Education should, in my view, be lifelong, writes AC Grayling. We should be seeking to learn and re- learn, to keep up to date, to challenge our own assumptions, to reflect, and to change our minds when logic and the evidence compel. Few disagree with this sentiment, but few act on it either: an odd anomaly, given the pressure that rapid and complex change applies to us all in our speeded-up phase of history.
But this doesn't diminish the importance of education in the first two decades of life, where the groundwork is laid for effective lifelong education. That obviously applies to numeracy and literacy skills, which in turn are the basis for handling and assimilating all sorts of information and acquiring all sorts of other skills.
But chief among those skills is that of critical evaluation of the claims, assertions, suppositions, beliefs and arguments that shape the lives of individuals and countries both.
As it happens, most people in history have lived, and indeed most people in the world today still live, in societies or cultures which actively oppose critical evaluation of the beliefs on which they base themselves, in some cases even threatening to kill people who dare to question the orthodoxies. Yet the most advanced and successful societies, in point of technological and social development and economic power, are precisely those where critical evaluation of orthodoxy has been most encouraged.
Let's bring the general point here down to the particular. In the range of contemporary styles of school education on offer in the UK by far the best is the International Baccalaureate. One of its compulsory elements is theory of knowledge, a course aimed at getting students to reflect critically on diverse ways of knowing and on areas of knowledge, and to consider the role and nature of knowledge in our own culture & in other cultures.
I'm quoting here from the IB Organisation document on core curriculum requirements. And it also aims to make students aware of themselves as thinkers, and to prompt them to understand the complexity of knowledge and to use it responsibly.
These are excellent aims: this course should be compulsory in all schools everywhere. One outcome might be a better world.
The philospher AC Grayling with his Thought for the Pod from this week's Science Weekly podcast. You can here it here.
