From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: A Tale of Two Oxford Educationists
Civitas, 7 July 2009
Cardinal Newman, it was reported at the week-end, is to undergo beatification. He is to do so on account of Pope Benedict having judged his soul to have interceded on behalf of an American deacon who had prayed to him for help in connection with a painful back condition that miraculously had cleared up by the following morning.
Should Newman be deemed similarly responsible for a second ‘miraculous’ cure that has been attributed to his intercession, the way would become open for his full canonisation, and with it his becoming the first Briton to achieve sainthood since the Reformation.
Given how good-natured a man Newman was, I am fully prepared to believe that, had he been able posthumously to intercede on behalf of anyone who prayed for his help, he would readily have given it. However, whether his intercession constitutes the simplest and most likely explanation for the sudden improvement in the deacon’s back condition is a somewhat different matter on which opinion may reasonably divide.
However, when I read of this news item at the week-end, it was not philosophical issues concerning the likelihood of miracles of which I was put in mind. Rather it was by how much the quality of educational thought in this country has declined since Newman’s day, especially at Oxford.
Undoubtedly, the drift of my thought was partly caused by another news item that caught my attention at that week-end—namely, how large is the short-fall in the number of graduate level jobs this year for those graduating from university this summer
One graphic illustration of the decline in the quality of educational thought since Newman’s day is how badly misrepresented has his own educational thought become by eminent present-day Oxford educationists. Take, for example, what is said about Newman by Richard Pring, a previous director of Educational Studies at Oxford and lead director of the Nuffield Review of 14-19 year old education and training whose final report has recently been published.
Pring is given over to claiming that Newman subscribed to an unduly narrow and overly intellectualised conception of the aim of education. In illustration of its defects, Pring is fond of quoting the following sentence from Newman’s great tract, The Idea of a University: ‘Liberal education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence.’
Pring claims the educational ideal articulated here neglects other aspects of the human personality besides the intellect which also need cultivating in young people, such as their emotions and feelings. The need for their cultivation, claims Pring, is especially pressing in the case of less academically inclined young persons.
In the final report of the Nuffield Review, immediately after quoting the sentence from Newman reproduced above, Pring and his co-authors warn: ‘care is needed, for often excellence is achieved on a narrow front (the cult of the specialist) and sits alongside ignorance of other matters which those deemed less well educated would be familiar with. Intellectual excellence is but a part of the whole person. There is more to development and fulfilment as a person.’
Pring likes to draw attention to what he claims are the inadequacies of Newman’s conception of the goal of education in order to show how much better suited to less academically inclined young persons are the new, more vocationally-oriented programmes that are currently being developed for them as an alternative to traditional A-levels. Since all young persons are now to be made to stay on in full-time education until 18, surely it is better, Pring is suggesting, the less academically oriented ones be provided with practical and vocational programmes rather than with inappropriately academic ones.
What Pring is arguing all sounds so sweet and reasonable that the enormity of the demand that all young persons remain in full time education or training until18 is simply glided over. But it constitutes a terrible form of oppression of young persons, especially those who are not academically inclined, and I believe Newman would have been horrified by the proposal. Perhaps, Roman Catholics who feel as I do about this matter should pray to Newman for intercession on behalf of the wretched 17 and 18 year olds who are about to be subjected to mindless courses, before they can escape to find some entry level job.
It would go far beyond the scope of a posting on a blog to explain everything that is wrong with Pring’s account of Neman’s conception of the object of liberal education, but it is worth mentioning two things that are.
First, in claiming intellectual excellence to be the object of a liberal education, Newman was not intending to suggest that the nurturance of virtue in young persons was not a desideratum. All that he was saying was that its nurturance should not be considered to be the job of universities in a way in which the cultivation of their intellects should be. That sounds perfectly reasonable, especially when it is borne in mind that Newman was not unduly worried about what subjects undergraduates should study at university provided they whatever they did study was undertaken and taught in the right spirit.
Second, ‘intellectual excellence’ and the ‘perfection of the intellect’ had, for Newman, nothing to do with the acquisition of academic expertise in anything or everything. Intellectual excellence, for him, consisted in the attainment of what he called ‘a philosophical habit of mind’. This consisted in a propensity to seek actively to relate everything one encounters in experience into some kind of coherent whole. To facilitate its attainment, Newman did think certain forms of prior preparation could be helpful: namely, those by which the minds of young persons could be sharpened and made appreciative of rigour, system and orderliness.
However, no one hated more than Newman did the systematic mental oppression of young persons that consisted in their being obliged to memorise a mass of things that were next to impossible to bring into any kind of overall relation, and which they had not begun to be given the conceptual tools to know how to begin to incorporate into any organised view of the world. The consequence of such a forced educational diet, in Newman’s view, was to put off young persons from thinking for themselves for life.
In fact, Newman argued that young persons would be better off being left without formal education than forced to submit to such educationally debilitating regimes. Frankly, it will not matter whether it is facts about geography and history or about plumbing and electronics, that they are going to be required to remember to obtain some graduating award. It is going to be just as oppressive and educationally unproductive in the case of many young persons about to be forced to remain in full-time education.
Doubtless, Pring will respond by saying that, in their case, their curricula must be made more young-person friendly, but such a suggestion shows only the utter futility, if not downright perversity of Pring’s whole approach. For example, in an essay defending the comprehensive ideal written for an anthology published in 2008, Pring has written that: ‘it would be wrong for educators to treat such cultures [as gang culture] … with disrespect, for to do so would be to disrespect those young people whose identities and self-respect are acquired, at least partly through those cultures. Indeed it would be important for the educator to seek what is valuable in them.’
Call me old-fashioned or what, but when a former of director of Educational Studies at Oxford can write such utter tosh, I believe it is time to think twice about the merits of extending further education to all young persons and higher education to half of them. I am also put in mind of something that Newman wrote in the Idea of the University which makes a mockery of everything Pring has claimed about him. Newman wrote:
‘Independent of direct instruction on the part of Superiors, there is a sort of self-education… which… at least, tends towards cultivation of the intellect… which will never issue from the most strenuous efforts of a set of teachers, with no mutual sympathies and no intercommunion…teaching … a set of youths who do not know them, and do not know each other, on a large number of subjects, different in kind, and connected by no wide philosophy…
‘Nay, self-education in any shape, in the most restricted sense, is preferable to a system of teaching which… does so little for the mind. Shut your College gates against the votary of knowledge, throw him back upon the searchings and efforts of his own mind; he will gain by being spared an entrance into your Babel…
‘How much better, I say, is it for the active and thoughtful intellect… to eschew College and University altogether, than to submit to a drudgery so ignoble…! How much more profitable…, how much healthier to wander into the fields and, and there… to find “tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks!”
‘How much more genuine an education is that of the poor boy [in Thomas Crabbe’s, “Tales of the Hall”]… who… ranging day by day around his widowed mother’s home… and with only such slender outfit as “the village school and books a few supplied”, contrived from the beach, and the quay, and the fisher’s boat, and the inn’s fireside, and the tradesman’s shop, and the shepherd’s walk, and the smuggler’s hut, and the mossy moor, and the screaming gulls, and the restless waves, to fashion for himself a philosophy and a poetry of his own!’
As I say, I was put in mind of what Newman here wrote about education, not only by reading about his imminent beatification, but about how large a number of universities students are graduating this year without prospect of a graduate-level job to which to go. The big question raised by their number to which what Newman wrote suggests an answer worthy of consideration is: How worthwhile is the big drive towards increasing the university participation rate of young people to 50 per cent, and towards requiring them all to remain in full time education until the age of 18?
It seems to me that Cardinal Newman deserves sanctification merely for the humane answers his writings have suggested to these questions, let alone for any acts of intercession that he may have made on behalf of any of us here below, since he shuffled of this mortal coil.