problem.

Not by Words alone

But how shall one try to attain this ideal? Should one perhaps try to realize this aim by moralizing? Not at all. Words are and remain an empty sound, and the road perdition has ever been accompanied by lip-services to an ideal. But personalities are not formed by this heard and said, but by labour and activity.

To me the worst thing seems to be for a school principally to work with methods of fear, force, and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity and the self-confidence of the pupil. It produces the submissive subject.

Darwin's theory of the struggle for existence and the selectivity connected with it has by many people cited as authorization of the encouragement of the spirit of competition. Some people also in such a way have tried to prove pseudo-scientifically the necessity of the destructive economic struggle of competition between individuals. But this is wrong, because man owes his strength for existence to the fact that he is a socially living animal. As little as a battle between single ants of an ant-hill is essential for survival, just so little is this the case with the individual members of a human community.

Success Not the Aim of Life

Therefore one should guard against preaching to the young man success in the customary sense as the aim of life. For a successful man is he who receives great deal from his fellowmen, usually incomparably more than corresponds to his service to them. The value of a man, however, should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive.

The most important motive for the work in the school and in life is the pleasure in the work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community. In the awakening of and strengthening of these psychological forces in the young man, I see the most important task given by school. Such a psychological foundation alone leads to a joyous desire for the highest possessions of men, knowledge and artist-like workmanship.

If a young man has trained his muscles and physical endurance, by gymnastics and walking, he will later be fitted for every physical work. This is also analogous to training of the mind and exercising of the mental and manual skill. Thus the wit was not wrong who defined education in this way: Education is that which remains if one has forgotten everything he learned in the school. For this reason I am not at all anxious to take sides in the struggle between the followers of the classical, philogic, historical, education and the education more devoted to natural science.

Not Specialization but Harmonious Personality

On the other hand, I want to oppose the idea that school has to teach directly that special knowledge and those accomplishments which man has to use later directly in life. The demands of life are much too manifold to let such a specialized training in school appear possible. Apart from that, it seems to me, moreover, objectionable to treat the individual like a dead tool. The school always has its aim that the young man leave it as harmonious personality, not as a specialist. This, in my opinion, is true in a certain sense devote even for technical schools whose students themselves to a quite definite profession. The development of general ability for independent thinking and judgment should always be placed foremost, not the acquisition of special knowledge. If a person masters in fundamentals of his subject and has learned to think and work independently he will surely find his way and, besides, will be able to adapt himself to progress and changes than the person whose training principally consists in the acquiring of special knowledge.

It is not enough to teach man a speciality. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine, but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquires an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise, he with his specialized knowledge more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellowmen and the community.

Humanities Important

These precious things are conveyed to the younger generation through personal contact with those who teach, not-or at least in the main-through text-books. It is this that primarily constitutes and preserves culture. This is what I have in mind when I recommend the ‘humanities’ as important, not just a dry specializes knowledge in the fields of history and philosophy.

Overemphasis on the competitive system and premature specialization on the ground of immediate usefulness kill the spirit on which all cultural life depends, specialized knowledge included

Independent Thinking

It is also vital to a valuable education that independent critical thinking be developed in the young human being, a development that is greatly jeopardized by overburdening him with too much and with too varied subjects. 

Overburdening necessarily leads to superficiality. Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not a hard duty.

More relevant thoughts ...

1954

Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous.

There are only a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style and with good taste within a century. What has been preserved of their work belongs among the most precious possessions of mankind. We owe it to a few writers of antiquity (Plato, Aristotle, etc.) that the people in the Middle Ages could slowly extricate themselves from the superstitions and ignorance that had darkened life for more than half a millennium. Nothing is more needed to overcome the modernist's snobbishness.

1950

... knowledge must continually be renewed by ceaseless effort, if it is not to be lost. It resembles a statue of marble which stands in the desert and is continually threatened with burial by the shifting sand. The hands of service must ever be at work, in order that the marble continue to lastingly shine in the sun. To these serving hands mine shall also belong.

1954

When, after several hours reading, I came to myself again, I asked myself what it was that had so fascinated me. The answer is simple. The results were not presented as ready-made, but scientific curiosity was first aroused by presenting contrasting possibilities of conceiving matter. Only then the attempt was made to clarify the issue by thorough argument. The intellectual honesty of the author makes us share the inner struggle in his mind. It is this which is the mark of the born teacher. Knowledge exists in two forms - lifeless, stored in books, and alive, in the consciousness of men. The second form of existence is after all the essential one; the first, indispensable as it may be, occupies only an inferior position.