Education & Values are NOT the Same
Rabbi David Wolpe in The Jewish Week: A Question Of Values
We are forever relearning the lesson: Education and values are not the same. A trained intellect does not equal an active conscience.
Doctors can plot to bomb innocent people in London and Glasgow, if they are doctors without values. Professors can lie and cheat and steal, if they are professors without values. As George Steiner so memorably wrote years ago: “A man can read Goethe or Schiller in the evening, he can play Bach or Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.â€
Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke of bigotry as resembling the pupil of an eye — the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts. Learning alone will not widen a mind unless it has elasticity. Becoming a doctor means developing the skill of preserving life; becoming a decent human being means holding the conviction of the value of life. The two often go in tandem but not always, as the growing literature on Nazi doctors teaches us, as today’s newspaper reminds us.
No belief, training or tradition alone can ensure goodness. Our best chance is to reiterate the central teaching of the Torah: each human being is made in the image of God. You can betray that image or honor it. A world bereft of that truth is a world bereft.
5 Responses to “Education & Values are NOT the Same”
Even more apt: education and intelligence are not the same.
To add another layer, Holmes himself was a eugenicist.
There is nothing wrong with eugenics nor euthenics. They are merely tools that can be applied wrongly or rightly.
“Our best chance is to reiterate the central teaching of the Torah: each human being is made in the image of God. You can betray that image or honor it. A world bereft of that truth is a world bereft.”
True words. I just wish both Israelis and Palestinians would believe this is the truth. Maybe, we could actually get a peace agreement then.
I hate to be the spoil sport here, but the’image of God’ is just a sugar pill (to me), unless everyone agrees on what God is or represents.
Wjat we are are really talking about is the societal need to embrace the same basic definitions of good and evil, and those are arrived at IMO by cultural evolution. It’s a cultural process, not a Godly one. Nevertheless, accepting the same definitions is he strongest impetus for cultural survival and advancement.
In that sense, Pres. Bush is right. We are being challenged by a culture where our definitions of good and evil have been turned upside down. As far as I can see, our best defense and our best hope for survival is to not slide into coypying them but to retain our own (Western) good and evil ideals.