The Quality of Intellectual Discipline in America

In: The annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Volume 378, Issue 1, p. 75-82

Abstract

Four of the seven words of this title are controversial. The image of "America" has become blurred both toward itself and in the eyes of the outside world. Education on all levels is a barometer of this uncertainty. The term "intellectual" often suffers from superficial equation of "quality" in terms of burgeoning quantity. This is exemplified by heavy stress upon physical science and technology at the cost of the arts and human sciences; by high-pressure promotions of educational computerization; by recent American philosophy (for example, logical empiricism); and by comparative weakening of alternative philosophies especially as they bear upon education (for example, the classical and holistic-organismic). "Discipline," in turn, is more frequently judged by rigorous standards of measurable mastery than by alternative meanings—meanings that include both Eastern philosophies of inner discipline and Western conceptions of social discipline. The latter, in turn, points to modern processes of co-operative learning-teaching as well as to movements of student activism which, democratically understood, afford abundant resources for educational experience. Yet, granting certain advances, the grimmest of all problems remains unsolved: whether any such modes of "intellectual" and "discipline" are able to generate a "quality" of moral ends sufficient not only for troubled "America," but for a whole world of unprecedented peril.