Conservadorismo na educação
Samuel Eliot (1821–1898) foi historiador e educador. Graduado pela Universidade de Harvard em 1839, ele foi presidente do Trinity College (uma das instituições universitárias mais tradicionais dos Estados Unidos) de 1860 a 1864.
A palestra transcrita abaixo foi apresentada em 20 de agosto de 1862 no American Institute of Instruction, em Hartford, Connecticut. Eliot apresenta algumas ideias básicas do que deve ser uma postura de prudência (isto é, conservadora) com relação à educação.
Ele aponta a diferença entre o que seria a busca saudável pela melhoria (improvement), em que se corrigem os problemas, preservando as qualidades do que se quer reformar, e a mera procura por inovações, em que se destroem os objetos e instituições apenas para promover a mudança pela mudança.
Ao invés de princípios educacionais que mudam diariamente, ao sabor das modices do momento, Eliot defende que há alguns (poucos) princípios fixos e imutáveis no processo de educação, que são baseados na própria natureza humana, e que devem ser respeitados ao longo de todas as tentativas de melhoria educacional.
Segue abaixo o texto original em inglês. Em breve, espero disponibilizar a tradução ao português.
CONSERVATISM IN EDUCATION
Samuel Elliot
It gives me great pleasure to meet the American Institute in Hartford. Although the particular institution with which I am connected, is closed for the summer holidays, and its members are scattered, so that they cannot unite with me in these words of greeting, I feel that I am speaking for them as well as myself in bidding you welcome. To the city in general, and to acquaintance with its citizens, you have already received a welcome from more fitting lips than mine. In a gathering like this, the whole community may well take pleasure; we look on with satisfaction, as the members of the Institute come among us to renew their intercourse with one another, to express their sympathies, to utter their counsels, and to bear their united testimonies to the magnitude of the cause to which they have pledged themselves. Nor, I may add, have they chosen an inappropriate spot for their assemblage. They find themselves surrounded by past associations as well as by present activities in the work of education.
Within seven years after the settlement of this town, and it may not have been for the first time that such an appropriation was made, thirty pounds, a very large sum for that period, were appropriated to the schools, and from that day to this, there runs the same silver thread through the Town Records, binding generation to generation in the same interests and the same sacrifices. What the schools of the present time are, and what the men who are engaged in them or in the other educational labors of the neighborhood, I may safely leave to you to discover during your sojourn, if you have not already discovered them. But I should be doing injustice to the city, as well as to my own feelings, if I did not advert, pointedly and gratefully, to the influence which the labors of one life, and that happily still in its prime, have shed not only here but elsewhere, making itself visible in generous exertions of various kinds, and now more especially identified with a Journal, worthily called the American, it might be styled the Universal, the most comprehensive of all periodicals devoted to Education.
In this presence, and the presence of so many active and successful leaders of education, it becomes me to be brief. It is but a small portion of your time that I shall occupy with some unpretending observations upon Conservatism in Education.
In education, as in almost every other respect, the characteristic of the Age is what is termed Improvement. Sensitive to the defects of systems, methods, and instruments, we undertake to reform them; we make one improvement here, another there; we build improved school-houses, equip them with improved furniture and apparatus, provide them with improved text-books, and conduct them upon improved theories. lago says he is “nothing, if not critical.” The educator of to-day often acts upon much the same principle, criticises, alters or tries to alter, amends or tries to amend, as if everything with him were an open question, or rather as if it were decided that everything was susceptible of change, and of change for the better. Like the painter in one of the English parishes, who brought in his bill for “mending the Commandments, altering the Creed, and making a new Lord’s Prayer,” our educational reformers hold nothing to be beyond the reach of their adventurous spirit. Such a spirit easily runs to extremes; in fact it is an extreme itself. Improvement of this sort is but another name for Innovation, a process in which alteration is an essential part, but amendment not an essential one; by which things may be very much changed, indeed quite revolutionized, without being reformed.
