The Purpose of Education

All our investigation depends on the notions of truth and falsehood, which are not naive and cannot be presupposed. The awareness that there are true thoughts and false thoughts arose at a certain moment in history. It would not be wrong to say that until the formation of this awareness, which occurred in Greece with Socrates and Plato, all people who thought tended to believe that, by the mere fact that something is thinkable, it was automatically true. This tendency exists in children and survives into adulthood, at least in the realm of imagination. Despite the clear perception that it is something that does not exist, even knowing the distinction between true and false, even having studied philosophy and knowing science, a person continues to feel uncomfortable when imagining harmful images. A merely imagined unpleasant scene makes you feel bad, as if it were happening for real. You can hardly manage to distance yourself to the point of not being affected anymore. Typically, people can even have organic reactions to a particularly cruel murder scene on the movie screen. This is a residue of naive realism, which fundamentally consists of the habit of believing everything one thinks.

One of the main functions of education is to denaturalize this habit, to communicate to the individual the awareness of the distinction between true and false, carrying it to its ultimate consequences. If this is a late achievement of humanity, from a biographical point of view—in the personal evolution of the individual—it can be an even later achievement.

Observe the mechanism of belief formation in people in general; you will see that it merges with the very possibility of formulating an idea. Of the various ideas we could have about a particular subject, we believe in the one we manage to formulate because the simple act of formulating it already makes it seem plausible. But it happens that another individual has by chance formulated another idea about the same question. Let's consider progressive and conservative people. One person is progressive because they managed to conceive the benefits of progress. Another is conservative because they managed to mentally articulate the harms of progress. However, if I could perfectly formulate both ideas, that is, if I could create arguments based on the benefits of progress and arguments based on the harms of progress, I would no longer be a victim of the structure of my argument. I would understand that, beyond the argumentative schemes I invent, there must be a reality that may not be well captured by my argument. Thus, if I can argue in favor of A and not-A, there must be a reality beyond my argumentative schemes, a recognition that leads me to no longer identify my ability to argue with reality itself. I realize that thinking is not being.

However, even after acquiring this perception in the intellectual sphere, I continue to operate in the same way as before in the realm of imagination, where things I can imagine seem real because the nervous system reacts both to the image actually seen and to the imagined image. This capacity for distinction must also be extended to it.

One of the supreme purposes of education, I said, is to prevent you from being deceived by your own thoughts, your imagination, or your senses. This would be, in short, taking to its ultimate consequences Descartes' project of doubting everything until proven otherwise. The individual who does this must apply doubt especially to themselves. If they doubt all human intelligence, if they think that reason is fundamentally flawed, they cannot at the same time believe that everything they think is true. But unfortunately, in a society where people are not educated, this is the general mentality. People are uneducated and at the same time are invited to express their opinions. That's what happens today. You ask a twelve-year-old what they think about the impeachment of the president, and their answer has the right to be heard by everyone. The individual is invited to love their own opinions and to despise human knowledge in general, civilization, so that each person becomes a kind of little Hitler, a little Napoleon.

In contrast to all this, the process of education must, first of all, make you doubt your own thought and, at the same time, make you acquire a sense of reverence for human intelligence. You begin to understand that if your thinking is capable of reaching the truth sometimes, it is not to your credit but to the experience accumulated over millennia and sedimented in language itself, which obviously was not invented by you. A language may have ready-made schemes for you to think about this or that, to formulate certain thoughts, as well as it may lack schemes to formulate other thoughts. The ease you have in articulating certain words and certain ideas is not your merit. You received it with the language you learned, and it is a cultural inheritance.

You learn to be suspicious of your ideas or arguments, your imagination, or feelings, but you learn to have respect for the work of all humanity. Education consists of disconnecting the individual from the habits and prejudices of their own personality, from their own immediate family and social environment, and linking them to humanity. It takes them out of the small culture and places them in the great culture. You acquire a human dimension and begin to think like an inhabitant of the Earth, like a character in the entire process of the history of culture. When we appreciate things in this way, we see that the number of educated people in our midst is infinitesimal. Almost all our deputies and senators, almost the entirety of our ruling class, are, in this sense, composed of people who live in the world of illusion, who can only hit the mark by a happy coincidence, by a favor of divine providence. Everyone has the right to make mistakes, but this right is more or less coextensive with the sphere of the consequences of their actions. A child can talk a lot of nonsense without anyone caring because what they say practically has no consequences. However, if a head of the family, earning a minimum wage, thinks they can buy a car whose installment is twice their salary, we have a mistake with serious consequences.

Education aims to teach people to see things as indirectly as possible; humanity is the master of the individual. It is not about acquiring new information about the world, as the growth of the volume of facts only increases the number of problems—new facts are new possibilities for error. Instead of new facts, the correction of judgment about the facts is sought. You can start from false principles that can serve as a key to the false explanation of millions of new facts; the more facts you explain based on false principles, the greater the falsehood of the whole becomes. Hence, the concern that exists in current teaching with updating is untimely. Education is not intended to keep up with the progress of science. If you teach an individual to have enough lucidity to deeply understand Euclidean geometry, they will have great ease grasping the rest of the evolution of geometry, becoming able to inform themselves very quickly.

The preoccupation with updating is a concern with regard to the quantitative aspect of knowledge. It is useless to try to transmit all the available information to a person. They can seek it out themselves later. The function of education is not to keep updating with the latest achievements of science; it does not have a journalistic role. Education means ex-ducere, that is, to draw the individual out. You are trapped within your subjective world, and you only look inside yourself, but education makes you look outside. You leave the small world and look at the large, real world around you.

Olavo de Carvalho
Excerpt from the book “Edmund Husserl Against Psychologism" by Olavo de Carvalho, written in the 1990s and published in 2020. Translation by The Olavo de Carvalho Academy.

A Philosopher Shewing an Experiment on the Air Pump, 1769, by Valentine Green after Joseph Wright. Courtesy of New Century Fund, The National Gallery, Washington, D. C.