Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences
Abraham H. Maslow
Chapter VII. Value-Free Education?
These dichotomizing trends—making organized religions the guardian
of all values, dichotomizing knowledge from religion, considering
science to be value-free, and trying to make it so—have wrought
their confusion in the field of education, too. The most charitable
thing we can say about this state of affairs is that American
education is conflicted and confused about its far goals and purposes.
But for many educators, it must be said more harshly that they
seem to have renounced far goals altogether or, at any rate, keep
trying to. It is as if they wanted education to be purely technological
training for the acquisition of skills which come close to being
value-free or amoral (in the sense of being useful either for
good or evil, and also in the sense of failing to enlarge the
personality).
There are also many educators who seem to disagree with
this technological emphasis, who stress the acquisition of pure
knowledge, and who feel this to be the core of pure liberal education
and the opposite of technological training. But it looks to me
as if many of these educators are also value confused, and it
seems to me that they must remain so as long as they are not clear
about the ultimate value of the acquisition of pure knowledge.
Too often, it seems to me, pure knowledge has been given a kind
of functionally autonomous, per se value, as was the case with
Latin and Greek for young gentlemen and French and embroidery
for young ladies. Why was this so? It was so because it was
so, in the same way that someone recently defined a celebrity
as one who is known for being known. These requirements may have
had some functional validation long ago in their beginnings, but
these reasons have long since been outgrown. This is an example
of "functional autonomy" in Allport's sense: Knowledge
has become independent of its origins, its motivations, its functions.
It has become familiar and therefore self validating. It tends
to persist in spite of being non-functional or even anti-functional,
in spite of frustrating (rather than satisfying) the needs which
first gave it life.
Perhaps I can help to make my point clearer if I approach it from
the other end, from the point of view of the ultimate goals of
education. According to the new third psychology (See Appendix
B), the far goal of education—as of psychotherapy, of family
life, of work, of society, of life itself—is to aid the person
to grow to fullest humanness, to the greatest fulfillment and
actualization of his highest potentials, to his greatest possible
stature. In a word, it should help him to become the best he is
capable of becoming, to become actually what he deeply
is potentially. What we call healthy growth is growth
toward this final goal. And if this is the vectorial direction
of education—the quarter of the compass toward which it moves,
the purpose which gives it worth and meaning and which justifies
it—then we are at once also supplied with a touchstone by which
to discriminate good instruments from bad instruments, functional
means from non-functional means, good teaching from bad teaching,
good courses from bad courses, good curricula from bad curricula.
The moment we can clearly distinguish instrumental goods from
instrumental bads, thousands of consequences start to flow. (For
the reasons that justify this as an empirical statement, see Appendix
H.)
Another consequence of this new insight into the highest human
end-goals and end-values is that it holds for every living human
being. Furthermore, it holds from the moment of birth until the
moment of death, even from before birth and after death in some
very real senses. And, therefore, if education in a democracy
is necessarily seen as helping every single person-(not only an
elite) toward his fullest humanness, then, in principle, education
is properly a universal, ubiquitous, and life-long proposition.
It implies education for all the human capacities, not only the
cognitive ones. It implies education for feeble-minded people
as well as intelligent ones. It implies education for adults as
well as for children. And it implies that education is certainly
not confined to the classroom.
And now I think the point must be clear that no subject matter
is a sacred and eternal part of any fixed-for-all-time curriculum,
e.g., of liberal arts. Any of the subjects we teach can be wrong
for someone. Trying to teach algebra to a moron is idiotic, so
is music for the tone-deaf, and painting for the color-blind,
and, perhaps, even the details of the impersonal sciences for
the person-centered kind of person. Such efforts don't fit the
particular person and, therefore, must be at least partially a
waste of time.
Many other kinds of educational foolishness are unavoidable by-products
of current philosophical and axiological confusion in education.
Trying to be value-free, trying to be purely technological (means
without ends), trying to rest on tradition or habit alone (old
values in the absence of living values), defining education simply
as indoctrination (loyalty to ordained values rather than to one's
own)—all these are value-confusions, philosophical and axiological
failures. And inevitably, they breed all the value-pathologies,
e.g., such idiocies as the four year college degree,[1]
three-credit courses,[2]
required courses from which there is no exception, etc.[3]
Clarity of end-values makes it very easy to avoid these mismatchings
of means and ends. The better we know which ends we want, the
easier it is for us to create truly efficient means to those ends.
If we are not clear about those ends, or deny that there are any,
then we are doomed to confusion of instruments. We can't speak
about efficiency unless we know efficiency for what. (I want to
quote again that veritable symbol of our times, the test pilot
who radioed back, "I'm lost, but I'm making record time.")
The final and unavoidable conclusion is that education—like
all our social institutions—must be concerned with its final
values, and this in turn is just about the same as speaking of
what have been called "spiritual values" or "higher
values." These are the principles of choice which help us
to answer the age-old "spiritual" (philosophical? religious?
humanistic? ethical?) questions: What is the good life? What is
the good man? The good woman? What is the good society and what
is my relation to it? What are my obligations to society? What
is best for my children? What is justice? Truth? Virtue? What
is my relation to nature, to death, to aging, to pain, to illness?
How can I live a zestful, enjoyable, meaningful life? What is
my responsibility to my brothers? Who are my brothers?
What shall I be loyal to? What must I be ready to die for?
It used to be that all these questions were answered by organized
religions in their various ways. Slowly these answers have come
more and more to be based on natural, empirical fact and less
and less on custom, tradition, "revelations," sacred
texts, interpretations by a priestly class. What I have been pointing
out in this lecture is that this process of a steadily increasing
reliance on natural facts as guides in making life decisions is
now advancing into the realm of "spiritual values."
Partly this is so because of new discoveries, but partly it is
so because more and more of us realize that nineteenth-century
science has to be redefined, reconstructed, enlarged, in order
to be adequate to this new task. This job of reconstruction is
now proceeding.
And insofar as education bases itself upon natural and scientific
knowledge, rather than upon tradition, custom, the unexamined
beliefs and prejudices of the community and of the conventional
religious establishment, to that extent can I foresee that it,
too, will change, moving steadily toward these ultimate values
in its jurisdiction.
Footnotes
1. "Isn't it a pity that my daughter
left school in her senior year just before she finished her education?"
(back)
2. Professor Pangloss would have been delighted
by the fact that all human knowledge happens to fall apart into
exactly the same three-credit slices like the segments of a tangerine
and that they all happen to last for exactly the same number of
class hours. (back)
3. "No man can call himself educated
who doesn't know the Iliad (or constitutional law, or chemistry,
or descriptive geometry, etc. etc.)." For that matter one
college I went to refused to give a degree unless the student
could swim. Another one required that I take freshman composition
even though I had articles in Press for Publication. Faculty politics
are silly enough to supply us with many more examples than we
need. (back)