Toward A Critique Of Paideia And Humanitas: (Mis)Education And The Global Ecological Crisis

Abstract

Homo sapiens has been variously described as a symbol-making animal, a toolmaking animal, a social animal, a political animal, a rational animal, and a spiritual animal. Each of these characteristics has been identified as the basic element which distinguishes Homo from the rest of animal nature and gives him his distinctively human characteristics. It may now be that Homo should not only be described biologically as Homo sapiens but socially and culturally as Homo educans. It may well be that the most apt way to describe the process of man's becoming human is to say that he became a teaching and learning animal. -R. Freeman Butts