15
Introduction
One of the ideas that emerged from the culture of fourth-century BC Greece was 'liberal education' which has been discussed, challenged and adapted in various ways ever since. The classical Greek economy was based largely on slavery. Slaves were trained to do manual work, while education for future citizens was concerned with freedom, leisure pursuits and ideas. This was the beginning of the education of the free man or 'liberal' education. We should beware of exaggerating the dichotomy between work and leisure, but it was deeply engrained in Greek culture.
Plato's ideas on education were very complex, but he did make a connection between 'freedom' and 'education for its own sake', untrammeled by any notions of useful knowledge, or training for a specific kind of work. Plato's outline of his ideal education system in the Republic would, in many respects, not meet the requirements of liberal education by some modern definitions: it was, for example, undemocratic, even anti-democratic, but it has survived as a powerful model. A more extreme version of the Greek idea was that 'practical' activities debased a free man's soul. According to this theory an essential feature of the human 'rational animal' was his ability to think theoretically. Most Greek men would have limited this capacity to the male gender, but Plato did at least speculate about the possibility of women being admitted to the highest form of education and becoming guardians. Aristotle continued to think within the Greek tradition when he made his well-known distinction within the Arts between pure forms of art and the more practical, and inferior, aspects of designing and making.
The idea of liberal education has survived but has over the years been adapted to serve different cultural priorities. For example, although Roman culture was essentially practical, involving engineering, military training and administration, the notion of a superior kind of education for the future leaders of society survived in the form of training for oratory or rhetoric which was expounded by both Cicero and Quintilian. In the Middle Ages, as has been mentioned, the liberal education of the elite took the form of the trivium and the quadrivium which lasted at least until the Renaissance.
During the Renaissance, as was explained in Chapter 6, the education of the courtier was another version of liberal education. Castiglione and others described the leisure pursuits which were the essential requirements for an aristocrat - a man of action, a courtier-soldier who needed to be well-versed in literature and languages as well as the clear logical thought associated with the study of rhetoric; but there was still an association between rank (the lower orders) and manual work. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was a good deal of speculation about the nature of education, but despite Rousseau's attack on the inappropriateness of traditional education, the liberal model survived the Enlightenment and continued to be distinguished from the acquisition of useful knowledge and skills.
By the nineteenth century, in English public schools the liberal education curriculum was modified, and classics with some mathematics became the basis for educating sons of 'gentlemen' who would become leaders of society at home or administrators of the Empire. Matthew Arnold1 was not, however, optimistic. He talked about inadequate education among both the Barbarians (the upper classes) and the Philistines (the middle classes). Arnold wanted to transform education by exposing as many as possible to the best examples of literature and art, but he did not think that such 'culture' could ever be made available to all. Thus, Raymond Williams2 saw nineteenth- and early twentieth-century educators in three groups: those who wanted to preserve culture as a minority liberal education for the elite: the 'classical humanists'; the 'industrial trainers' who wanted more useful vocational preparation for the working classes; and, thirdly, the 'public educators' who would have liked to plan a common curriculum for all.
During the twentieth century, other subjects were gradually added but the traditional secondary school curriculum was essentially non-vocational in the sense that it specified academic rather than practical knowledge, although sometimes the academic knowledge, such as Roman history, was justified as good preparation for a parliamentary or imperial career - relevance was not ruled out as long as it was remote. By this time, the distinction between an academic, liberal education and the so-called vocational training available for lower ranks in society was essentially specified in terms of practical, useful knowledge and skills. The education of the gentleman was deliberately general, and anything resembling practical skill-training tended to be despised. By now, a defining feature of liberal education tended to be the contrast with vocational training.
In 1970, the philosopher of education, Richard Peters,3 was concerned to clarify the meaning of liberal education. Peters identified three current interpretations of liberal education. Whilst all three put a high value on knowledge and understanding they differed in some other respects. His first version stressed knowledge for its own sake, not inhibited by vocational or utilitarian ends. Peters suggested that this was an essentially Greek notion which had been revived in the nineteenth century by Matthew Arnold and others. The second version stressed the idea that education should be broad and balanced, not confined to one discipline by being overspecialised. Cardinal Newman, in his book The Idea of a University4 (1852), had also stressed all-round development of the individual. Peters' third version was more concerned with methods of teaching: liberal education should not be constrained by dogmatic methods of instruction, because authoritarianism restricted the reasoning capacity of the individual. Peters pointed out that his three versions did not necessarily coincide, the term 'liberal education' was at that time being used to include at least one of the three sets of values.
We will need to refer back to Peters' three-fold classification which attempted to explain some of the ambiguities attaching to liberal education. At this stage, we will simply note that it has become increasingly common in education circles to deplore the contrast and barrier between liberal and vocational, partly for democratic reasons and partly because the distinction is unhelpful in terms of manpower planning. Peters' Version 2 (a broad and balanced curriculum) is generally regarded as desirable, although there may not be agreement about the meaning of either broad or balanced, and the desirable end is frequently ignored; for example, in English sixth forms, where there is a tendency for students to specialise in arts or science at the early age of 16, if not earlier. Finally, Version 3 (liberal pedagogy) is generally accepted, at least for older students, but it should be noted that this kind of teaching style can be applied to most curricula, whether labelled academic or not, and it is certainly possible to teach a supposedly liberal curriculum in a way that is very non-liberal according to Version 3 criteria.
Many writers have attempted to preserve the best of liberal education values whilst casting doubt on the academic/vocational distinction. One of the earliest was John Dewey5 who was concerned to provide a worthwhile education for a much larger number of young people: he accordingly concentrated on a variant of Peters' Version 3 by defining education in terms of problem-solving teaching methods; Dewey also strongly advocated the inclusion in the curriculum of a critical approach to the understanding of industry and commerce. Dewey's notion was far from work-training and socialisation for work: he wanted a positive but critical attitude to the workplace. For Dewey, the content of the curriculum mattered less than the mode of learning: a so-called 'vocational curriculum' could be taught in such a way as to make it worthy of being called liberal education.
More recently, in England, Richard Pring has entered the fray, advocating in his book Closing the Gap6 and indicating with the sub-title of his book where the gap was - 'Liberal Education and Vocational Preparation'. He identified two enemies: those who, when faced with change, retreat to a 'narrow concept of liberal education which leaves so many dispossessed'; and those who 'in trying to make education more relevant, betray the best that is preserved within liberal education'. Pring criticised those, including John Stuart Mill, who assumed that a liberal university education should not include professional training of any kind. Pring challenges that assumption and advocates, in the long run, the abolition of the two-track system which qualitatively divides young people into academic and vocational categories. Instead he recommends, in Stenhouse's7 phrase, 'the community of educated people'.
In Ireland, Anton Trant8 set out on a mission similar to Pring's, but in the context of a European Union Project. In Reconciling Liberal and Vocational Education, Trant described two traditional approaches to education, different but equally worthy, which should now be brought together as a single educational concept. One of the advantages of his study was that it involved empirical evidence, examples of schools and colleges which illustrated the reconciliation of the two traditions. Trant also discussed the impact of the Christian tradition on the Romano-Greek education model, suggesting that liberal education was able to include many practical activities such as manuscript illustration and metalwork for example, in the Irish monasteries - without any difficulty. Similarly, some medieval universities had specialised in vocational studies, for instance, in Italy, law at Bologna and medicine at Salerno, without compromising liberal education. Other universities such as Paris taught theology as a vocational subject, in the more accurate sense of the word. Trant allies himself with Dewey and a contemporary educationist, Malcolm Skilbeck, in advocating an end to the disdain with which vocational education has sometimes been treated. OECD and the European Union are firmly on his side. Trant also quotes A.N. Whitehead:
A technical or technological education, which is to have any chance of satisfying the practical needs of the nation must be conceived in a liberal spirit as a real intellectual enlightenment in regard to principles applied and services rendered. In such an education, geometry and poetry are as essential as turning lathes.9
Another writer recently expressing concern about liberal education is the philosopher, Alan Ryan. In Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education10 Ryan discussed his anxieties about education in the USA, the UK and elsewhere. After reading Dewey's writings and broadly, but not entirely, agreeing with his views on education, Ryan unfortunately completely ignored the other writers on education quoted earlier in this chapter. This is a pity because he struggled to cope with the ambiguity of the term 'liberal education' and he might have found R.S. Peters' three versions of liberal education helpful in his own analysis. Instead, he admits to the distinction between liberal education and vocational education being 'decidedly suspect' but does not elaborate on the problem. Ryan's main intention would appear to be to preserve liberal education in complex and rapidly changing societies.
With that aim in mind Ryan made his own attempt to sort out the meaning of liberal education which, he suggests, has two distinct meanings: 'liberal education' and 'liberal-education'. He associates the former with the kind of education that sustains a liberal society (not defined) and the latter with the education of a gentleman. Part of his diagnosis is that a widely disseminated liberal education in the gentlemanly sense is often perceived as an essential element of education in a liberal society.
Perhaps the key to the puzzle lies in the fact that Ryan is primarily a political philosopher: so what does he mean by liberal society? His answer is scattered throughout the rest of the book: 'an educating society'11 which is not the same as the 'planned society' rejected by Dewey; 'a society that embodies liberal social and political values - that encourages economic ambition, emphasises individual choice and the meritocratic route to social mobility, and takes for granted the variability of our tastes and allegiances';12 it is also an 'open' society in the sense of 'democratic, argumentative, changeable';13 and it is 'concerned for truth and individual freedom'.14
Now that we have a much clearer view of Ryan's 'liberal society', it may be useful to examine his 'liberal anxieties'. There are three: first, the cultural estrangement, or brutalisation of the underclass; second, unease about Weber's concept 'disenchantment', the loss of religion and spiritual meaning of life; and finally, a political fear of revolution of the 'Terror' kind. It would seem to be a tall order to expect education to relieve all three of these anxieties.
Ryan proceeds to discuss liberal education and non-liberal education in an interesting way. He accepts the fact that education should be concerned with the problem of earning a living, but rightly says that it is not the main concern of education, especially liberal education. Similarly, education for citizenship is important but not the central concern of education. At this point Ryan agrees with Dewey: 'liberal education is defined less by content than by purpose: the provision of a general intellectual training'.
Like Dewey, Ryan wants to distance himself from the excesses of child-centred education but questions the adequacy of Dewey's concept of 'growth' as the mainspring of an educational philosophy. Ryan thinks, however, that Dewey went some way to providing an answer, not least in his concentration on the learning process itself rather than the content; but surely some content is essential? How can we specify a core curriculum which will not be so demanding that it is beyond many students and so prescriptive that it will alienate the teachers? Ryan suggests that in reaching this conclusion he has come to much the same conclusion about the liberal-vocational divide as Dewey. All that remains is to specify exactly how trainee plumbers and bricklayers are to be taught in a liberal way.
Conclusion
In summary, it is probably enough to say that the distinction between liberal and vocational preparation was essentially a pre-democratic social differentiation which becomes increasingly irrelevant and offensive in a truly democratic age. However, in our search for reconciliation between the two traditions there is no need to ignore or to abolish the useful distinction between education and training - both are essential but it is sometimes necessary to emphasise the differences. It would be a pity to lose such meaningful distinctions as teaching/instructing, for example. In the Army, you will find weapon-training instructors who train soldiers to strip and fire rifles in the approved manner. Instruction and training are the correct words because in that situation there is only one right way. Therefore no discussion or argument is appropriate - there is only room for obedience to the rules and 100 per cent competence. The context is training, not education. That does not mean, of course, that some things we now call training could not be seen as an opportunity for education. For example, business studies can be just as liberal as academic economics and geography, perhaps more so if the curriculum and pedagogy are carefully planned. The debate about liberal education is by no means over.
References
1. M. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1869).
2. R. Williams, The Long Revolution (Penguin, 1961), pp. 143-76.
3. R. Peters, 'Ambiguities in Liberal Education', in Education and the Education of Teachers (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 35.
4. J.H. Newman, The Idea of a University (Yale University Press, 1899) (1996 edn).
5. J. Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York Free Press, 1916).
6. R. Pring, Closing the Gap: Liberal Education and Vocational Preparation (Hodder & Stoughton, 1995), p. 183.
7. L. Stenhouse, Culture and Education (Nelson, 1967).
8. A. Trant (ed.), Reconciling Liberal and Vocational Education (Curriculum Development Unit, Dublin, 1999).
9. A.N. Whitehead, The Aims of Education (Williams and Norgate, 1929), p. 7.
10. A. Ryan, Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education (Profile Books, 1999).
11. Ibid., p. 34.
12. Ibid., p. 37
13. Ibid., p. 45.
14. Ibid., p. 47.
Further Reading
Spencer, H., 'What knowledge is of most worth?' in Essays on Education (Dent, 1861, 1911 edn).
Tawney, R.H., Equality (Allen & Unwin, 1931).