Maxims for the Principals Institute

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

The Post-Technological Age

We\u27re not certain we\u27re yet into a technological age, so to stake out a post-technological age is somewhat like the original sooners dashing across the prairies in their prairie schooners to make first claims on the choice sites, saying I got here first. What is implied by the title is a recognition that students presently sitting in college classrooms are the people who will be in charge of society twenty to thirty years from the inescapable present. The education presented to them now must be preparation for that time --in some way must be a foretaste or a prophecy of what society will become and what it will need. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course, because as these students nudge their way toward the seats of power they will be helping to shape the very society they are to rule. How can we educate for a society we know will be different from the present

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