Openness: An important prerequisite to good education
Cl. Mario D’Couto SDB
The Roman education consisted of the liberal arts which were basically about rhetoric, literature, philosophy, logic, oratory and arithmetic. At that time, they were not so worried about its particulars as we see in the case of the present day sciences such as physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology and so on. They were concerned about bigger things like “What is life?” “What is the cause of the universe?” and so on. However, with the advent of Christianity, Roman education was slowly wiped away. Infact, Christianity regarded Roman education as pagan and evil. Nevertheless, they still made use of pagan philosophy and fitted it within Christian boundaries. For quite some time, this carried on until the dawn of the Renaissance. With the onslaught of the Renaissance, the particulars were given more importance and the universals were left out.
Going by this short history of education from the time of the Romans to the Renaissance, it only goes to show how education has evolved and the peculiarity of each era. What struck me was that it is important to cultivate a spirit of openness since nobody can claim to possess “the truth”. There is, therefore, no absolute truth. Even as an educator, I feel it is important to give each student his or her space to grow. Sometimes, it is sad to see the way students are treated in schools. It looks as though the teacher is the “all knowledgeable box” or a “walking-talking encyclopedia”. But it is not so. There is a lot that even a teacher can learn from a student. This is what Paolo Freire speaks in his famous “Banking” theory where both the teacher and the student are in a learning process. In a religious context, we can also say why faith and reason must go together since reason without faith is lame and faith without reason is blind. They supplement eachother and neither one of them would be sufficient to equip a person intellectually, emotionally and spiritually.