The Aims of Education and Other Essays

This book was part of the welcome packet for incoming students to Boston University’s School of Public Communication (as it was called then) a half-century ago. I recently reread it, and find it hard to reconstruct what I made of some of the more abstruse essays at the time. The ones that I got the most out of back then, to judge from my underlining, still speak directly to me. Some of the author’s proposals for education carried the day; I wish more of them had been adopted. Some of the other essays, such as “The Anatomy of Some Scientific Ideas,” are heavy going. Taken together, though, the lectures and articles collected here are evidence of a first-class mind at work. Of course, the oldest of these lectures were given more show more than a century ago. Whether you find his unexamined assumption that all scholars are male exasperating or merely quaint will depend on how tolerant you are of paragons of a bygone age. For others, the language may be off-putting; Whitehead writes as British dons did back then. Perhaps it’s inevitable that the scientific lectures seem more dated than those that deal with education. Taken however as texts that show a first-class mathematician and philosopher coming to terms with the then-new theory of relativity, they remain valuable. show less