Dewey-eyed about gentlemen

Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education

September 10, 1999

At a time when so many academic leaders seem to regard themselves as little more than managers of their institutions, it is good to see the head of a major academic body actively engaging with the fundamental question of what education is for and why it is important.

Alan Ryan is a distinguished philosopher and warden of New College, Oxford. In this book he explores the relationships between liberalism as a world view and liberal education in the various ways that term is used.After discussing the philosophical ideas that have shaped his thinking, Ryan applies them to primary and secondary education before concluding with a chapter on higher education.

The book is more of a personal apologia than a systematic academic exposition. Thus the thinkers who have particularly influenced Ryan are centre-stage: John Stuart Mill and John Dewey, to a lesser extent Matthew Arnold and Bertrand Russell. It is impossible to write about liberal education without considering the ideas of John Henry Newman, so despite Ryan's admitted "antipathy to organised religion ... and to the personality of Newman himself", Newman stands like a shadow beside much of what Ryan says.

The book originated in several different "invited lectures" given over a period of two or three years when Ryan was teaching in Princeton. This may account for its lively, almost conversational style. It may also explain why we seem to be witnessing a development of the author's ideas as we proceed. For example "early Ryan" is quite enthusiastic about the national curriculum but the "later Ryan" sees in bored and over-stressed teachers the grim consequences of a government believing that it has to lay down exactly what is taught, when and how. No American, he considers, would think a free society could tolerate such dictation by central government.

But what about liberalism as a philosophy and liberal education? The concept of liberal education has developed from classical antiquity, through the high middle ages when John of Salisbury associated it with elevating the understanding and empowerment to solve "all problems possible of solution", without the need of a teacher. From this there would seem to be no necessary connection with those loosely related Enlightenment meta-narratives termed "liberal".

It is perhaps with this in mind that Ryan distinguishes two meanings of "liberal education". The first is the kind of education that sustains a liberal society, the second one that teaches what is worth learning for its own sake, which seeks to enlarge the mind. He adds that in this second meaning liberal education is the modern equivalent of an education to fit a young man as a "gentleman", preparing him for a vocation without providing vocational education.

The mention of a "gentleman" is an allusion to Newman. Newman did himself, and the cause of liberal education, a grave disservice by not anticipating the odium with which the term would be widely held in the second part of the 20th century. By "gentleman" Newman meant little more than one who is sensitive to others and would not cause unnecessary offence.

The distinction Ryan initially draws between vocational and

liberal education is frequently made. The issue is one of major contemporary significance because it is the supposed need for vocational education that drives much government education policy.

Is there a necessary conflict between vocational education and teaching "what is

worth learning for its own sake, in a manner which seeks to enlarge the mind"? As Ryan points out, neither Newman nor Dewey thought so. Towards the end of the book Ryan surprises himself by coming to the same conclusion. As he says, "he essence of liberal education lies in the creation in students of the ability to reach a deep, empathetic but critical understanding of what they read and hear, and the ability to express that understanding in (an appropriate manner)". The point he makes is that what constitutes a liberal education is not what is taught, but how it is taught. The mechanics of Greek verse may be taught by the rote-learning of rules in a thoroughly illiberal way. In contrast, teaching the ethics of hotel-keeping could, and probably should, involve discussion, the development of sympathy and intuition, rather than rote-learning moral truisms.

In several places Ryan opens up the question of the place of science in liberal education. Arnold, he reminds us, insisted that science could not form the basis of liberal education because it offered no scope for criticism and had to be learned passively. Dewey, by contrast, taking the view that liberal education was defined less by content than by purpose, hoped to make students inheritors of everything modern culture had to offer, both literary and scientific.

It is a shame that Ryan does not take this matter further, for surely both Arnold and Dewey are right. Science is often taught in a manner that offers no scope for criticism or for active engagement with the syllabus content. This is surely a significant factor in the falling proportions of sixth-formers taking physical science A levels and the closure of so many university departments of physics and chemistry. Science teaching badly needs an injection of Deweyan ideas to transform it to a liberal education. Appropriately adapted, Ryan's example of hotel-keeping ethics shows us the way. Consider the enormous scope for the development in students of a deep, empathetic but critical understanding in, for example, a study of the polymer PVC. If the "pure" physics and chemistry are complemented by the environmental dimension, we have a current controversy involving politics, social justice, the operation of multinational corporations and the clash of different world views.

A narrow vocationalism and an excessive emphasis on cognitive, at the expense of affective, faculties are two features that blight many university courses. Ryan's book should stimulate a debate on both these problems. A different kind of problem that has engaged a number of recent critics of university education - Peter Scott and Ronald Barnett come to mind - is the influence of postmodern ideas. Here Ryan is surprisingly quiet. He talks of the distinction between facts and their interpretation as being easy enough to make in most contexts. Everyday standards of truth and falsehood apply readily to technically orientated knowledge. Indeed? Is light a wave or stream of particles? Is Boyle's law a fact or an interpretation? Is it a fact that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand caused the first world war?

Of course Ryan points out that facts and judgements on them are not always easy to distinguish and that it may be difficult to decide the "truth" of elaborate interpretative theories. However, he appears to confine such considerations to study beyond the graduate school, rather than making them central to liberal education throughout the university. Surely these are important lessons, especially in a liberal democracy.

I would also question the sharp dichotomy Ryan draws between reason and emotion. For example, he argues that the racial origin of the protagonists is irrelevant in deciding the scientific truth of the hypothesis that IQ is racially determined. Thomas Kuhn has taught us that scientific controversy is rarely decided on the basis of pure logic and that a host of "non-scientific" considerations come into play. Is it not our duty to invite our students at least to consider that this may be the case?

Thus Ryan engages with most of the important issues in education that have significance for the liberal society it serves. His book should be of interest to all concerned with universities, and constitutes an implicit challenge to the nascent Institute of Learning and Teaching. Will the institute require in its members the "ability to reach a deep, empathetic but critical understanding" of "the best that has been thought and known" (Arnold) on the fundamental question of what education is for and why it matters, or will it confine itself to dull mechanics, such as demanding evidence that they have written formal "aims and objectives" for all their courses?

David Packham is senior lecturer in materials

science, University of Bath.

Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education: What Education is Really for and Why It Matters

Author - Alan Ryan
ISBN - 1 86197 117 6
Publisher - Profile
Price - £14.99
Pages - 182

Register to continue

Why register?

  • Registration is free and only takes a moment
  • Once registered, you can read 3 articles a month
  • Sign up for our newsletter
Register
Please Login or Register to read this article.

Sponsored