Reform in the Universitu

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 479, 27 August 1948, Page 18

Reform in the Universitu

SOME THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSITY EDUCATION. By Sir Richard Livingstone. National Book League. Cambridge University Press.

(Reviewed by

F. L.

Combs

URS is a harassed and per- () plexed civilisation. Half its time it is hot and bothered; the other half it is escapist. One thing that used to perplex it Dine the question: "It’s prettv but

is it Art?" The con- | sidered answer found to this conundrum a decade ago is "No." . But to the question "It’s ugly but is it Art?" no reassuring reply has yet been found even if the trend of opinion is at the moment toward the affirmative. With the art question still unsettled, another fundamental question is looming up, viz.: "It’s clever but is it Education?" No. living man can give a weightist better-balanced reply to this ques-

tion than Sir Richard Livingstone. His answer is that cleverness is not education; not even in the universities, those forcing houses of gifted intellects in which so many ordinary intellects groan and strain in order like Hamlet’s mother to "assume a virtue if they havé it not." Sir Richard is fair to the university. He begins by saying, "In my opinion the last 40 years have been a time of steady improvement in the universities." He praises their increased fitness for their work as regards equipment, organisation, teaching, and research. But at the same time he believes that "they need reform and that the future will be astonished that we have done nothing to remedy grave weaknesses in our system .... " for the moulding of the whole outlook of our modern world . ... "depends on these distant nerve centres of intelligence and on _ their health and vigour." ° Beginning. his criticism, Sir Richard says: "In the last 20 years two new conceptions of society have changed the course of the world-Communism and Nazism. The universities have not created or moulded them; like mercenaries they have served the rulers of the day in Russia, Germany, Italy; supplied them with the weapons they need. and asked no questions. Outside the countries which accepted these philosophies the universities have provided no alternate philosophy to counteract them, Achilles ponders in his tent, The Kings of modern thought are dumb; Silent they sit and not content, And wait to see the future come." What answer is given’ "to those who thus complain that the university is amoral, indifferent to values, concerned with nothing except knowledge?" It is that "history is full of warnings against the sacrifice of truth to edification."

ae Sir Richard Livingstone is not satisfied with this answer. Like Plato, in whom he is steeped, he wants an edugation that will make a whole man. Research that turns out expensive human spare parts and graduate-grind which equips for the pursuit of profitable professional careers is to his mind far from being enough and he quotes the edifying definition of the noble-minded Milton given in his letter to Master Samuel Hoartlih: >

I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and pub- \ lic of peace and war. . ‘He particularly liked the adverb "magnanimously" in this definition, and he considers that "the churches and the universities are the natural institutions" to make the collegiate generation "conscious of the déeper issues. at stake and the values involved in them. If it (the university) does not; undertake

: the task in the end Wwe mav find as in Russia and in Hitler’s Germany that the State will dictate a philosophy of life to the nation; or that we shall drift into no philosophy at all. Either alternative is dismal." Carlyle a hundred years ago made what, compared with the trenchant criticism of Sir Richard Livingstone, must be regarded as a furious attack, an attack savouring of the saeya indignatio of Swift, but did he not say much the same thing? There is room for one quotation. We (in Edinburgh ) boasted Suede a Rational University; in the highest degree hostile to Mysticism; thus was the young vacant mind furnished with much» talk about Progfess of the Species, Dark Ages, prejudice and the like; so that all were quickly blown out into a state of windy argumentativeness -the end of which in " the better sort" was "sick impotent Scepticism" and, in "the worser, finished self-conceit" which caused them "to all spiritual intents to become dead." In what direction does ‘Sir Richard turn to find a remedy for an education system which has given us nuclear physics with its atom bomb on the one hand and on the other a lack of will and ability to grapple with big and formidable problems involving the destiny of the race? He opposes the sort of specialisation that makes a high grade factotum and would counterweight its one-sidedness by, the teaching of philosophy and religion. In his mind these two overlap, as will be seen from his definition ‘of religion as "a study of what we should think of the meaning and ultimate nature of the universé; how in the light of the view we form we should live... ." Sir Richard’s own temperate but cogent criticism is that the disappointingly limited influence of the universities is due to their too little concern

with human values and a philosophy of life. "Man," he says, "lives in a world of thoughts; if you change the moral, political and economic ‘theories’ generally accepted . . . you change the character of the world. And the most important of these, the ones which most radically change the world, are moral theories." Does this brief Gallien fall short in any ‘way? It seems to this reviewer that owing probably to its very brevity it places too great a reliance upon what is merely learned, that is upon the verbal forms of knowledge which partaken of by themselves become’ unnourishing husks. Schopenhauer made a devastating onslaught on this kind of "instruction education" when he wrote: In artificial educaticn the head by means of ‘dictation, teaching and reading, is crammed full of ideas. .., . Thence it comes that in youth after long years of study and reading we enter the world, partly foolish, often perverse, and conduct ourselves at One time timidly, at another time foolhardily; that we have our heads now full of ideas which we are anxious to apply but almost always misapply/ A full education, one forming the whole man, is not just a course of studies but studies intimately mixed with’ the "events of our days and our own doings as participants in those events. It is in other words a way of life, just as Christianity and Stoicism in their best cen-’ turies were also ways of life. Nothing can be more remote from life than a university teaching system in which academic freedom tends to dwindle and become merely the freedom to be academic in the sphere alike of science or the humanities. _To the battle-scarred Milton such a system would have appeared to lack utterly the essential quality he implied by the great word ‘"magnanimous." This last comment, however, on Sir Richard Livingstone’s vital and timely book, is hardly more than a cavil when one comes to express gratitude for what he has done in such brief space. What has he done? He has reminded us that in a world forced by a tremendous crisis to grapple with and to reform the sorry, scheme of things, one of the most important and necessary ‘things to reform is the University.