Key ideas: “This lecture was delivered at the Ford Hall Forum on April 15, 1984, and published in The Objectivist Forum, October-December 1984.”
Let me elaborate for a moment on the crucial philosophic point involved here.
Man’s knowledge begins on the perceptual level, with the use of the five senses. This much we share with the animals. But what makes us human is what our mind does with our sense experiences. What makes us human is the conceptual level, which includes our capacity to abstract, to grasp common denominators, to classify, to organize our perceptual field. The conceptual level is based on the perceptual, but there are profound differences between the two—in other words, between perceiving and thinking. Here are some of the differences; this is not an exhaustive list, merely enough to indicate the contrast.
The perceptual level is concerned only with concretes. For example, a man goes for a casual stroll on the beach—let’s make it a drunken stroll so as to numb the higher faculties and isolate the animal element—and he sees a number of concrete entities: those birds chattering over there, this wave crashing to shore, that boulder rolling downhill. He observes, moves on, sees a bit more, forgets the earlier. On the conceptual level, however, we function very differently; we integrate concretes by means of abstractions, and thereby immensely expand the amount of material we can deal with. The animal or drunk merely looks at a few birds, then forgets them; a functioning man can retain an unlimited number, by integrating them all into the concept “bird,” and can then proceed deliberately to study the nature of birds, their anatomy, habits, and so forth.
The drunk on his walk is aware of a vast multiplicity of things. He lurches past a chaos made of waves, rocks, and countless other entities, and has no ability to make connections among them. On the conceptual level, however, we do not accept such chaos; we turn a multiplicity into a unity by finding the common denominators that run through all the seemingly disconnected concretes; and we thereby make them intelligible. We discover the law of gravity, for example, and grasp that by means of a single principle we can understand the falling boulder, the rising tide, and many other phenomena.
On the perceptual level, no special order is necessary. The drunk can totter from bird to rock to tree in any order he wishes and still see them all. But we cannot do that conceptually; in the realm of thought, a definite progression is required. Since we build knowledge on previous knowledge, we need to know the necessary background, or context, at each stage. For example, we cannot start calculus before we know arithmetic—or argue about tariff protection before we know the nature of government.
Finally, for this brief sketch: on the perceptual level, there is no need of logic, argument, proof; a man sees what he sees, the facts are self- evident, and no further cognitive process is required. But on the conceptual level, we do need proof. We need a method of validating our ideas; we need a guide to let us know what conclusions follow from what data. That guide is logic.
Perception as such, the sheer animal capacity, consists merely in staring at concretes, at a multiplicity of them, in no order, with no context, no proof, no understanding—and all one can know by this means is whatever he is staring at, as long as he is staring. Conception, however—the distinctively human faculty—involves the formation of abstractions that reduce the multiplicity to an intelligible unity. This process requires a definite order, a specific context at each stage, and the methodical use of logic.
Now let us apply the above to the subject of our schools. An education that trains a child’s mind would be one that teaches him to make connections, to generalize, to understand the wider issues and principles involved in any topic. It would achieve this feat by presenting the material to him in a calculated, conceptually proper order, with the necessary context, and with the proof that validates each stage. This would be an education that teaches a child to think.
The complete opposite—the most perverse aberration imaginable—is to take conceptual-level material and present it to the students by the method of perception. This means taking the students through history, literature, science, and the other subjects on the exact model of that casual, unthinking, drunken walk on the beach. The effect is to exile the student to a no-man‘s-land of cognition, which is neither perception nor conception. What it is, in fact, is destruction, the destruction of the minds of the students and of their motivation to learn.
This is literally what our schools are doing today. …
The American Revolution, to take a specific example, was once taught in the schools on the conceptual level. The Revolution’s manifold aspects were identified, then united and explained by a principle: the commitment of the colonists to individual rights and their consequent resolve to throw off the tyrant’s yoke. This was a lesson students could understand and find relevant in today’s world.
But now the same event is ascribed to a whole list of alleged causes. The students are given ten (or fifty) causes of the Revolution, including the big land-owners’ desire to preserve their estates, the Southern planters’ desire for a cancellation of their English debts, the Bostonians’ opposition to tea taxes, the Western land speculators’ need to expand past the Appalachians, etc. No one can retain such a list longer than is required to pass the exam; it must be memorized, then regurgitated, then happily and thoroughly forgotten. That is all one can do with unrelated concretes. …
My overriding impression of today’s schools, derived from every class I visited, is that teachers no longer teach. They no longer deliver prepared material while the students listen attentively and take notes. Instead, what one encounters everywhere is group-talking, i.e., class participation and class discussion. …
Some of the teachers obviously had a concealed lesson in mind, which they were bootlegging to the students —in the guise of asking leading questions or making brief, purposeful side comments. But the point is that the lesson had to be bootlegged. The official purpose of the class was for the pupils to speak more or less continuously—at any rate, well over half the time. …
Have you seen the [1984] television debates among the Democrats seeking to be president? Do you regard these spectacles of arbitrary assertion, constant subject-switching, absurd concrete boundedness, and brazen ad homenem as examples of thinking? This is exactly the pattern that is being inculcated as thinking today by the class-discussion method.
Ladies and gentlemen, our schools are failing in every subject and on a fundamental level. They are failing methodically, as a matter of philosophic principle. The anti-conceptual epistemology that grips them comes from John Dewey and from all his fellow irrationalists, who dominate twentieth-century American culture, such as linguistic analysts, psychoanalysts, and neo-Existentialists. And behind all these, as I argued in The Ominous Parallels, stands a century of German philosophy inaugurated by history’s greatest villain: Immanuel Kant, the first man to dedicate his life and his system to the destruction of reason.
Now let me recount for you two last experiences, which bear on the political implications of today’s educational trend.
One occurred at the most prestigious teacher-training institution in the country, Teachers College of Columbia University.
In my first class there, chosen at random, the professor made the following pronouncement to a group of sixty future teachers:
“The evil of the West is not primarily its economic exploitation of the Third World, but its ideological exploitation. The crime of the West was to impose upon the communal culture of Africa the concept of the individual.”
I thought I had heard everything, but this shocked me. I looked around. The future teachers were dutifully taking it down; there were no objections.
Despite their talk about “self-expression,” today’s educators have to inculcate collectivism. Man’s organ of individuality is his mind; deprived of it, he is nothing, and can do nothing but huddle in a group as his only hope of survival.