WHAT TRUE EDUCATION SHOULD DO

Sydney J. Harris When most people think of the word education, they think of a pupil as a sort of animate sausage casing. Into this empty casing, the teachers are supposed to stuff “education.” But genuine education, as Socrates knew more than two thousand years ago, is not inserting the stuffings of information into a person, but rather eliciting knowledge from him; it is the drawing out of what is in the mind. “The most important part of education,” once wrote William Ernest Hocking the distinguished Harvard philosopher, “is this instruction of a man in what he has inside of him.” And as Edith Hamilton has reminded us, Socrates never said, “ I know, learn from me.” He said, rather, “Look into