Maxims for the Principals Institute

Excerpts from Comments by Donald Cowan at the 1990 Principals\u27 Institut

Fall 1970 Convocation Speech

Fall 1970 Convocation speech given by Dr. Donald Cowan

Lifelong Learning

We are, all of us, in the business of education. Mortimer Adler, in his Paideia Proposal, distinguishes between ”educatio•n and ”schooling•, considering ”educatio•n to be the life -long process of learning by which an individual becomes an educated person, while ”schooling• is the formal process that you and I administer to the young. My vocabulary is different; what he calls schooling I call education, and what he calls education I call learning. So it will be with others, and there are many, who write or talk on this work we are in, all with different vocabularies. Still, the reader should have no difficulty; just as the string section of an orchestra automatically shifts to a well -tempered scale when the piano breaks into the concerto, so we adjust our interpretations according to the intention of the message. Meaning exceeds definition, we might say, in the same way that a real landscape is more than a map