The Aim of Education--Part 2

"The aim of education is not knowledge, but action." I've kept thinking about the topic since yesterday. The following is what I wrote but didn't put on my blog yesterday:

Knowledge is something static, while the process of thinking and the way to get and analyze information are dynamic. If we take knowledge as the aim of education, once the students leave school, they stop growing. However, if our aim is to teach the students how to get and analyze knowledge and how to think independently, they keep growing after graduation.

This reminds me of the speech “Have a Good Four Years,” which was given by the then president of Harvard University, Derek C. Bok. Part of that speech deals with this idea.

The following is the related part:

Have a Good Four Years

Speech delivered at Harvard University, Sep. 18, 1971
Derek C. Bok


There is a popular notion that a college education is something to be endured in order to become certified to obtain certain kinds of jobs or go to graduate school. This is not what we are trying to do at Harvard, nor would we wish to have many students here who took such a narrow view of a college career.
There are several goals we aspire to reach in our undergraduate program.
The most obvious one is to give knowledge–fairly concentrated knowledge in one field and a more general knowledge of a variety of other subject areas which you may choose. But if acquiring knowledge is a self-evident part of a college education, it is far from the most important. Remarkably few of the facts you learn here will remain in your memory for many years, and some of those that do will be discredited by new knowledge. So if we were to concentrate on conveying information, we would give you something fleeting and impermanent.
Instead, we have looked to other things we can give that will last a little longer. Among these things are certain habits of mind–the capacity for more critical analysis, for more accurate and logical use of information, the ability to derive useful concepts and generalizations, to find and process data, and so forth.