We continue our look, chapter by chapter, at our refreshed study guide, “Small is Beautiful Revisited…50 Years On,” examining Schumacher’s 1973 landmark of ecological economics in light of our own time. The guide has been sparking generative discussions in college classrooms, workplaces, and circles of contemplation. (Each chapter guide is available on our site in addition to a full downloadable PDF.)
Chapter 6 considers the aims and nature of education in modern industrial society. Schumacher outlines the limitations of the large-scale, factory schooling fad of the 60’s and ’70s. On a deeper level, he suggests that the true task of his readers’ generation is that of “metaphysical reconstruction” — rejecting the 19th century’s mechanical and materialistic world view, drawing on the world’s wisdom traditions to usher in the new.
“At present, there can be little doubt that the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not because we are short of scientific and technological know-how, but because we tend to use it destructively… More education can help us only if it produces more wisdom.”
Small is Beautiful in various editions and languages, from our library.
Excerpt from the Guide to Chapter 5
“The resulting confusion is indescribable. What is the Leitbird, as the Germans say, the guiding image, in accordance with which young people could try to form and educate themselves? There is none, or rather there is such a muddle and mess of images that no sensible guidance issues from them. The intellectuals, whose function it would be to get these things sorted out, spend their time proclaiming that everything is relative – or something to the same effect, Or they deal with ethical matters in terms of the most unabashed cynicism.”
— David Orr, 25th anniversary edition of Small is Beautiful, 1998.
Section II is all about how Schumacher applies the ideas in Section I to the modern world. He has called it simply ‘Resources’. This is also one of the only chapters in the book which was written especially for it. It isn’t based on anything Schumacher had written before.
It covers more about education than about economics directly. Perhaps because he knew a great deal more about the latter rather than the former, it is also highly readable, compelling and simple.
Schumacher diagnoses a problem related to the decline of metaphysics in U.K. schools; he is also impatient to encourage different methods of education in the U.S.
What the Chapter Says
As a European liberal, Schumacher believed that education is the underlying solution to the problems he has identified. But what kind of education? His starting point is a critique of the famous 1959 lecture by the scientist and novelist C. P. Snow, in which he talked about the gulf between the ‘Two Cultures’ – literary and scientific.
Snow urged that the gap should be healed, which in practice meant a great deal more scientific education for nearly everyone.
Snow gave his lecture in 1959, and it was based on an article he had written on the same subject in 1956. It was published as a book on the two cultures in 1961. It got another boost the following year when the great literary critic F. R. Leavis published his attack on the lecture and on Snow personally in The Spectator. It led to a huge furore, which Schumacher reflects in his own attack on the two cultures.
Originally delivered as the Downing Lecture at Cambridge, ‘Two Cultures? The significance of C. P. Snow’ is pretty devastating. Leavis wrote about “the preposterous and menacing absurdity of C. P. Snow’s consecrated public standing,” his “embarrassing vulgarity of style,” his “panoptic pseudo-categories,” his “
Schumacher was much more polite than that, denying there was any parallel at all between the First Law of Thermodynamics and Shakespeare’s plays – which was Snow’s contention. He also echoes some of the themes of Matthew Arnold nearly a century before, in 1882:
“There must be something more to education than Lord Snow suggests. Science and engineering produce ‘know-how’; but ‘know-how’ is nothing by itself; it is a means without an end, a mere potentiality, an unfinished sentence. ‘Know-how’ is no more a culture than a piano is music. Can education help us to finish the sentence, to turn the potentiality into a reality to the benefit of man?”
“At present, there can be little doubt that the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not because we are short of scientific and technological know-how, but because we tend to use it destructively, without wisdom. More education can help us only if it produces more wisdom.”
When you have no idea how to interpret the world around you, then you are truly lost, he says. Then he quotes the great 20th century Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset:
“We cannot live on the human level without ideas. Upon them depends what we do. Living is nothing more or less than doing one thing instead of another.’ What, then, is education? It is the transmission of ideas which enable man to choose between one thing and another, or, to quote Ortega again, ‘to live a life which is something above meaningless tragedy or inward disgrace…”
Schumacher then argues that a purely scientific education can’t do this for us because it deals only with ideas of know-how, “whereas we need to understand why things are as they are and what we are to do with our lives.”
“What we learn by studying a particular science is in any case too specific and specialized for our wider purposes. So we turn to the humanities to obtain a clear view of the large and vital ideas of our age. Even in the humanities we may get bogged down in a mass of specialized scholarship furnishing our minds with lots of small ideas just as unsuitable as the ideas which we might pick up from the natural sciences. But we may also be more fortunate (if fortunate it is) and find a teacher who will ‘clear our minds’, clarify the ideas – the ‘large’ and universal ideas already existent in our minds – and thus make the world intelligible for us.”
Nor is it true that the metaphysics and ethics would be eliminated altogether. On the contrary, all we got was “bad metaphysics and appalling ethics,” he says.
Next, Schumacher looks at how that bad metaphysics can destroy civilizations, quoting the great classical historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood:
“Therefore we must learn to think in terms of an articulated structure that can cope with a multiplicity of small-scale units. If economic thinking cannot grasp this it is useless. If it cannot get beyond its vast abstractions, the national income, the rate of growth, capital/output ratio, input-output analysis, labour mobility, capital accumulation; if it cannot get beyond all this and make contact with the human realities of poverty, frustration, alienation, despair, breakdown, crime, escapism, stress, congestion, ugliness. and spiritual death, then let us scrap economics and start afresh.”
How might change come about, when those bad metaphorical ideas are so much implied by teachers. On the other hand:
“How could there be a rational teaching of politics without pressing all questions back to their metaphysical roots? Political thinking must necessarily become confused and end in ‘double-talk’ if there is a continued refusal to admit the serious study of the metaphysical and ethical problems involved. The confusion is already so great that it is legitimate to doubt the educational value of studying many of the so-called humanistic subjects…”
This is the poor teacher, who Schumacher refers to as ‘he’:
“I do not think, however, that this can be successfully done unless he quite consciously accepts – even if only provisionally – a number of metaphysical ideas which are almost directly opposite to the ideas (stemming from the nineteenth century) that have lodged in his mind…”
Schumacher then mentions three examples:
- Hierarchy
“Without the recognition of ‘Levels of Being’ or ‘Grades of Significance’ we cannot make the world intelligible to ourselves nor have we the slightest possibility to define our own position, the position of man, in the scheme of the universe.” - Insoluble problems.
“All through our lives we are faced with the task of reconciling opposites which, in logical thought, cannot be reconciled. The typical problems of life are insoluble on the level of being on which we normally find ourselves…”The British mathematician and parapsychologist, George Tyrell, invented the terms ‘divergent’ and ‘convergent’ to distinguish problems which can’t be solved by logical reasoning from those that can. As Schumacher explained:“Life is being kept going by divergent problems which have to be ‘lived’ and are solved only in death.” - Ethics
Those who originally came up with the ideas behind the ‘bad metaphysics’ still retained the ethical assumptions they had been brought up with, he says – yet after three or four generations, they have nothing:
“In ethics, as in so many other fields, we have recklessly and willfully abandoned our great classical-Christian heritage. We have even degraded the very words without which ethical discourse cannot carry on, words like virtue, love, temperance. As a result, we are totally ignorant, totally uneducated in the subject that of all conceivable subjects, is the most important, We have no idea- to think with and therefore are only too ready to believe that ethics is a held where thinking does no good. Who knows anything today of the Seven Deadly Sins or of the Four Cardinal Virtues? Who could even name them? And if these venerable. old ideas are thought not to be worth bothering about, what new ideas have taken their place?”
Finally, he sets out his hopes for the future:
“What is to take the place of the soul- and life-destroying metaphysics inherited from the nineteenth century? The task of our generation, I have no doubt, is one of metaphysical reconstruction. It is not as if we had to invent anything new: at the same time, it is not good enough merely to revert to the old formulations. Our task – and the task of all education – is to understand the present world, the world in which we live and make our choices.”
In “What Happened Next,” David Boyle considers how the idea of small-scale schools, capable of reignited the metaphysical fire, remained important among those influenced by Schumacher. He compares Small is Beautiful with the work of a younger Schumacher contemporary, the Austrian Catholic priest Ivan Illich, author of Deschooling Society.