What Is a Liberal Education?

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 42, 4 November 1925, Page 15

What Is a Liberal Education?

(By Maurice Francis Egan, in America.)

.A liberal education to-day lias ceased to have the meaning it had in England, for instance, when education was limited practically to the nobility and gentry, and when a young man was fully educated when be could quote Horace without too many mistakes in quantity, ride to hounds, and talk of the sights of the grand tour of Europe. In France, somewhat more was required; and the results of the system of education fostered by the Jesuits, which was really a development of the new learning of Sir Thomas More and Erasmus and Dean Colet, deflected in England after the Reformation, produced that marvellous literary flowering which made the age of Louis XIV so radiant. Systems Compared. Nobody doubts the brilliancy of the mind of Voltaire, its penetrating power, or its consummate technical training; and these qualities were very largely due to that system by which the Society of Jesus synthesized the best in pagan learning with the theses and dogmas of Christianity. Very recently a very clever Frenchman who had lived long in this country and in England, declared that, in a mental way. he was more at home with the great writers of France, of the periods of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, than with any man brought \ \ * up in our modern system of university education in England or the United States. He admitted the value of the sciences that is. the natural sciences, of the practical economic and social courses which fit men for meeting the exigencies, of everyday life, but lie regretted, having been brought up in France under the system of the Jesuits, and having lived at Oxford when Dr. Jowett reigned supreme, that the classics of the Greek and Latin languages no longer offered a basis for men of cultivation who wanted to speak the same literary language. And he added that, in his experience, which had been great, the minds of the young men brought up under the older philosophical system were better trained than the minds of those who revelled in the elective system so much in vogue in some of our universities. He admitted that, under the older system, life minds of the students were not so plastic, so alert or alive to the practical things of life, so intensely interested in actual movements, but that they had a greater reasoning power, a belter taste and fixed canons of judgment which 'made them surer judges of the value of the essential, things of life. Loss of Knowledge. It is not the loss of the ponderous (imitations of Greek and Latin that formerly ornamented the orations of Congressmen, or other popular orators, that one misses; for sometimes they were borrowed from that great treasury of erudition, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and very often were tags, or rather filches, from Catiline or Cicero or Virgil; but what is lamentable is

the result of a loss of the knowledge of those half-divine fables of the Latins and Greeks that made a man of culture speak the same language as other men of culture. This loss is looked on by most of our American contemporaries as of little importance compared with the breadth and practical value of the new systems. I say systems because wo have no fixed system of education. Each college and university in our country is, after the entrance requirements are settled, a law unto itself. Harvard once ran wild in the matter of elective courses. The present authorities, in that distinguished seat of learning, have changed this in a great degree. Under our present systems it is not too much to say that the doctorate in philosophy has become merely a teaching degree, and its requirements are so nebulous that almost any study, followed with or without a philosophical method, may lead to it. Nothing is more indicative of the decay of the teaching of philosophy, or, rather, of the study of philosophy in our American institutions of learning than the degradation of this degree, which should only , be given, under modern conditions, for original research work, conducted in a really philosophical manner. What is a Liberal Education? But. after all, the question of the requirements for the doctorate of philosophy has no part in the answer to the question, What is a liberal education? The doctorate of philosophy is a thing apart, rightfully intended for the student in pure philosophy or for the scholar who follows research work in the manner which the German universities introduced and which was first .copied in our country by Johns Hopkins University. Its notorious degradation is quite another matter. Every man with the degree of bachelor of arts or a baccalaureate in letters or science, or who has followed equivalent studies, is supposed to have a liberal education, but it would be difficult, taking the great mass of bachelors together, oven by a process of elimination, to deduce any canons from (hose great groups which would enable us to define what a liberal education is today. One of Ike greatest faults under the older system, the value of which in training minds was undoubted, is that the study of modern languages had no effective place in it. French, Italian, Spanish or German were considered as rather ladylike ornaments, merely decorative fringes of a system whose whole force was put into the classics, into philosophy, o'r into mathematics; but in which neither philosophy nor mathematics ever occupied the great place of the literature of Greece and Rome. Natural Sciences. 'No blame can be attached to the old system , for not paying more attention to the

natural sciences. Any man whose education : was begun fifty years ago can remember how unimportant their practical application to life seemed to be, or how adequate a smattering of physics and chemistry seemed to be for normal cultural purposes, or for the uses of practical life. Some of us can recall ; the great day, in 1876, when Mr. Alexander Graham Bell made his first struggle to bring the telephone to the serious attention of students and to practical business men. The development of electricity, as applied practically, is a very modern thing indeed. And, consequently, outside of mathematical preparation for civil engineering, let us say, or a perfunctory series of disputes on the scientific finding of Wallace and Darwin and the theories of Herbert Spencer and Tyndall and Huxley and Virschow, universities had very little need of chairs of advanced science. The Jesuit colleges in the United States, especially Georgetown, made a specialty of astronomy and its cognate studies; but these were not, as a rule, part of the course; they were confined to the research work of eminent professors. Now all is changed. The classics are no longer the basis of a liberal education; in fact, the study of Greek is rapidly becoming a. tiling of the.past : and, if Homer is made part of a cultural group of books bis work —if one may speak of Horner as one man — is read in English. Latin, even in preparatory schools, is no longer looked on as even an etymological necessity; and that facility of making Greek versos, which still obtains at Eton and Harrow and Beaumont and Oscott, is looked on to-day as rather a waste of time. The Classics in Modern Education. In consideration of the.demands of the time one must revise those ideas of what a liberal education is, as held by our fathers and grandfathers. There is a serious movement in this country to restore the classics to a higher place in the changed system of modern education ; and it does seem strange that a student who takes a baccalaureate degree at the age of twenty-two or twentythree finds his course so crowded that ho must leave out the study of Greek and give the study of Latin a merely casual glance. When I was a boy, I can recall my father’s speaking of men of his acquaintance who bad been graduated with the degree of Bachelor at Hie age of sixteen and seventeen, and 1 think the New Englanders who fathered Yale and Harvard would have been amazed if a youth approached the ago of. twenty-four before ho received bis diploma. - It seems hopeless to think of standardising the requirements of what is called a liberal education to-day. And any attempt to standardise it. in the present attitude of our people, toward the making of autocratic laws, might result in an educational condition much worse than wo have at present. However, .if the parents of the freshmen should have the force to decide what they consider to 'be a liberal education, the right kind of colleges and universities would be crowded with students who have a fixed object In life, and not with young men on most

of whom 1 what is called a college education r produces a detrimental effect, the effect of their mental growth through the T constant dissipation of time. Deciding Between Right and Wrong. No education ought to be considered liberal to-day that does not give a. man the power of deciding between what is right and wrong, and that does not strengthen his will and his power of reflective choice. Ho must have fixed ethical canons, and added to this his sense of honor must have been cultivated as a safeguard to the development of his character. Again, it is difficult to know how on© of the first requisites of a liberal education can be cultivated without a knowledge of those great masterpieces of the pagan world which are necessary to the cultivation of thoroughly good taste A man cannot be • liberally educated unless, quite apart from his social position, ho has the mind of a gentleman, unless he speaks the common

language of gentlemen all over the world; and this cannot be effected by the mere study of mathematics, natural sciences, theoretical or applied, or -by slavish adherence to the received formulae of writers who are largely popular because they are new. In my opinion, no education can be considered liberal which does not include a speaking, not only a reading, knowledge of a modern language. Any man who has lived abroad cannot help noticing the self-conceit and egotistical ignorance generated by some of our systems of education in the minds of English and Americans who, whatever may be said to the contrary, are, through their systems of education, the least plastic, the least comprehending, and the most condescending of all the people in the world towards men who do not speak the language of their own countries. Perhaps an answer to this question needs to be more detailed; I have simply given the best answer that occurs to me, rather by suggestion than by definition.