When most people think of the word “education,” they think of a pupil as a sort of animate sausage casing. Into this empty casing, the teachers【B1】______stuff “education. “

But genuine education, as Socrates knew more than two thousand years ago, is not【B2】___the stuffings of information into a person, but rather eliciting knowledge from him: it is the【B3】___of what is in the mind.

” The most important part of education,” once wrote William Ernest Hocking, the【B4】______Harvard philosopher, “is this instruction of a man in what he has inside of him. “

And, as Edith Hamilton has reminded us, Socrates never said, “I know, learn from me. ” He said, rather, “Look into your own selves and find the【B5】___of truth that God has put into every heart, and that only you can kindle (点燃) to a【B6】___. “

In a dialogue, Socrates takes an ignorant slave boy, without a day of【B7】______, and proves to the amazed observers that the boy really “ knows” geometry—because the principles of geometry are already in his mind, waiting to be called out.

So many of the discussions and【B8】___about the content of education are useless and inconclusive because they【B9】___what should “go into” the student rather than with what should be taken out, and how this can best be done.

The college student who once said to me, after a lecture, “ I spend so much time studying that I don’t have a chance to learn anything,” was clearly expressing his【B10】______with the sausage-casing view of education.

【B7】