The idea of a liberal education
Cameron, J. M.
! KNOWLEDGE FUNDAMENTAL TO THE HEALTH OF SOCIETY
The idea of a liberal education
I J.M. CAMERON SUPPOSE there can't be any doubt that the golden age of liberal education was in...
...for every student who put himself down for a major, or a major and a minor, would be brought within a network of tutorials of two or three students, and of small seminars, and these would be devoted to the discussion of the writing and reading of the students...
...Each student should be required to write at least one essay, perhaps more commonly two, each week, and to do recommended reading in connec- tion with his writing...
...they hadn't been given any help...
...This is why I thought it so alarming that the term had crept into the ICEL rendering of the Liturgy...
...M. Cameron, On The Idea of a University, Toronto, 1978, p. 49...
...It was men educated in the tradition who founded some of the inquiries and the subjects of immense importance in the modern world...
...And yet it seems to me necessary, to put it as strongly as possible, that liberal education should be available at the undergraduate level in a fair number of universities and colleges, even if this involves the existence, side by side, of two very different models of education, a college within a college or university...
...No doubt young persons left to themselves by some catastrophe would not be totally helpless: the young in Golding's novelLord of the Flies even invented totemism and human sacrifice...
...A little later he continues: I have known a time in a great School of letters, when things went on for the most part by mere routine, and form took the place of earnestness...
...One who has never read a Platonic dialogue or Descartes's Meditations or Berkeley's Principles is ill equipped to deal with critical problems in study or in life...
...But it seems reasonable to suppose that in schools, as in families and other collective enterprises, there is a necessary and desirable partnership between the younger and the older• Much will plainly depend upon the quality of that relationship...
...I think historical, literary and linguistic, and philosophical studies have to be a part of a core curriculum, and this for a number of reasons, some of which I'll try to explain, sometimes in my own words, sometimes in Newman's...
...above all, it is as though it were coated with a special kind of grease--it slips down (or past) easily...
...I quote from Newman who is maintaining that even self-education is to be preferred to certain kinds of university education...
...but he knows, and shows he knows by proposing the establishment of a Chair of English Literature at the new university in Dublin, that the vernacular literatures of Europe are classics in their own right...
...Perhaps I ought to insert here the remark that as a believer I am not concerned with whether or not Christianity will survive...
...And could one who was not already deeply read in history have seen as an intellectual challenge the palpable difference of social atmosphere between the Catholic and Protestant parts of~ Europe, that is, could a man educated in the modern fashion have stumbled upon the hypothesis whence came The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism...
...the notion that we can confect at will our moral stances, our value-systems, isn't intelligible...
...Literature stands related to Man as Science stands to Nature...
...its words are for the most part to be found in the standard dictionaries...
...The apprenticeship system was in the nineteenth century common to both liberal and the useful arts and has in our time decayed in both cases for similar reasons: the system required the sacrifice of immediate gratification for the sake of possible future gratification...
...I have noticed (in Toronto) that the written work of fourth-year undergraduates may be from a formal point of view, just hopeless, of course not always but in a surprising number of cases...
...There is the moral revolution of our time which I have already mentioned...
...Instead, students should opt for a major subject, with or without a minor, and the syllabus and booklist covering the three years should be the main guide to the student...
...In every enterprise concerned with finding things out and acquiring skills there is of necessity a partner- ship between older and younger persons...
...and because it commonly goes with an incapacity to use the language with clarity...
...I have known places where a stiff manner, a pompous voice, coldness and condescen- sion, were the teacher's attributes...
...all the same, the note of complacency is sounded in this book, and I hear behind it a lot of popular applause...
...This was forcibly brought home to me some time ago when I came across in something written by a scholar and published by a university press of great prestige the astonishing statement that the con- cept of the Unconscious would have been incomprehensible before Freud...
...These are clever young men and women...
...The course once completed, the grade once assigned, the substance of what has been learned may vanish from the student's mind, and will certainly not be revived if there are no final and comprehensive examinations, oral or written or both, on the work of the previous three or four years...
...and in this he represented the social reality of his time...
...Since attendance at lectures would be entirely voluntary, only the charm and interest of the lectures would guarantee an audience...
...Now, I know very well that Twain wasn't at all complacent about his American present...
...It is true, what he has in mind is the literature of antiquity...
...and they had been corrupted by bad models, sometimes bad models in the work put before them by their teachers...
...Much that is valued by the latter is unintelligi- ble to the former...
...Secondly, the effect of the mode of teaching that commonly goes with this system is that the students become passive, giving back in examinations and term papers what they have received from their teachers...
...First, I think the dominant method of teaching and study at the undergraduate level--in North America--has to go...
...But whereas people are on their guard in relation to racial docuines--after all, every "race" is an interest group--astrology and other kinds of nonsense seem to find believers among the educated...
...Take what is said here in North America about "values...
...total amnesia would produce in our society what it produces in individual persons, a loss of inner confidence and inability to take charge of one's own life...
...But in more specific terms what are the main features of the regime I would substitute for what prevails at present...
...I will put my question in another form...
...Could Christianity survive a complete break with the past of our culture...
...Sometimes this kind of wisdom is expressed proverbially, as in "What is sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander" or the Gospel saying about motes in eyes...
...but as a student of society I am bound to ask questions one might ask about any form of belief, about Buddhism, say, or Islam...
...The way of life of the former is not in general marked by strong intellectual or artistic interests...
...This could today be used without alteration of undergraduate students working under the regime of many institutions in North America...
...he seems to be saying about the European Middle Ages...
...They can't all be imparters of liberal education in Newman's sense...
...It was related of an English philosopher (I think G. E. Moore) that he used to say apropos of some problem and its proposed solution: I don't know what's true in this matter but I know that is not true...
...It seems grammatical...
...The answer to this question is plainly no: if the story of Israel and of the Crucified One were to drop out of human memory, then Christianity would obviously cease to exist...
...But it isn't always true that this gap is such that there is no possibility of a common spiritual life...
...Now, I call this illiteracy because I can't find a better word for it...
...Where it is sour, achievement will be warped and limited...
...Philosophy is a very difficult subject and philosophical ability is rare--not logical ability: anyone who can do mathematics can do logic--and undergraduate students are on the young side for it, or perhaps they are neither old enough nor young enough...
...Such language would have been laughed out of existence in the nineteenth century or would have taken refuge in the inner life of some strange sect...
...If some lectures didn't catch on it wouldn't matter...
...this has the effect of making past morality not so much disliked or opposed as unintelligible...
...it is his Life and Remains...
...It is amusing, in a macabre way, to find the confectors of value-systems exclaiming in tones of moral passion over the wickedness of censoring the books to be read by schoolchildren, and then, in almost the same breath, scrutinizing textbooks for traces of such heresies as racism and sexism...
...sort to dispense with an academical system, but that system cannot in any sort dispense with personal influ- ence...
...and I shall take it as something beyond dispute that Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Dickens, George Eliot, Hawthorne and Melville, to pick out a few, can be in a curriculum what Homer and Virgil, Herodotus and Livy, were in the nineteenth cen- tury...
...Most degree courses, ending in the Bachelor's degree, are made up out of fifteen, or twenty, courses or their equivalent in half courses, in subjects more or less related to each other...
...but offered astrology as a solution we can say: I don't know what's true but I know that is not true...
...This is hard, in part because it is a not much questioned presupposition that the past is bad and the future good, that the record of the past is the record of the crimes and follies of mankind...
...Religion was no longer a supreme category of thought...
...it is his Life and Remains...
...the life of the scholar or learned amateur or of the skilled artisan was contemplated as a highly desirable state to be aimed at over a period of years, and the authority of the master craftsman was recognized if not always accepted in particular cases...
...weren't they dumb...
...These institutions are concerned with moving adolescents through the ever-increasing space between childhood and adult life...
...I think this is true even where majors and minors do impose some pattern on the choice of courses...
...Com- parative philology, that is, all intensive study of the vernacular languages, sociology, social anthropology, psychology, were all founded by men trained in this way, in what I shall call the tradition of humanism...
...We are faced with two sets of questions: about content-curriculum, syllabus--and questions about method--how is the content, supposing our having agreed about it, to be made available to the undergraduates...
...That so much regurgitating goes on is alarming, just as alarming as the widespread practice of plagiarism, though it isn't visited with the same penalties...
...Even if an amnesiac does put together something of a new life for himself, the sense of a void in which all-important things had happened would always be there...
...It would be hard, I think, to argue that they belong to the same spiritual world...
...Literature is [man's] history...
...This is not primarily a matter of acquiring ease and polish in one's manners--we all know great and good men who are in this respect very deficient, and others who have such graces but are rogues--though such firings are desirable...
...What have the fathers done that the children's teeth should be so set on edge...
...There, the adolescent members of the middle class, proceeding from families that were either bookish or thought it a defect in themselves that they weren't, went through the grammar school, or the lycee, or the Gymnasium, and then on to universities where the subjects having the highest prestige were the ancient classical languages, history, philosophy, literature, and mathematics...
...the syntax conforms to standard models and thus our habitual expectations are fulfilled...
...I can best say what I mean by giving examples...
...indeed, what distinguishes a university from a technical school is that in a university even technological subjects are studied liberally at the graduate level...
...Chadband's discourse in Bleak House represents the religious parasense of the mid-nineteenth century...
...These evils are not new and they arise under many different systems...
...This was the reign of Law without influence, System without Personality...
...And yet the United States has produced at least one historian of genius, Parkman (just as it produced a philosopher of genius, Peirce) and a mass of brilliant academic historians...
...it is as though it is thought desirable to shield the young from the close embrace of the world's great minds...
...He is commending the study of literature not as an option, polish or decoration, but as a means of self-knowledge, knowledge about ourselves as a species and as individual members of a species...
...It differs from what may be taken as nonsense, in that there are no category blunders and no obvious logical foul-ups...
...I don't mean that anyone without a taste for it should be made to attempt any technical philosophy...
...To carry five courses a year, with the reading and other assignments connected with the work--in a big university the sheer physical problem of getting from place to place on the campus--is not compatible with fruitful lei- sure, with rummaging through libraries, general reading, going to concerts and plays, extended conversation...
...I am rather concerned with that of which such things are only the symptoms...
...Instead, the faculty members should lecture--if they do--on subjects that interest them or on which they are working...
...John Henry Newman, The O~ce and Work of Universities, London, 1856 p. 112 **ibid., pp.112,113...
...What I suppose puzzles me and frightens me is the large number of lumpen intellectuals we seem to be producing...
...it is his history," * "Literature is to man in some sort what autobiography is to the individual...
...In any case, the main work of the faculty would be tutoring and conducting small seminars...
...I I J. M. CAMERON, professor emeritus, St...
...Even if this be granted, we have still to think out a way to teach such a curriculum in our present circumstances...
...But many think it is, and it's therefore not surpris- ing to find, e.g., supporters of abortion on demand rancor- ously opposed to capital punishment for murder, and pro-life defenders of the human foetus in favor of threatening our enemies with nuclear weapons...
...ibid...
...But I think they should know about philosophy...
...their inability to express themselves in plain, intelligible, and reasonably correct English (in matters of correctness we are all of us liable to fail many times a day) wasn't their own fault...
...My, •John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated, edited by I. T. Ker, Oxford, 1976, p. 193...
...It is a spasmodic system...
...An academical system without the personal influence of teachers upon pupils, is an arctic winter, it will create an ice-bound, petrified, cast- iron University and nothing else...
...KNOWLEDGE FUNDAMENTAL TO THE HEALTH OF SOCIETY The idea of a liberal education I J.M...
...and while not everyone lies on one side of the gap or the other, there is plainly a great difference between most of those who come out of the institu- tions of higher education in our society--a very high propor- tion of the total age group--and the professional intellectuals...
...Newman saw this relationship as more important than systems and institu- tions...
...Christianity, and liberal culture, are essentially things mediated through time...
...They will commit pages of what I have elsewhere called "parasense...
...Such a culture, enriched in the English-speaking countries by the classics of the vernacular literature--e.g., Shakespeare and Bunyan --that were picked up in the home rather than at whether it could survive the vanishing of a culture that is in some way Biblical, that is, soaked in the narratives, the sym- bolism, and the moral attitudes conveyed in Scripture...
...These considerations show us that liberal educa- tion, the cultivation of the mind for the sake of the discourse itself, not for its utility (not that this is denied), came to its perfection in a society very different from our own and under conditions it would today be impossible to duplicate...
...Perhaps this isn't the right way to put it...
...It is totally parasensical...
...But today the gap is within the educated classes of modern society...
...To this central core of literary and historical studies I should like to add some philosophy...
...and of course I would add to the English names those of French and German and Italian writers...
...Thus Newman in the ninth of the university Discourses...
...It "is to man in some sort what autobiography is to the individual...
...but in at least Protestant countries vernacular culture, something shared by far more people than were liberally edu- cated, was Biblical --Luther's Bible or the King James version provided a common measure of style, a source of illuminating stories -- Abraham, the man of faith, Moses, the leader of the nation, David the King who combines heroism and depravity, the Gospel parables, the unforgettable exemplary story of the young man from Nazareth betrayed by his friends and executed by a foreign power, the rich thought of Paul, with his great opposition, Grace and the Law, his com- mendation of charity as the master virtue, and the thought that before God man is always in the wrong...
...The parameters of the problem can only be fully evaluated by those who are able to relate to the educational process in a meaningful way and thus interfacewise implement a viable solution in the ongoing future...
...There should be no lecture courses "covering the ground," no courses providing material to be regurgitated...
...I reverence Mark Twain as a great writer...
...It is deeply impressed on the mind of the young, and they certainly get this from their teachers who themselves got it from colleges, schools, and institutes of education, that there are many different sets of "values" to be picked out by the individual ("true for me," "right for me"), as from the counters of some vast moral cafeteria, and that growing up, becoming a mature person, is confecting one's own style and constellation of "values...
...Again, higher education has a "natural" basis, in the fol- lowing sense...
...It isn't a matter for discussion...
...I don't think it would make any sense to propose some scheme for the 'establishment of liberal education throughout the institutions of higher education in North America...
...I I EACHING AND LEARNING are, then, two terms of a natural relation for satisfying the needs of civilization and the college and university will be healthy where this relation is recognized and, even, celebrated...
...Thirdly, the division of work into distinct courses, each course assigning a grade to the student, means that there is no continuity, no development in studies...
...193, 194...
...when neither part entered into the thoughts of the other, when each lived by and in itself...
...First, where the undergraduate takes the system seriously he/she has no leisure...
...the personal influence of the teacher is able in some *Idea of a University, p. 132...
...if influence is deprived of its due position, it will not by those means be got rid of, it will only break out irregularly, dangerously...
...and where the pressure of numbers is great such essays as are written are often marked on content, not much attention being paid to questions of vocabulary, syntax, and style...
...but A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court strikes me as a representative and painfully philistine work, an attitude to the past of a man intolerably complacent about the present...
...an acquaintance with some of the classics of philosophy: it seems reasonable that such things should be nourished as the core of a curriculum in the liberal arts...
...I have a number of objections to this system...
...Fifthly, it seems to belong to the system that the writing of essays is not a prominent and sustamed activity throughout a student's career...
...Most of us--I include myself--are not very good at using the techniques of logical analysis to sort out the wild and the plausible, the reasonable and the extravagant, from each other in discourse about men and the world...
...I know this is a very difficult problem with many causes: simply the decline of reading -- even good students will only have read the works included in the high school syllabus --as a common leisure activity is a powerful negative influence (this is reflected by the wide use among the half-educated of the word "book" to mean a magazine, Time or Reader's Digest)• Finally, I think the system as such mili- tates against growing familiarity between teachers and taught...
...The ethic of self-realization, of life-fulfdlment, the current view of the place of pleasure in a satisfactory life for the young (it is widely taken for granted that non-procreative sexual activity is a natural fight to be exercised from, at least, early adolescence), all these are, for so many, unquestioned presup- positions that anything that questions them is taken to be quaint, reactionary, even malicious...
...With influence there is life, without it there is none...
...It strikes me that a difficulty in talking about liberal educa- tion --the education of those who are free so that they may exercise their freedom -- is not so much that it isn't believed in as that many people have no idea what one is talking about...
...By this I mean we have to get rid of the credit system, not necessarily for most students in universities and colleges, but for those who want a liberal education...
...The possibility of cultivating the historical sense must plainly be there...
...Sometimes it shows itself in action and speech, when we show what we think is worth talking about and what not...
...If we were to make such texts central in our curriculum, then it seems to follow that we must in some way enable students to pick up the historical sense...
...I have experienced a state of things, in which teachers were cut off from the taught as by an unsurmountable barrier...
...On this I commented as follows...
...But I think there is a central core which has, historically, made university education a living and shaping element in our civilization...
...And yet it is quite plain that to be a liberally educated man, in the nineteenth-century sense, involves years of what seems to be unrewarding toil at subjects not always at the time very exciting, a limitation of choice springing from the authority of the older and wiser to shape the curriculum -- the credit and elective system in high school or college/university seems to me incompatible with a liberal education -- a life, even at the undergraduate level very confined by today's standards...
...it belongs to a great tract of territory that lies beyond profitable discussion...
...Michael's College, Univer- sity of Toronto, recently published On the Idea of a University (University of Toronto Press...
...Such a view is never--can never--be held consistently, in part for purely logical reasons, in part because it isn't arbitrary that certain dispositions--veracity and courage, for example-- count as virtues, their opposites as vices...
...it would be impossible seriously to propose they should be...
...CAMERON SUPPOSE there can't be any doubt that the golden age of liberal education was in Western Europe in the nineteenth century...
...This is widely recognized and there are many attempts to remedy the evil by tutorial or counseling schemes, schemes that wouldn't be necessary if the system were changed...
...We may be puzzled by whatever the determinism/free will controversy is about...
...Each course is a self-contained unit and is separately assessed and graded, the student's grade being recorded on his transcript, Sometimes requirements for "majoring" and "minorintg," and the writ- ing into the regulations of prerequisites of various kinds, impose some shape on this structure--the mosaic is given a pattern --but in other cases an elective system enables students to go in for very bizarre combinations...
...That it is now common among the educated, that is, among those who have passed through the high schools and the universities and colleges, seems to me connected with deep confusions in politics, in theology, in thought about human life...
...I think the first thing to do is to abolish all particular courses attendance at which is required for credit and in respect of which grades are awarded, at least in the second, third and fourth years...
...Quite apart from Freud's distinguished nineteenth-century predecessors, there is the passage in Plato (Republic 571,572) in which he shows we have desires that we only know about through their expression in dreams, a passage with which Freud himself was of course familiar...
...a sense of history...
...In principle almost any subject may be studied liberally, that is, out of curiosity and for its own sake...
...I T IS TRUE that in every civilized society there is necessarily a gap between those who have received an elaborate educa- tion and have leisure in which to cultivate the arts, to specu- late, to write, and those who give themselves to business and professional activity and to physical labor...
...This is a part of the same irrationalism that has been showing itself in mad racial doctrines...
...Fourthly, it is a common though not a necessary part of the system that textbooks and anthologies rather than original works are studied...
...KNOWLEDGE of literature...
...Now, the signs of a fraying of (if not of a break with) our link with the past are evident...
...Such knowledge is fundamental to the health of society, for without it we have no criteria for picking out who we are or what we are...
...Shakespeare is an excellent example of one who belonged simultaneously to more worlds than one: to the court and the country, the laboring poor and their masters, the respectable and the debauched...
...It is sobering to think that if Freud had been brought up in a contemporary school he might not have had enough mythol- ogy in his head to have characterized -- or even noted --the Oedipus complex...
...It is surely a very odd state of affairs that places on the library shelves The Rainbow and Fear of Flying and at the same time removes Oliver Twist, Huckleberry Finn, and Little Women...
...Nothing is to me more astonishingband nothing is more frightening--than the eruption of astrology, talking to the flowers, doing things under pyramids, and so on, in the midst of our society...
...It is befter, he argues, to be self-educated, with all its drawbacks and disadvantages, than to be one of those earnest but ill-used persons, who are forced to load their minds with a score of subjects against an examina- tion, who have too much on their hands to indulge themselves in thinking or investigation, who devour premise and conclusion together with indiscriminate greediness, who hold whole sciences on faith, and commit demonstrations to memory, and who too often, as might be expected, when their period of education is passed, throw up all they have learned in disgust, having gained nothing really by their anxious labours, except, perhaps, the habit of application...
...What to do in the first year, which ought to be a "sampling" year, is a special problem I neglect on this occa- sion...
...I am not concerned with the decline in the practice of reading and writing or the growing inability, even in academic circles, to write in plain and intelligible English, free of gobbledygook, parasensical locutions, psychobabble and other substitutes for the language, serious though all such things must seem to teachers in high schools, colleges, and universities...
...this i.4 peculiarly well estab- lished in the American tradition, in part by reason of the revolutionary ideology with which the United States begins, in part by the nature of its vernacular culture in the nineteenth century...
...retains a minimum of health certain sophistries and idiocies are recognized for what they are, men turn away from them as they turn away from what stinks or is liable to cause pain...
...Those who defend the "values" nonsense will go in for the active use of "to relate" ("I don't relate to him/her"), and the jargon of input, parameters, meaningful relations, consciousness-raising, interface, and so on...
...With a deeper knowledge of litera- ture, with a finer historical sense, with wider acquaintance with the many good and absurd things said by philosophers, much nonsense written and spoken in Western society wouldn't be expressed...
...I do a fair amount of general reviewing and I find that howlers of this kind are becoming more and more frequent in books put out by respectable publishers: a criticism of the editors as well as the authors...
...And there is what I can only call the collapse of literacy...
...I invented a piece of parasense that would, I am convinced, scarcely raise an eyebrow in a document issued by a school of education or even by a university...
...But so long as society "J...
Vol. 107 • April 1980 • No. 7
