The most important assumption made in a general theory of education is the assumption about
the end to be achieved, the aim. This is a commitment to value and a logical prerequisite of there being a theory at all. All practical theories, limited or general, must begin with some notion of a desirable end to be attained. Formally a general theory of education can be said to have one aim only: to produce a certain type of person, an educated man. The interesting question is how to give substantial content to this formal aim. There are two ways in which
this might be done. The first is to develop an analysis of the concept of education, to work out in detail the criteria which govern the actual use of this term. The criteria will be those which enable us to mark off the educated man from one who is not. The task of working out these criteria falls to the analytical philosopher of education. At the outset of this enterprise we meet with a complication. The term ‘education’ can be used in more than one way. In one of its uses it functions in a more or less descriptive way. A person’s education may be understood as the sum total of his experiences. This is a perfectly acceptable use of the word, so that it would not be inappropriate to say of a man that his education came to him as a street urchin, or in a mining camp, or in the army. A more restricted use would be to use it to describe what happens to an individual in specifically educational institutions
like schools or colleges. In this case to talk of a man’s education is to talk of his passing through a system. ‘He was educated at such-and-such a school’ signifies that he went to
the school in question. A more restricted sense still is one which imports into the notion of education some reference to value. Education, on this interpretation, is a normative or value term, and implies that what happens to the individual improves him in some way. The purely descriptive sense of the term carried no such implication; to comply in this case it is enough to have attended the school for a certain period. According to the normative use, an educated man is an improved man, and as such a desirable endproduct, someone who ought to be produced. It is this normative sense of education which provides the logicalstarting-point of a general theory, the commitment to produce something of value, a
desirable type of individual. Such a person would have specific characteristics, such as the possession of certain sorts of knowledge and skill, and the having of certain attitudes themselves regarded as worth having. The educated man would be one whose intellectual abilities had been developed, who was sensitive to matters of moral and aesthetic concern, who could appreciate the nature and force of mathematical and scientific thinking, who
could view the world along historical and geographical perspectives and who, moreover, had a regard for the importance of truth, accuracy, and elegance in thinking. A further
requirement is that the educated man is one whose knowledge and understanding is all of a piece, integrated, and not merely a mass of acquired information, piecemeal and unrelated.Taken all together these various criteria allow us to give content to the merely formal
notion of the educated man by specifying what conditions have to be satisfied before the term has application. The second way in which the aim may be given substance is to place it in some particular social, political or religious context. The formal aim simply demands an educated man, but this notion will vary in content according to the time, place
and culture in which the aim is to be realised. For Plato the educated man was one trained in mathematical and philosophical disciplines, cognizant of true reality in his grasp of the Forms and both able and willing to act as guardian and ruler of the state. For Herbert
Spencer, living in an age and society very different from Plato’s, the educated man was one who had acquired knowledge and intellectual development sufficient to enable him to support himself in an industrial and commercial society, to raise and support a family,
to play the part of a citizen in such a society and to use his leisure wisely. The kind of knowledge and skill which would have satisfied Plato’s requirement would not have been
much to the point in Spencer’s England. James Mill, Thomas Arnold, Cardinal Newman and John Dewey each formulated a different notion of what would count as an educated man. Present-day shapers of societies, like the rulers of Cuba, emergent Africa, and China
will no doubt have very different notions from those of nineteenth century Europe. Each will see the educated man in terms of what social demands will be made on such a man.It is perhaps worth mentioning here that the fact that the substance of the aim is bound to be culture-relative is a good reason why no general theory can provide recommendations applicable to all educational situations and why no such general theory will command
universal acceptance. What is important, however, is the fact that common to all such theories is the assumption that the educated man is someone worth producing. This
assumption establishes the educational aim, the logical point of departure for a general theory of education.