A Progressive Case for Liberal Subject-Based

Education

(Based on a Case Study of the English Literature

Syllabus)

By Alka Sehgal Cuthbert

Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge

Date of Submission: November 2016

 Introduction

Philosopher Allan Blooms defence of liberal education in his work, The Closing of the
American Mind (Bloom 2008), first published in 1987, was met with an intensity of feeling from
both supporters and detractors. A more recent example in Britain of a similar occurrence is the
intensely hostile reaction on the part of many educational and cultural lites to Conservative
politician, Michael Gove, who, as Secretary of State for Education in 2011, attempted to re-
introduce more formal, traditional academic subjects to the curriculum. The predominant public
responses to both Bloom and Gove indicate that a strong defence of academic knowledge is,
almost by default, associated with upholding a politically conservative position: conversely, the
political views of those who are critical of academic knowledge are automatically associated
with a politically progressive position.

The aim of my thesis is to provide a moral and epistemological progressive defence of liberal
subject-based education (LSBE) in a cultural context where the intrinsic worth of both
disciplinary knowledge, and education broadly, is proving difficult to affirm. If the belief in the
intrinsic worth of knowledge and education is to be re-vivified, then school subjects based on
disciplinary knowledge need to be manifest in the substantive content of the curriculum. This
means that the organisational principles which guide the pedagogic procedures, rituals and
relationships in a school need to be based upon those principles which facilitate the enactment of
such a curriculum.

One major problem facing supporters of LSBE today is that disciplinary knowledge, as currently
understood, is often regarded as the antithesis of any idea of freedom. It is often held to be
restrictive of spontaneous development; of creativity; or the source of oppressive psychological
effects for certain social groups. No doubt those making such criticisms would claim their
interest is in liberalising, or democratizing, education further. My point against this view is that,
whatever the intentions such arguments reject the very thing which is most capable of ensuring
pupils are introduced to a form of freedom of thought. Subjects derived, in the first instance,
from disciplinary knowledge, are integral to the socialisation of the young which contributes to
the likelihood of them developing the inner resources to become adults capable of thinking and
acting with a greater degree of intellectual independence than if educated with non-disciplinary
based forms of knowledge and attendant pedagogy. As adults they can decide for themselves

1
whether disciplinary knowledge is the source of its imputed negative effects. The cultural
climate of hostility to disciplinary knowledge has, I argue, opened the door to various forms of
instrumentalism which have been allowed to encroach into the heart of education curricular
knowledge itself.

My thesis offers a justification of LSBE predicated on the claim that disciplinary knowledge,
and by extension school knowledge, is the prerequisite for the theoretical excavations of the
rules of practice understood as their generative principles and condition of existence (Moore &
Muller, 1999, p. 197-198). On this basis I argue that LSBE, as an educational ideal with
concomitant organising pedagogic principles is the best form of education for ensuring the
young gain some measure of freedom of mind and thought.

To substantiate my hypothesis, I provide the following:

1. A description of three main definitions of LSBE and discussion of four dominant forms
of instrumentalism which prevail in current educational discourse.

2. A discursive philosophical-based account of three concepts central to LSBE; freedom,

reason and knowledge, with particular attention to how they have been significantly
elaborated in key historical periods: Classical, Christian, Renaissance and
Enlightenment. I also consider critiques of Enlightenment (mainly Kantian) Idealism.

3. A historical and sociological account of the development of Britains national education

system form the mid nineteenth to the early twentieth century. In elucidating the points
of contact between the cultural critiques of industrialisation and central tenets of
Enlightenment philosophy, I consider how a commitment to liberal ideals on the part of
the British ruling class intersected with an emerging awareness of its declining moral
authority. These were the main cultural dimensions which influenced the early formation
of Britains national state education system.

4. A discussion of the crucial importance of World War I in shaping official educational

discussions of the early twentieth century in which a national education system was
understood as a means by which a modern liberal British cultural identity could be
established. I consider the work of F.R. Leavis, who was a central figure in establishing
the study of English Language and Literature as an academic discipline and school
subject. His conceptualization and advocacy of the study of English Literature
contributed to its centrality in post-war British liberal education and the school
curriculum.

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5. A theoretical, epistemological justification for disciplinary knowledge the subject-
based part of my title. Here I draw on the emerging field of Social Realism, which
elaborates Basil Bernsteins work on knowledge classifications.

6. A theoretical, epistemological justification for an aesthetic form of knowledge, based on

the theory of Symbolic Representation found in Ernst Cassirer, Wolfgang Iser, and
Suzanne Langer, from which I construct a model of English Literature as a school
subject and the criteria for evaluating the knowledge content of a purposively selected
sample of English Literature examination papers.

7. An empirical analysis presented in the form of tables, which literally illustrate the
shape of literature as formed by the exam questions, and an interpretative commentary
based on my findings supported by official documentation, including examiners reports.

8. A conclusion in which I consider the findings of my analysis in the light of the previous
discursive and theoretical chapters and argue that the corrosion of knowledge content in
my sample of English Literature has important moral, ethical and pedagogical
implications.

.......

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 Chapter One

Definitions of Liberal Subject Based Education and Forms of Contemporary

Instrumentalisation

I begin this chapter with a description of three main conceptualisations of liberal subject based
education (LSBE) as found primarily in the works of philosophers Robert Dearden (2010), Paul
Hirst (1965), R.S. Peters (in Archambault, 1965; 1973), and historian Lionel Elvin (1969). They
worked at the University of Londons Institute of Education during 1960s and 1970s.1
Sociologist Basil Bernstein, whose work directly informs the emerging field of Social Realism
(SR), also worked at the Institute of Education during the same period. The other
contemporaneous philosopher, based at the London School of Economics, whose work on
education is, in some respects, similar to that of Peters in particular, is Michael Oakeshott
(Oakeshott 1971; 1989). Taken together the accounts of liberal education, found in the
philosophers cited above, articulated an ideal which accorded with older conceptualisations of
liberal education, as well with as a cultural and ethical outlook associated with social democracy.

I then move on to describe four main types of instrumentalism in the contemporary

understanding of education. I conclude by considering contemporary attempts to re-articulate
some form of liberal education by those seeking to counter what they perceive to be the negative
effects of an over-concern with monitoring, meeting data-driven targets and a pervasive
managerial ethos within education. I discuss how these attempts are flawed or limited because
of their misunderstanding, or unwarranted rejection, of disciplinary and academic knowledge.
Ultimately they tend to favour a strand of liberal education rooted in the ideas of Rousseau,
which, over time, have been influential in the discourse of child-centred education which, in its
current manifestation, pays too little attention to, or is openly critical of, academic knowledge.

Different Definitions of Liberal Subject Based Education (LSBE)

1
Lionel Elvin was Director of the Institute of Education, University of London, from 1958-1973.

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During the 1960s and 1970s, Dearden, Peters and Hirst in Britain, and philosopher Philip Phenix
(Phenix 1964) in America, provided an account of LSBE in which education was understood as
something uniquely human and cultural. Their ideas diverged as to the extent to which liberal
education could be characterised purely as an intellectual matter, a form of conduct and practice,
or an introduction to a cultural inheritance. However, the centrality of academic knowledge in
the school curriculum was assumed, perhaps because it was accepted that such knowledge had
an association, however intangible, with independent thinking. Three distinctive characteristics
of LSBE can be discerned in their works:

1. An intergenerational transmission of a cultural heritage, enacted through practices and

relationships in educational settings, directed to the development of human faculties
along rational principles.
2. An intellectual development of pupils cognitive or intellectual faculties.
3. A contribution to making substantive the values of freedom and autonomy the ideal
and ethical basis of liberal social democratic societies.

In the first view academic knowledge, and concomitant educational practices, are important less
for their properties related to cognition, but rather because they help pupils locate themselves
within a cultural tradition. Without an introduction to this tradition, through learning the
different languages and salient practices of each discipline, pupils, and the adults they become,
are less able to ascribe meaning to human life and activity in a general or universal sense.
Instead meanings are more strongly attached to the personal experiences and intersubjective
relationships of the individual. This conceptualisation of LSBE as an important entry into a
public conversation or culture, into which all can be initiated, is associated most with
philosophers Hannah Arendt (1993), Michael Oakeshott (1962; Oakeshott 1971) and G.H.
Bantock (Bantock 1952; Bantock 1968). In this view of LSBE, a general level of introduction to
the different subjects, for all pupils irrespective of ability, talent or interest, is the basis of being
able to participate as adults in a public culture. It provides a common language which is a
precondition for public discourse among individuals from different social and cultural positions.

Others place more emphasis on the association of LSBE with cognitive or intellectual
development arrived at by the practice of thinking along rational principles and following
rational procedures, which is required when engaging with different forms of disciplinary
knowledge (Dearden, Hirst, and Peters 2010; Hirst 1965; Phenix 1964). The ability to reason,
thus developed, is associated with the ability to take an objective view. For these thinkers, a

5
liberal education in general has a political dimension because judgements in the public sphere of
politics, they argue, require certain communicative conditions associated with rational
deliberation and communicative action (Habermas, 1985; Levinson, 1999; Martin, 2009). The
procedural rules, associated with acquiring disciplinary knowledge at school, as well as the
knowledge per se, are regarded as important propaedeutic practice. Taken together, the
knowledge and skills associated with liberal education are understood as important for
participating constructively in a diverse, liberal society where competing claims need to be
evaluated, judged and a consensus, or zone of tolerance, established.

A related view of knowledge and political judgement, but with a different emphasis, is offered
by Hannah Arendt, whose central idea has been elaborated recently by political philosopher,
Linda Zerilli (Arendt, 2003; Zerilli, 2005). The central point of difference is that Arendt and
Zerilli do not think political judgement is wholly a matter of knowledge and rational thought.
Drawing on Arendt and Kant, Zerilli argues that imagination, rather than conceptual reasoning,
is the most important faculty for the representative thinking characteristic of democratic
societies. She argues that representative thinking, developed from Kants idea of an enlarged
mentality, means the ability to stand in the place of another, or to take on their viewpoint on a
given issue. Zerillis elaboration of a Kantian enlarged mentality is different from a superficially
similar idea that a liberal education can engender greater compassion, as philosopher Martha
Nussbaum claims (Nussbaum, 2003). For Arendt, the ability to stand in the position of another
depended upon the moral will to exercise a faculty of imagination in order to first and foremost,
to think and to judge for oneself (Arendt, op. cit.). In Zerillis explication, following Kants
Critique of Judgement (Kant, 2014, [1790]), the imagination is a faculty associated most closely
with the aesthetic; the aesthetic faculty is far less reliant on either conceptual thought necessary
for reasoning, or the categorical imperative central to moral reasoning.

The point for Arendt and Zerilli, is that through taking on the point of view of another, but as a
representative rather than trying to be, or feel, the same as another person, we develop the
ability:

. . . to see things in their proper perspective, to be strong enough to put that which is too
close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without bias and
prejudice, to be generous enough to bridge abysses of remoteness until we can see and

6
 understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own affair.
(Arendt quoted in Zerilli, op.cit. p. 175)

The more often we are able to do this in practice, the more reliable and democratic our political
judgements are likely to be. In this respect, the Kantian idea of enlarged thinking is not an
appeal for greater understanding in order to suspend judgement; but rather a prerequisite for
making more, and better, political and moral judgements which contribute to a flourishing public
life. Arendt, in The Life of the Mind drew a sharp distinction between education and politics and
argued that the pursuit of truth was a suitable task for philosophy, and by extension, for
education, but it had no place in politics. For Arendt, politics was a site where different interests
and moral judgements competed during which bonds of social solidarity can be formed. The
tenor of philosophy was contemplative and required a distance from public life, while politics
was directed towards action in a pluralistic, often rumbustious sphere and was necessarily part of
public life (Arendt 1978).

From a sympathetic viewpoint, Ronald Beiner softens Arendts sharp distinction between action
and reasoning with his proposal that, even in politics, people want to make claims that are more,
rather than less, truthful (Beiner 2008). More recently, educator Lynne Slominsky, in discussing
Emile Durkheims ideas of social morality and cohesion, argues that if any normative system,
whether political or moral, is to be legitimate in the eyes of the public, it needs to be known
before it can be accepted, or rejected, on the basis of autonomy. In her account knowledge is a
constituent component of a community of individual citizens capable of exercising free, inner-
directed judgements (Slominsky 2016), although rationality is not afforded the same degree of
primacy as in Habermasian accounts of public and political life. Consequently, knowledge
plays a part in enabling, or guiding towards, better judgement, even if the act of judgement itself
is irreducible to knowledge and reason alone.

The accounts of LSBE outlined above as cultural inheritance, intellectual development, and
fostering of autonomy necessary for democracy are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and
despite their differences they all tacitly accept that academic knowledge is the most important
form of knowledge upon which education should be based. The differences between their
accounts are more of emphasis than substantive content, and in many ways they complement
each other. All uphold an idea of LSBE as enabling (but not guaranteeing) a type of inner
transformation, based upon the pursuit of truth through disciplinary knowledge, which cannot be
measured directly. The point is evocatively stated by Bernstein when he writes, The first

7
dislocation between the Trivium and the Quadrivium constituted inwardness as a prior condition
of knowing (Bernstein 2000:86).

This, in some respects ineffable, quality of transformation entailed in the concept of LSBE is
less to do with transforming an individuals psychological or behavioural dispositions, but is
related to a deeper understanding or recognition of the meaning of things. This type of
transformation is clearly articulated in Michael Oakeshotts description in The Voice of Liberal
Learning (1989). He writes that education based on introduction to the languages of different
subjects enables a person to be able to understand and place his or her life, and that of others,
within a more expansive and meaningful context than is possible through the knowledge and
experience of any individuals life alone.

Peters articulates a similar idea in Education as Initiation (Peters 2007) when he compares
education to a journey whose purpose is not the destination reached, but to travel with a different
view; one with a greater degree of freedom from the contingencies of what Bailey refers to as
the present and particular (Bailey 2009). Peters and Bailys description provide a working
definition of what is meant by the term freedom of the mind. Under this conceptualization,
education is independent of any secondary level effects such as training for work, better
relationships or life in general. The default assumption is that this form of education LSBE
is itself a constituent element of the public good.

The accounts of LSBE outlined above entail a commitment to its intrinsic ideals: those of truth,
and freedom. They also affirm a belief in human reasoning as the best way to ensure these
ideals have concrete expression in our lives. In arguing against attempts to reshape ideas and
practices of education according to interests deemed relevant to pupils, politicians or business,
philosopher Israel Scheffler wrote:

The primary task [of education] is not to be relevant but to help form a society in which
its ideals of free inquiry and rationality shall themselves have become the touchstone of
relevance.
(Park 1997:10)

Schefflers words point to a profound problem for LSBE today. For whatever reasons,
contemporary society may be unable or unwilling to value or uphold ideals of free inquiry and
rationality not only in education but more widely. Sociologist Frank Furedi emphasises that
the source of educational problems resides in a convergence of wider cultural and moral trends

8
rather than any localized problem or inadequacy of educational practice (Furedi, F. 2009). If the
ideals of rationality and free inquiry are not upheld in contemporary culture, or are upheld only
weakly within restricted social spheres, it is unlikely that LSBE will be the preferred educational
ideal, and dominant ideological discourses of education are likely to favour those in which
academic knowledge is either marginalised or redefined.

It could be argued that the 1967 Plowden Report on primary education can be seen as an attempt
to reformulate a version of liberal education by paying greater attention to psychological
theories of child development (Plowden, B. 1967). Hence the famous opening sentence in
Chapter 2, At the heart of the educational process lies the child. (ibid. p. 7). Although there are
many aspects in which the Report are consistent with the broad aims of a liberal education, it did
mark an important, deliberate move away from the idea that the transmission of knowledge was
the central aim of schools. It publicly validated the idea that the remit of primary schools, at
least, should include a range of wider developmental aims.

The Plowden Report was robustly critiqued by Hirst, Peters and Dearden ((Peters (Ed.) 1969) ,
mainly due to its ontogenetic model of child development and its advocacy of an integrated
curriculum which, they argued, neglected the intellectual dimensions of the educational process.
Interestingly, the authors of the 1975 Bullock Report note, with some concern, a narrowing of
material in the collections of some school libraries. The authors speculate whether the turn to
project work in primary schools was a factor in this development. It was suggested that
librarians, keen to support teachers in project work, might be prioritizing the provision of non-
fiction books rather than ensuring a good range of fictional literature was maintained (Bullock
1975).

It could be concluded, then, that with respect to maintaining the function of schools as sites of
general intellectual development, the concerns of Hirst, Peters, Dearden and less explicitly.
Bernstein, were not unfounded. Following Bernsteins line of thinking about the relation
between regulative and instructional discourses in education (Bernstein, 2000), the subsequent
appeal of Plowdens child-centred educational approach lay, in no small part, in a prior or
simultaneous change of societal ideals and values.

The cultural changes in the 1960s posed problems for teachers inasmuch as they encouraged a
growing scepticism about adult authority. This was discussed by Bernstein, Elvin and Peters in

9
Ritual in Education published in 1966.2 They recognised that for substantial sections of the
young generation, traditional rituals of adulthood, including those within education, were losing
their salience. Reflecting on the emergence of youth sub-cultures, they argued that adolescents
were starting to develop their own rituals of socialisation, in ways more independent of adult
authority. They concluded that in this situation, the best course for education was to focus more
narrowly on intellectual development rather than the traditional aim of developing pupils
character in a broader sense, which would have included some form of moral education
(Bernstein, Elvin, & Peters, 1966). However, by 1969, Elvin stated his awareness of the
growing problem of adult authority more strongly when he wrote Our problem is not too much
guidance of the young but too little (in Peters, 1969, p. 87).

From a sociological point of view, it is fascinating that the Plowden Report was published one
year after the publication of Ritual in Education. The latter highlighted the increasing
ineffectualness of educations power to socialise adolescents, and the Plowden Report, as if to
provide a symbolic counterbalance, effectively argued for bringing the processes of infant
socialisation more closely under the remit of education. While education has always had a
socializing function, it had been indirect, through the teaching of knowledge, and inculcating
attendant habits of study. The traditional aim of improvement through education had been
conceived broadly. In the main it has been perceived as a public good because knowledge itself
was good, and therefore its transmission to the young was, per se, a good thing. The
conceptualisation of educations aim in the Plowden Report retains the idea of improvement, but
the focus of improvement is couched more in terms of the psychological development of the
individual child rather than adult culture broadly defined.

The Plowden Report placed the child, rather than knowledge, at the centre of education, at the
very time when the ability of adults, and teachers specifically, to socialize the existing cohort of
teenagers, was being questioned in some quarters. The key translation effected at this point, was
that of a political and moral problem of authority in the adult sphere, into a problem of
motivation or engagement in the educational sphere. In turn, the problem of pupils lack of
motivation and engagement was located further back in the educational process, to primary
schooling. Here, developmental psychology, rather than academic knowledge, seemed to offer
better ways of ensuring engagement and motivation.

2
Richard Arum offers a detailed discussion of a similar problem in American colleges from the 1960s, from which time there
has been an increasing turn to litigation to resolve contestations over mainly minor disputes arising in college life, in Judging
School Discipline A Crisis of Moral Authority in The Structure of Schooling: Readings in the Sociology of Education, (2015),
Sage Publications, Eds. R. Arum, I. R. Beattie and K. Ford.

10
A more overt attack on disciplinary knowledge and liberal education was made by radical left
wing critics of Peters and Hirst. In the growing focus on the issue of social equality, a growing
number of educators and academics, who saw themselves as political progressives, came to
regard liberal education as elitist, or irrelevant at best. The main criticism in D.L. Adelsteins
vitriolic attack on Peters (Adelstein 1971), for example, rests on associating all ideas of liberal
education with a specific Platonic version of it, wherein an lite few were fitted for freedom.
As Nussbaum points out, this idea was challenged even in Roman Classical times by a
competing idea that liberal education could produce free citizens. Anybody, through intellectual
effort and introspection, could achieve a greater freedom of the mind by being better able to
distinguish the thoughts held through convention alone, from those which were freely held and
justifiable (Nussbaum, 1997). Taken together, the greater turn to psychology, and the imputed
egalitarian critique of liberal education, dethroned traditional disciplinary knowledge as the
basis for the school curriculum, and opened the door a little wider to subsequent forms of
instrumentalisation, which I discuss below.

Instrumentalism of Education

Today the difficulty of upholding a non-instrumental understanding of either education or

knowledge, even while proclaiming its importance to society, is brought to light if we compare
statements on education from two leading Labour and Conservative politicians; one is explicit in
his instrumental justifications; the other attempts to put forward a non-instrumental case.

In his 1996 Ruskin speech Tony Blair said:

Since I became leader of the Labour Party, I have emphasised that education will be a
priority for me in government. I have done so because of the fact - increasingly
recognised across our society - that our economic success and our social cohesion
depend on it. An Age of Achievement is within our grasp - but it depends on an Ethic of
Education. That is why in my party conference speech I said that my three priorities for
government would be education, education and education. 3

And in his 2009 speech to the Royal Society of the Arts (RSA), Michael Gove, then
Conservative Shadow Secretary of State for Education, said:

Education has an emancipatory, liberating, value. I regard education as the means by

which individuals can gain access to all the other goods we value cultural, social and
3
Text available at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/000000084.htm

11
 economic on their terms. I believe education allows individuals to become authors of
their own life story.4

Unlike Blair, Gove does attempt to defend a case for the intrinsic worth of liberal education as a
democratic right for all pupils, and he refers to philosopher Michael Oakeshott to make his case,
but he is nevertheless unable to eschew instrumental justifications. If education is liberating and
valuable in its own right, it cannot also be held that it is valuable principally because it is the
means to other goods, without the argument being logically contradictory. The comparison
points to the fact that even political Conservatives, with whom LSBE has been widely associated
by its politically progressive detractors, are no longer able to provide a justification based
consistently on its intrinsic worth. Goves arguably restorationist calls for a return to a past
model of liberal education as a means of upholding standards are associated with a Conservative
political position. For this reason, they lacked wider authority, especially among sections of the
education profession where the political outlook has, for some considerable time, been
associated with left wing, or at any rate progressive, politics.

Irrespective of Goves political position, and the limitations of his view of what curricular
knowledge entails, it could be argued that nonetheless he contributed to putting the question of
knowledge back on the public and educational agenda. As discussed above, the prevailing
educational discourse and policy since the 1970s, had made arguing for LSBE, or academic
knowledge, a particularly difficult task for the minority of educators and academics who were
concerned with various forms of instrumentalism which were encroaching into the heart of
education the school curriculum (Lawes et al., 2007; Moore & Young, 2001; Moore, 2000).
Below I discuss illustrative examples of four main types of instrumental understandings of
education: economic; political; social; and functional or pseudo-scientific.

Economic Instrumentalism

Labour Prime Minister James Callaghans speech at Ruskin College in 1976, in the wake of the
economic crisis of the mid-1970s, marked a significant turning point and a move away from the
post-war consensus on education (Kogan 1975). The main thrust of his speech was that higher
education should be prepared to enter into closer relationships with business rather than maintain
its traditional position of aloofness from the world of work. Such relationships, he argued,
would boost economic growth, mainly by breaking down traditional cultural barriers that were
thought to be obstacles to the technological revolution predicted by his predecessor, Harold

4
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/files/090630-gove-speech-to-rsa.pdf. Retrieved on October 10th, 2016.

12
Wilson, at the Labour Party Conference of 1963. It could be argued that although Callaghans
speech advocated a form of economic instrumentalism, his ideas remained within a broadly
liberal cultural discourse, as economic growth was understood to be necessary to maintain a
commitment to a liberal view of education in terms of a public good (Moore in Bates et al.,
1984).

However, sociologist Rob Moore contends that the increasingly closer relationship between
sections of education and business interests had detrimental consequences (ibid.). Through the
establishment of the Manpower Services Commission in 1973, representatives of business came
to have a greater direct influence within educational policy. For example, the 1977 Green Paper,
Education in Schools aimed to address the complaint, from sections of business and industry,
that pupils were ill-prepared for the world of work, and that as a consequence pupils were
becoming increasingly disaffected at school, and thus even less likely to be work ready.
Against this deficit model of young people, Moore argues that, on the contrary, many pupils,
disaffected in school, were quite willing and ready to work, and that they were adept at pursuing
social careers (opportunities for formal and informal work through extended family or social
networks).

The problem with such deficit arguments, apart from the fact that their claims about young
people are highly contestable, is that they tend to direct sustained attention away from the source
of problems in education, which reside within the ideas, practices and ideals of public, adult
culture. They represent, as Moore suggests, an ideological attempt to pose education as the site
for cultivating an idealised subject; in this instance the flexible worker trained in transferable
skills (ibid., p. 77). Although all education presupposes a general, ideal of personhood, in the
past the ideal bore some relationship to both the ethical value of autonomy, intrinsic to liberal
education, as well as the reality of economic and social institutions and practices. The
introduction of the world of work discourse in education in the 1970s, Moore argues, bore little
relationship to any reality as youth unemployment was rising and the world of work, for this
cohort, was shrinking (ibid.). Hence the world of work contributed to an ideological discourse
that hindered a more accurate understanding and description of either economic or educational
problems. It also more closely tied the ideal personhood for a specific cohort to their eventual
economic function, a development which contravenes a central tenet of liberal education.

An example of how the introduction of the ideological discourse of the world of work could
have pernicious, if unintended, effects within the curriculum is illustrated in the second
publication of A Basis for Choice Report of a Study Group on Post-16 Pre-Employment

13
Courses, (Further Education Curriculum Review and Development Unit, 1982). The Report
strives to maintain some commitment to a liberal education by introducing a Common Core for
all students, in addition to Vocational and Job Specific Studies. The authors write:

This report advocates and describes a curriculum structure which comprises a well
defined common core and deliberately less well-defined area calling for general and
specific vocational studies.
(ibid. p. 24)

But The Common Core, as set out in Appendix 1 of the Report, does not provide any well
defined description of content; it stipulates only a list of processes. The twelve aims and
objectives of the Common Core are:

1. To bring about an informed perspective as to the role and status of a young person in an
adult society and world of work.
2. To provide a basis from which a young person can make an informed and realistic
decision with respect to his or her immediate future.

3. To bring about continuing development of physical and manipulative skills . and an

appreciation of those skills in others.

4. To bring about an ability to develop satisfactory personal relationships with others.

5. To provide a basis on which the young person acquires a set of moral values applicable
to issues in contemporary society.

6. To bring about a level of achievement in literacy numeracy and graphicacy appropriate to

ability, and adequate to meet the basic demands of contemporary society.

7. To bring about competence in a variety of study skills.

8. To encourage the capacity to approach various kinds of problems methodically and

effectively, and to plan and evaluate courses of action.

9. To bring about sufficient political and economic literacy to understand the social
environment and participate in it.

10. An appreciation of the physical and technological environments and the relationship
between these and the needs of man in general, and working life in particular.

14
 11. To bring about a development of the coping skills necessary to promote self sufficiency
in the young people.

12. To bring about a flexibility of attitude and a willingness to learn, sufficient to manage
future changes in technology and career.

Logically, the aims thus formulated are incoherent at best. For example, it is difficult to see how
objective 8, To encourage the capacity to approach various kinds of problems methodically
could be taught as a generic skill outside the requirements of a particular subject. The effect of
such specifications could only encourage the most superficial approach to problems.
Objective10 would need a high level of understanding of history, science and philosophy in
order to address meaningfully the needs of man in general. Objective 5 treats moral values as
propositions to be taught directly, and then applied to issues. This proposal reveals a
mechanical and problematic conception of moral values and pays no heed to the potential
practical and ethical problems posed in trying to teach morals directly in schools or colleges;
that is presuming that there is a consensus over which values are to be acquired.

During the 1970s, a form of economic instrumentalism was introduced into educational
discourse, which included some sections of higher education, but in practice its effects were felt
mainly in the vocational education sector. By the early 2000s the effects of economic
instrumentalism were felt more widely, including within most universities (Williams, 2013). In
2003, the then Secretary of State for Education and Skills, Charles Clarke, said, I don't mind
there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the
state to pay for them. According to Clarke, the state should only pay for subjects which have a
clear usefulness. His comments caused some controversy, and a spokesperson from the
Department of Education and Skills attempted to clarify Clarkes comments with, The Secretary
of State was basically getting at the fact that universities exist to enable the British economy and
society to deal with the challenges posed by the increasingly rapid process of global change.5
Despite some protests, there were few rebuttals of Clarkes underlying, philistine assumption
that education had to be useful in a clear way, which often means it has to be seen to have a
direct economic benefit for society in general, or for individual students.

Political Instrumentalism

5
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/may/09/highereducation.politics . Accessed on 10th October 2016.

15
As discussed earlier, the political and cultural problem of adult authority emerged as a concern
among sections of the public and within the education profession in the mid-1960s. During the
1980s, this generational problem of authority had, in my view, intensified. One example,
pertaining to a crisis of police authority, was the outbreak of inner city riots in the early 1980s.
These were largely provoked by the police drawing on the Vagrancy Act of 1824 to instigate
stop and search procedures, known at the time as the infamous Sus laws, predominantly in
areas populated by a high number of citizens of Afro-Caribbean descent.

That the young, mainly black youth, should have protested against this specific police practice,
and police authority more generally, is perhaps unsurprising. What was new was the reaction of
the Conservative government. Rather than pursue a traditional policy of ensuring the law was
enforced, they introduced a series of multicultural initiatives, including the recommendations for
education in the Swann Report of 1985 (discussed in Chapter Five). In part, the initiatives
could be regarded as a concession wrested by the rioters and some anti-racist groups, but at the
same time, the government was willing to promote multicultural policies in most state
institutions, but perhaps most extensively in the root and branch reforms within the police and
education professions. This suggests that for sections of the Conservative government,
multiculturalism might well have provided them with an opportunity to win back some clearly
waning moral authority with sections of the public.

Of longer term concern for the political lites was the decreasing electoral turnout among the
younger population at large, and their growing disengagement from political life in general. A
series of official reviews including the HMSO report, Encouraging Citizenship (Commission on
Citizenship 1990), led to the conclusion that education could provide a solution. Two years
before the introduction of Citizenship education at secondary level schooling, in 2002,
influential political theorist Bernard Crick wrote:

A new consensus that citizenship should be taught and learnt has come about as part of
a general questioning whether our old institutions serve the purpose of our citizensand
worries about the alienation of young people from public values.
(Crick 2000:49)

Cricks words suggest that there was some recognition that the source of a democratic deficit
resided within the political institutions and not solely within the younger population; a
conclusion supported by empirical research which indicated that young people were uninterested
in formal, parliamentary politics, but remained concerned about issues of justice and inequality

16
(Henn, Weinstein, and Forrest 2005; Henn, Weinstein, and Wring 2002). Interestingly, Crick
raises public values as a problem, an issue which was to develop its own momentum in the wake
of the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre Complex. For example, in 2014 the
government issued a directive to schools to promote British values explicitly in an attempt to
boost the status of its earlier Prevent Strategy. The problem with the directive was that it
ignored the fact, noted by Crick at least a decade previously, that British values were precisely
the things which were losing their meaning among the younger generation, as well as among
significant sections of the ruling and cultural lites. With no fuller, and reflective, discussion
about which values were important, and why, the directive could only be an empty exhortation
which further obscured the difference between education and indoctrination.

In relation to geography, academic and teacher educator, Alex Standish, has critiqued the
concept of global learning as it is manifest in educational policy and professional practice on
ethical and epistemological grounds (Standish 2012). His argument is that the emergence of
global learning in educational discourse has arisen less from a genuine growth in the discipline
of geography, and more from the advocacy of particular charities and non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) whose main concern is the promotion of their necessarily narrow
concerns. In this context, curricular initiatives are motivated more by ideas of social justice
than by educational concerns. Such groups, he argues, effectively bypass traditional sources of
educational authority who, in the past, were the main gatekeepers of the curriculum, and
debatably, were more publicly accountable than the individual charities and NGOs seeking to
attain their goals via education. He argues that attempts to introduce the somewhat ill-defined
aims associated with global learning into classroom materials and practice often results in
distorting, or marginalizing, established disciplinary boundaries of the subject: a claim which my
own analysis of examination papers in English Literature supports.

Social Instrumentalism

In addition to the economic and political forms of instrumentalism in education discussed above,
an arguably more insidious and all-encompassing form of instrumentalism emerged under the
New Labour government, from 1997 to 2010. Despite Tony Blairs famous pledge to
education,6 New Labour soon proved itself to be more concerned with safeguarding, rather than
educating, children. Or rather, education came to be defined as a means of ensuring children
remained safe. In an emerging culture of risk aversion, where a cultural understanding of risk as
something calculable and open to rational consideration, comes to be replaced by risk
6
On page 17.

17
understood as something akin to an all-pervasive, existential threat (Furedi, 2006, 2008, Rose,
1999, 2010), the boundaries between social and educational policy-making have been blurred.

For example, educational policy and discourse, have become ever more concerned with two
issues which arguably represent two sides of the same coin, and which often dovetail in practice.
These are avoiding risk and maximizing outcomes. The former is evident in a report by Labour
Party supported think tank, Demos, A Stitch in Time: Tackling Educational Disengagement
(Sodha and Gugliemi 2009), which promotes the idea that early years education should aim to
teach children that they should seek to avoid all risks that could prevent optimal life chances in
the future. The phrase optimal life chances is rarely defined specifically and suggests a
somewhat mechanistic and diminished idea of peoples own agency in creating their own life
chances, even if not in circumstances of their choosing. It is as if chances were commodities
that could be conjured into being, with absolute certainty, provided all risks were eliminated.
The idea that an optimal life chance might arise from taking a risk is denied in this discourse.

The authors of this report were following the policy trajectory set by the government
commissioned Every Child Matters: Change for Children, the report which underpinned the
2004 Childrens Act. The report describes education as an organization for delivering services
for children and young people. The services were to achieve five outcomes which were: health,
safety, enjoyment and achievement, making positive contributions and achieving economic well-
being. Notable by its absence is the only outcome specific to strictly educational aims, which is
to ensure children are educated. The conflation of safeguarding, education and optimal life
chances, developed and disseminated under the New Labour government, was continued by the
Conservative led Coalition government that came to power in 2010.

The Coalition governments 2011 report, Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers: A Strategy for
Social Mobility claimed, Our schools should be engines of social mobility, providing every
child with the knowledge, skills and aspirations they need to fulfil their potential. (HM
Government, 2011, p. 36). There are two striking points about this statement. The first is that
education now seems to have been wholly subsumed under social policy; the second is that
social policy seems to have been subsumed under a notion of individuals fulfilling their
potential, although potential to do, or be, what is not stated beyond the banalities of well-paid
jobs, happy relationships and so forth.

In his definition of liberal education, philosopher Christopher Ormell writes that education
needs to address itself to the question of how to construct a form of education capable of

18
adequately preparing the mass of citizens to sustain a healthy, democratic, liberal society
(Ormell 1988:170). This, not uncommon, description of liberal education, conceives of
education and society as related, but essentially two distinct spheres. The 2011 Report, by way
of contrast, regards schools as being engines of social mobility; a view which, it could be
argued, obscures the more important role which politics and economic strategies, or wider
circles of family and friends, have in realizing the possibly desirable, but not incontestable, aim
of social mobility.

Functional or Pseudo-Scientific Instrumentalism

In a report from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the authors write:

In PISA the term literacy is defined so as to measure the extent to which students have
acquired the ability to put their knowledge to functional use in different situations in
adult life. What PISA does not do is to attempt to measure student success in their
mastery of school subjects taught to a nationally defined curriculum. (Quoted in
National Statistics, SFR 40/2007 First Release, p. 1)

These words reveal the dominance increasingly global in its reach of a new form of
instrumental conceptualizations of school subjects and of literature in particular. This
understanding combines an older idea from the 1970s vocational discourse which promoted life-
skills and adaptability, with the new discourse of evidence-based-education (EBE) and its central
aim of providing measurement and prediction on the model of the experimental methods of the
natural sciences.

The authors write that mastery of school subjects is outside their scope, as if to imply that
conceiving of a subject as functional co-exists happily with mastery of school subjects. This
is complacency at best, and disingenuous at worst. PISA is a high status international body
which embodies the ideas and values which prevail among the international political and
business elites. PISA produces reports on education systems of over 70 countries based upon
students skills and knowledge through conducting tests in reading, mathematics and science.
That its triennial reports have become highly influential is evident from the extent to which they
are referred to by politicians to justify national educational policies. In selecting the application
of knowledge to life contexts as their focus, PISA are, by default, endorsing a prevailing anti-
intellectualism which cannot be helpful for education or teachers. Furthermore, by appealing to
evidence from such reports, politicians exemplify a worryingly anti-democratic trend as,

19
increasingly, European governments rely upon international coordination of targets and data
reports supplied by individual interest/groups rather than traditional legislative procedures of
nation states (Hritier 2002; Fenwick, Mangez, and Ozga 2014).

In 1997, at the same time that the first PISA report was being planned, the Labour government
introduced the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) which affirmed a similarly instrumental
justification for reading. The consequences of this functional conception of reading in terms of
functional literacy, have been criticised by Alexander (2004), Doddington and Hilton (2007) and
Wyse ( 2003). The main criticisms are based upon the reportedly dulling effects compulsory
literacy sessions have on both pupils and teachers, or in other words, the effects of the NLS at
the level of pedagogy.

The policy revived older debates on the role of phonics in teaching reading, and the extent to
which formal, didactic instruction was helpful. However, there has been less criticism of an
explicitly epistemological nature. What, for example happens to a subject like English literature
when it is understood primarily in functional or instrumental terms and the emphasis is on its
technical, measurable aspects rather than its substantive aesthetic character? One effect of the
widespread endorsement of literacy (a technique) as distinct from, and logically prior to,
English (a school subject consisting of both language and literature) is that the understanding of
literature as a specific aesthetic form of knowledge, germane to both reading and writing, is
marginalised. While PISA is an international body, its statistical-based approach is being
increasingly adopted at national level by policy makers, as indicated by the recent establishment
of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) in Britain.

The EEF is a leading educational charity dedicated to producing and disseminating an evidence
base for educational policies and initiatives. It was founded in 2011 by the Sutton Trust to work
in partnership with the Impetus Trust, and received a founding grant of 125 million pounds
from the Department of Education.7 The EEF sets the criteria with which bids are assessed, and
projects evaluated, thus it is highly influential in shaping the terms of debate in public
educational discourse. For example, in 2012 the then Coalition government in Britain
announced it would make 10 million pounds available for a literacy catch up programme
following the previous years disappointing Key Stage 2 test results in English. The task of
running the 10 million-pound programme was entrusted to the EEF, whose aims are broadly

7
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/about/ Retrieved on October 14th, 2016.

20
those of a social justice agenda, in which educations contribution is seen as improvable through
new or better knowledge garnered primarily through research. The EEF approved projects are
assessed through evaluative processes based primarily, on statistical analysis and probabilities
which means that projects can receive a low rating because their pre-test predictions did not
match the post-test results (even if their results exceeded prior expectations).

The assumption underlying the EEFs remit is that because knowledge within the natural
sciences has allowed us to make more reliable predictions about the physical world, its methods
could be transferred in order to achieve more reliable predictions in educational matters.
However, if my case for LSBE is accepted, the EEFs underlying assumption inadvertently
affirms my hypothesis: knowledge itself is the central problem; or rather the widespread
acceptance of a distorted and weak understanding of what knowledge is and what is its intrinsic
worth. Science is one part of knowledge, it does not, and ought not to subsume all other forms
of knowledge: to accept that it does, entails the acceptance of a model of the individual in which
the scope for intellectual and moral freedom is necessarily restricted, as well as the acceptance
of a concomitant, impoverished model of education.

The problem with conceptualizing the intellectual content of education in terms technical
functionality, open to scientific measurement, is that it is extremely reductive as qualitative, non-
material phenomena have to be transmuted into forms of empirically observable criteria which
can be subjected to statistical analysis. Of particular importance for education is that this form
of instrumentalism avoids making value judgements; decisions are to be made on the basis of
how statistically significant and value-neutral the criteria are held to be, thus emulating a
particular, contestable view of scientific objectivity. The growing influence of PISA among
national governments, and the EEF among policy makers, sections of academia and the teaching
profession, could be seen as indicative of the strength of desire to find some source of certainty;
or a new source of legitimation for education in a context where academic knowledge itself is
largely discredited.

Some Contemporary Defences of Liberal Education

The difficulty todays supporters of academic knowledge have in upholding the intrinsic worth
of education and academic knowledge is arguably testament to the separation between the
epistemological and the moral in educational discourse, with both diminished in the process.
Subsequently, those who are sympathetic to an idea of knowledge-based education are often
understood as standing in opposition to those who favour a values-based educational model.

21
Both approaches, in my view, are limited and fail to provide an understanding of education
comparable to that found in LSBE.

Writer, and research and development consultant at Ark Education, Daisy Christadoulou, is a
well-known advocate of a return to a knowledge-based curriculum as opposed to a progressive,
child-centred one. Yet her commitment to knowledge does not entail an understanding of its
intrinsic worth, or maybe she is too defensive in the face of the current value afforded to EBE
research approaches discussed above. Hence she writes, I absolutely agree that the end of
education is skilled, creative, critical individuals who can sift evidence8 (my emphasis).

While the objectives of creating skilled, creative and critical individuals may seem innocuous, I
would argue that her aims are incompatible with LSBE, which does not seek to produce
individuals with tightly prescribed dispositions (everyone does not have to be creative or
critical), or skills so generic that they lack meaning and risk being seen as banal. Christadoulou
does not address the questions skilled in what?; creative in what way?; critical of what and
why?, and last but not least, what could meaningfully count as evidence in education. Without
addressing these questions, it is logically possible to argue that educations end is to produce
individuals who are critical of certain groups and find creative ways of torturing them and
become very skilled at it. Such citizens could be highly functional in a totalitarian society whose
ideals were other than truth and free inquiry. They might also be able to sift evidence without
being much able to interpret evidence in a meaningful way according to logical principles.

There have been attempts by others to provide an ethics-based concept of education as an

alternative to the existing managerial, target-driven culture, which has proliferated since the
1988 Education Act, and as older forms of accountability, and professional and pedagogic
relationships have been extremely corroded (Beck, 1999; Ball, 2003; Olssen & Peters, 2005).
In response to the ensuing demotivation among sections of the profession, philosophers of
education, Daniel DeNicola and Colin Wringe, propose a return to aims associated with liberal
education: transformation, inner-directedness and flourishing (DeNicola 2012; Wringe 2014).
Wringe presents an important insight, based upon symbolic interaction theories, which is that
relationships in education play a role in developing an individuals sense of self that is
independent of either nature or of reasoning alone. He writes:

8
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/nov/25/daisy-christodoulou-seven-myths-education-profile. Accessed on 10th
October 2016.

22
 what is important for the development of the self is the manner of the formative
interactions between teachers and pupils which occur as any kind of knowledge is
passed on, as well as those between pupil and school as an institution.
(Wringe 2014:39)

Both writers are concerned that todays education is proving to be a hindrance rather than a help
in achieving a good or flourishing life: a life where pupils can go on to make the best of the
cultural, political and civic opportunities available. I would not dispute the fact that affective
dimensions of education are important, but his claim that as long as the formative interactions
are acceptable, any kind of knowledge will do, is highly problematic. If, as I argue in this
thesis, academic knowledge is the form of knowledge most suited for a liberal democratic
society, the selection of knowledge deemed suitable for public education cannot be any kind of
knowledge.

De Nicola and Wringes approach is typical of a growing interest in forms of character-building

and well-being approaches to education; it is famously endorsed by the former Headmaster of
Wellington School and board member of the educational charity Action for Happiness, Anthony
Seldon. Apart from a somewhat simplistic idea in which a good life is conflated with a happy
life, this type of therapeutic-based instrumentalsim ignores important epistemological
differences between forms of knowledge, as well as the possibility that happiness may not be an
ultimate goal, or, in Kants terms, an unconditional good. In fact, some argue that when schools
promote happiness, well-being and self-esteem at the expense of knowledge, a form of stifling,
conformism can develop (Ecclestone and Hayes 2008; Smith 2002).

Eminent philosopher Martha Nussbaum, seeks to make a classical defence of liberal education
based on deliberative reasoning, but she regards the undifferentiated, or unreformed, idea of
tradition in a negative light. She claims it is disapproving of those students seeking to inject
their non-traditional experiences in to the dignified business of liberal learning (Nussbaum,
1997, p. 295). Traditional liberal education, in her account, is hostile to the idea that we should
cultivate our perceptions of the human through a confrontation with cultures and groups that we
have traditionally regarded as unequal (Ibid. p. 294). Thus she seems to be supportive of a form
of multiculturalism in education.

In my view Nussbaums account is confusing because it lacks clear and strong distinctions
between the broad terms business of liberal learning, our perceptions of the human, and the
curriculum, and more specifically, disciplinary knowledge. The business of liberal learning

23
could readily accommodate non-traditional experiences at the level of pastoral care, in the
preferred model of scholarly etiquette, or even in experimenting, within necessary limits, with
entrance requirements. But a liberal education is more than expanding the socio-ethnic make up
of the student cohort, or in ensuring there are fruitful cultural encounters between a greater
diversity of groups. Above all it requires a form of disciplinary knowledge which has internal
epistemological demands of both teachers and students; without these demands it would cease to
be disciplinary, potentially transformative knowledge.

In my view Nussbaums account lacks a sufficient epistemological defence and therefore risks
conceding too much to those academics calling for selected experiences (usually on the basis of
perceived social injustice) to be injected into the heart of liberal learning knowledge itself.
There seems to be an unresolved tension implicit in Nussbaums account between advocating a
normative ethical position of valuing diversity, group experience and equality on the one hand,
and rhetorically, at least, supporting the universitys aim of teaching students how to argue,
rigorously and critically, so they can call their minds their own (ibid). The latter are attributes
associated with universalism and a cultural commitment to maintaining a democratic, pluralist
society; group differences are considered to be of less importance, or salience, in most aspects of
public life within this framework (although they might be hugely important in private spheres).

The lack of clear distinction between university curriculum and knowledge, and institutional
mores, in Nussbaums account indicates the need to distinguish clearly between epistemology,
education, culture and politics. Having established these lines of demarcation, it is possible to
see how aims and practices in different areas might intersect in ways more, or less, compatible
with various forms of liberal education, including LSBE. Experiences new to academia can
shape knowledge, but only indirectly, through the criteria and standards established within the
disciplinary field. The problem with Nussbaums account is that she seems to assume that
growth in knowledge arises through cultural encounters at a sociological level alone.
Philosopher Harvey Siegel argues cogently that the social and moral imperatives of
multiculturalism are easily met by established liberal moral theory (Siegel, 1995): it does not
logically follow that there need be epistemological consequences. As my discussion of the
emerging field of Social Realist thought in Chapter Five argues, the prioritisation of claims
based on experience over the criteria required by disciplinary knowledge, threatens to destroy
the universal and transformative potential of knowledge in liberal education as it has developed
over centuries. The next two chapters provide a philosophical, historical, and sociological

24
account of the central tenets of LSBE, and of the development of English Literature as a
discipline and school subject.

.......

Chapter Two

25
 Philosophical Roots of Liberal Education

This chapter compares how the concepts of freedom, reason and knowledge have been
elaborated during distinct historical periods as found in the works of Plato, St Augustine,
Thomas Aquinas, Giambattista Vico, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. My
aim is to provide an overview of how the the ideas of freedom, reason, and knowledge
have been developed historically through the efforts of particular thinkers who engaged
with the intellectual, theological and moral problems of their time. I conclude by
considering critiques of the Enlightenment conceptualisations of freedom, reason and
knowledge as found in the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Martin Heidegger,
Hannah Arendt, and the recent challenge posed by postmodernism.

Knowledge and Two Types of Freedom

The liberal of LSBE indicates a connection to some sense of freedom, and subject-based to a
particular epistemological understanding of knowledge which requires some notion of reason
and truth (Luntley 1995). There have been many interpretations of liberal education most of
which generally fall into one of two influential traditions: the classical or the progressive.
Although both would claim to uphold freedom in its most general definition, the substantive
content of each is underpinned by different philosophical assumptions. Each tradition has
distinctive understandings of the relationship between society and the individual, authority and
freedom, and knowledge and experience. Thus the two strands of liberal education embody
different educational aims, and consequently give rise to different practice and emphasis. Where
classical liberal education has prioritised academic knowledge, progressive liberal education has
tended to prioritise experience; where the classical strand has regarded adult epistemological
authority as compatible, if not necessary, for freedom, progressive educational discourse has
been more ambivalent, if not hostile, to this form of adult authority.

The question of how terms such as knowledge, education and authority are interpreted is
important; as are the reasons why certain interpretations prevail over others at particular
historical moments. This chapter provides an overview of the different meanings ascribed to
these ideas in four major periods of history. In providing a comparative overview of the ideas of
freedom, reason and knowledge found in key thinkers of each period, it is possible to see the
relationships between their ideas; the important dissimilarities as well as points of contact. It is

26
an illustrative account of how, when certain cultural and intellectual conditions exist, it has been
possible for some thinkers to address philosophical, theological or moral problems of their day,
in a fresh and creative way. In the process they have contributed to an intellectual tradition
which has provided the epistemological and moral groundwork for the development of both
strands of liberal education.

Greek Classical Tradition

The principles underlying a classical educational tradition are clearly articulated in Platos
Republic (420BC/1997). In Platos cosmology, the creation and maintenance of the city state
combined both political and moral virtues. Compared to earlier forms of communal, transient
dwellings, the organization of city states were thought to encourage civic, and civilized, life
which were worth defending from surrounding rivals through cultivating military, moral,
political and cultural excellence (Donati 2014). According to Plato, the harmonious and well-
ordered state required citizens of the highest virtue who would be able to rule with more moral
and intellectual authority than any other group of citizens. The status of governor thus depended
upon possessing wisdom which would be manifest in speech, thought and conduct. Wisdom
was considered to be the ability to understand reality free from illusion. Hence truth, and the
knowledge needed to apprehend it better, was broadly conceived and encompassed questions of
virtue as well as epistemology. Truth was the most important value because its pursuit through
the use of reason was itself a marker of wisdom and public virtue. Thus Platos ideas on
education were closely related to his model of the ideal city-state and the best form of its
governance; both, in turn, were indissoluble from the search for truth and greater realisation of
virtue. Virtue in this cosmology was legitmised by appeal to metaphysical belief in a Divine
power (Price 1962; Rusk and Scotland 1965).

Platos Education System

The intrinsic role and value of education lay in directing pupils faculty of reason to arrive at an
undistorted view of reality. In doing this education would also be contributing to the proper
formation of citizens and thus be a de facto part of the public good. Education was to be
provided by the guardians (of the polis) for all children of free men, or citizens, but not those of
slaves. According to the prevailing cosmology, slaves could not be considered to be free men
whose differential worth depended upon the virtues given by the eternal, universal soul of God.
As defeated people they must be lacking essential virtues, and the potential for developing them,
or they would not have been defeated in the first place. Therefore, they could have no part in

27
contributing to civic life or the polis; their role was confined purely to labour in the private
sphere of the oikos. Hence there could have been no reason for them to be educated.

The differential distribution of virtues was given by divine power and the duty of all citizens was
to put every effort into perfecting their virtues through education: slaves, by the fact of their lack
of differentiation, could have no requirement for education; there was nothing to be perfected.
Thus Platos idea of universalism, in this respect, was very different from its current meaning in
which it is closely allied to, and sometimes supplanted by, a commitment to realizing some form
of equality. For Plato, by contrast, a commitment to equality would have contravened his prior
belief in a metaphysical Divine power whose universalism was absolute and provided a standard
of goodness to which all citizens needed to aspire in their deeds, thoughts and speech.

Plato proposed education should be organized into a sequence of five stages, each of which had
prescribed content and methods. Points of selection for further study, entry to manual work, or
to the military were stipulated but some were less specifically pinpointed by age than others.
The first stage was from birth to 17 or 18 years. Around the age of six children were removed
from families and began their initial education in communal nurseries. The curriculum consisted
of Music and Gymnastics. Music included singing, playing certain instruments, and narratives.
Gymnastics involved field exercises and marching, and was directed towards training the body.
Both however were directed towards the overall improvement of the soul, and could overlap in
practice, when, for example, music and song would accompany marches at religious ceremonies
(Rusk & Scotland, ibid.).

The aim of this early educational stage to was sensitize young minds to what was harmonious,
beautiful and therefore truthful, through imitation. This criterion justified censorship of
narratives, forms of music and instruments to be played, all of which were selected according to
how well they could expedite the educational process of moral improvement (Plato, op. cit.:
Rusk & Scotland, ibid.). During this stage some were chosen to leave this preparatory stage of
general education and enter a particular artisanal training, although Plato did not state exactly
when, nor did he give much detail about the content of vocational training.

From the ages of seventeen or eighteen to twenty, the young underwent intensive military and
physical training, during which period all intellectual study was forbidden. After this some
would leave studying to enter military service, and others would embark upon a more
intellectually developed course of study based upon arithmetic, plane and solid geometry,
astronomy and harmonics. This was a preparatory stage of study lasting up to the age of 30.

28
When an individual showed they had achieved a level of excellence in those subjects, they could
continue to the study of dialectics for five years. This stage took the form of Socratic
conversation which was, the basis of all knowledge as it provided a systematic understanding of
the world., (Price, op. cit., p. 23). The carefully calibrated organisation of the different stages
suggests that education prior to the stage of dialectics was considered to be propaedeutic for this
higher level of study through which knowledge and wisdom were brought to fruition. Students
successful in dialectics would leave to take up guardianship posts of the polis, and some would
go to join higher ranks in the military. At the age of 50 guardians would leave their posts and
became advisory elders in public affairs.

Plato made a strong distinction between education and training. In his view training, because it
was directed towards narrow, instrumental ends, was necessarily illiberal. By way of contrast,
education was concerned with truth and virtue, and by default, it was necessarily a liberal
endeavour. He wrote:

For we are not speaking of education in this narrower sense, but of that other education
in virtue from youth upwards, which makes man pursue the ideal perfection of
citizenship, and teaches how rightly to rule and how to obey. This is the only education
which, upon our view, deserves the name; the other sort of training, which aims at the
acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from intelligence and
justice, is mean and illiberal, and is not worthy to be called education at all.
(Plato, quoted in Rusk, 1965, p.30)

Even though individuals had a predetermined social role, the public good depended upon each
person desiring and accepting their role; so the manner in which training, as well as education,
was undertaken was important. Liberalism, in the context of education, was associated with
being able to rule with wisdom, as well as having the wisdom to obey, as the quotation states. If
either education or training were undertaken without due regard to developing the ability to
recognize truth, goodness and beauty, then there would be negative consequences: the energies
of the young would be directed towards undesirable goals such as self-aggrandizement (Price,
op. cit.). For Plato, the ideal of education was to inculcate the will to more closely approximate
the ideal perfection of citizenship through developing reason and virtue in pursuit of truth.
Thus, knowledge and the ideals of freedom and truth found are closely intertwined.

Knowledge and Classical Education

29
Platos belief in metaphysics meant that he believed that all things in the world, including
humans, were products of Gods mind, from which the idea of ideal forms were derived. These
forms embodied a universal and eternal standard of excellence. The idea of each class of things
manifest in the material world was where goodness or virtue lay, rather than in the material,
empirical existence of any object. Accordingly, if God was eternal then his creations also had to
be eternal. But the features of material phenomena in particular instantiations vary, and wither
over time, as evidenced by the fact of death. Plato concluded that the material world had to be
inferior because it was necessarily more removed from the more truthful ideal forms, and
ultimately from God (Price, ibid.; Rusk & Scotland, op. cit.).

Platos metaphysical ontology shaped his understanding of what knowledge was, and how it was
to be taught and learnt in education. Any qualitative standard of worth depended upon the extent
to which a phenomenon exhibited goodness, which rested in the extent to which the idea of a
thing was observable. This transcendental dimension could be best apprehended by use of reason
and logic rather than by sensory impressions (which were more closely tied, he thought, to the
corrupted physical world). Other intrinsic qualities of a phenomenon could be manifest and
open to observation, but knowledge of these aspects, derived by this, sensory-based method, was
less reliable and certain than that achievable by reason and logic. Consequently, he was critical
of those who praised astronomy for its practical applications in agricultural work:

I am amused at your fear of the world which makes you guard against the appearance of
insisting upon useless studiesin every man there is an eye of the soul which, when by
other pursuits is lost and dimmed, is by these purified and re-illumined; 9
(Plato in Rusk & Scotland, ibid, p. 24)

The quotation suggests that for Plato everyday experience was an obstacle to the pursuit of truth,
as the capacity of the souls eye (the God given faculty of reason) is lost and dimmed.
Everyday life in the private sphere, or in manual work, was characterised by physical and
emotional contingencies which distract from contemplating truth; hence there was little reason
to observe it. Doxa, or the ideas and opinions gained from experience, was not a reliable source
of truth. Even more significant, in the light of the instrumentalisation of education and
knowledge discussed in Chapter One, is his claim that the power of useless studies re-vivifies
our ability to reason (the re-illumined eye). There is an implication that thus strengthened,
reason can be brought to bear on the pursuits of life and experience. The other noteworthy point

9
Astronomy was one of the subjects to be studied between the ages of 20-30 years at the higher level of preparation for the
study of dialectics.

30
in Platos words above is that he recognised a connection between an inability to embrace the
intrinsic worth of knowledge, and a fear of the world. The implication is that a value or moral
commitment to an open, unfearful outlook about the world and its contents is a necessary
condition for useless studies.

For Plato knowledge was characterized as arriving at a state of certainty about objects in the
natural world which involved applying reason to check the volatility of emotions and urgency of
desires; it implied a mental move from the world of becoming that is the material world and
everyday life to the world of being where the souls eye strives for greater awareness of
absolute certainty of the ideal forms or ideas. Here more than true opinions are possible, true
knowledge and certainty or episteme, were possible either through a metaphysical belief in a
supreme absolute form, or through hypothetical thought (Price, op. cit., p.33).

Platos epistemology, with its strict adherence to the belief that knowledge was only obtainable
by using logical rules and propositions alone was modified by Aristotle, who observed that not
all natural events appeared to follow rule-bound patterns. Consequently Aristotle allowed more
room for empirical observation in knowledge than Plato (Barnes 1996). The incipient
empiricism in Aristotles thought encouraged practices of recording and classifying examples,
and consequently he did not share Platos distrust of books. Plato had thought that written texts
were less reliable than speech in education because he thought that epistemic authority rested
with the educator, and texts could only be an undermining interruption in the direct educative
relationships between educator and pupil. Detached from their authoring person, written words
allowed more scope for deception and they also weakened the valued faculty of memory.

Platos Idea of Freedom

Political philosopher Zbigniew Pelczynski writes, in his discussion of Hegels philosophy of the
state, that the weakness in Greek thought was that it afforded the absolute priority of the
community over the individual (Pelczynski 1984:57). Citizens were above all citizens of an
ethical polis; the good of which governed all efforts, acts and utterances. In this sense there
were no free individuals in the modern meaning where individuals are autonomous, self-
authoring beings who face similar other beings, either in a state of nature or in a human created
society. Each person had an allotted role where actions were governed by the universal ideal of
justice which, from a Hegelian point of view, ignored the subjective aspect of the ideal where
individual experience and knowledge could be incorporated (Pelczynski, ibid.). Platos idea of
freedom was limited to a particular form of knowledge and reasoning which were directed to

31
attaining freedom from illusions and distortions of the material world in order to seek, and get
closer to, the truth. In Platos elementary distinction between doxa and episteme, we can see, in
embryonic form, the epistemological differentiation that would be elaborated by subsequent
thinkers, including Emile Durkheim, Ernst Cassirer and Basil Bernstein as well as contemporary
Social Realist theorists, who I discuss in Chapters Four and Five.

Christianity, Knowledge and Education

In his anthropological and philosophical account of knowledge, philosopher Ernst Cassirer

points out that Christianity introduced one important doctrinal change into the Classical ideas of
truth, reason and knowledge (Cassirer, 1929/1957). In classical thought there was no
fundamental conflict between human use of reason, knowledge and Gods will, which
contributed to the unity of Greek thought. But this is not true in Christian theology where Adam
and Eves curiosity to know led them to go against Gods will. In the Christian cosmology,
human reason and knowledge could no longer be an absolute, unqualified good. The power of
human reason and knowledge to ascertain truth came to stand in tension with belief and
knowledge based on revelation. Arguably, this important development in theology engendered a
greater degree of epistemological uncertainty concerning which was the better source of
knowledge about an eternal, all knowing, all powerful, and mysterious, God; divine revelation,
or human (but still God-given) reason?

The tension between humanly acquired and divinely revealed knowledge is found in the works
of both Augustine (4/5th century AD) and Thomas Aquinas (13th century AD). Augustine agreed
with Platos Idealism but, eventually, he came to uphold the necessity of belief as a prerequisite
for knowledge (Mooney & Nowacki, 2011; Price, op.cit.). To address the tension between the
claims of belief and those of knowledge, Augustine developed the idea of exterior and interior
teaching. The former was concerned with knowledge and reason; it required teaching through
signs which referred to external reality. However, the guarantor of the truth behind knowledge
claims which had been derived through reason and human teaching required interior assent.
This was achievable only by divine illumination within, and was the outcome of Gods direct,
interior teaching. Consequently, Saint Augustine concluded, The man who can reason should
know what he, along with others, must first believe. (St Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana II,
quoted in Price, op.cit. p.125).

The rediscovery of Aristotles works during Aquinass life contributed to sharpening questions
concerning epistemological and moral authority. On the one hand Aristotles works caused great

32
excitement; the accuracy and detail of his observations of nature drew much admiration. But, on
the other hand, some of his ideas had the potential to undermine the authority of the Bible. For
example, Aristotles idea that man and the world had always existed was regarded by some as
undermining the belief in God as Creator of man and the world (Mooney & Nowacki, op. cit.).

In grappling with this problem, Aquinas reasoned that as truth is eternal and unfailing,
knowledge of it must also be eternal and unfailing; humans clearly fail, and do not have eternal
life on earth; therefore, truth was not something which could be directly taught or learnt by
humans. To claim direct access to the truth would be to assume the perfection and infallibility of
God. Thus Aquinas concluded that only God could teach truth directly through revelation.

Human knowledge, on the other hand, had to be fallible because, Aquinas reasoned, it arose
from human activity; human activity was analogous to human existence itself, and both could
cease to be, or fail. In this way Aquinas attempted to provide an account of human knowledge
which justified its limits while also affording it a more important rle than in Platos thought.
Following Augustine, Aquinas reasoned that humans could teach knowledge, and thereby teach
truth, but indirectly, through the signs of knowledge (Mooney & Nowacki, ibid.). He thought
that with this form of human exterior teaching, understanding required an act of willing assent
on the part of the pupil. But unlike Augustine, he thought it could be arrived at through the
scholastic practice of disputations:

Any activity is to be pursued in a way suitable to its purpose. Disputations have one or
other of two purposes. One sort is designed to remove doubts about whether such and
such is so. In disputations of this sort you should above all use authorities acceptable to
those with whom you are disputing: with Jews, for example, you should use the
authority of the Old Testament...And if you are disputing with those who accept no
authority you should resort to natural reasons. Then there is the professional or
academic disputation, designed not for removing error, but for teaching, so that those
listening may be lead to an understanding of the truth with which the magister is
concerned. And here you must rely upon reasons, reasons which track down the root of
the truth and create a real knowledge of how it is your assertions are true. Otherwise, if
professors settle questions by bare authority, listeners are told indeed that such and such
is so, but gaining nothing in the way of knowledge or understanding, and go away
empty.
(From Aquinas' Quodlibet IV, quoted in Mooney & Nowacki, ibid., pp. 109110)

33
In contradistinction to Classical study, in which Socratic dialogue was highly valued, Medieval
scholastic study was based largely on the detailed scrutiny of a few selected texts whose
readings would be undertaken collectively and under close supervision. Disputations would be
based on the study of the minutiae of textual details and interpretations within strict doctrinal
boundaries. Here Aquinas seems to introduce something of the spirit of Platos dialectics to the
Christian scholarly disputation. He describes two types of disputations each with a different
purpose: the removal of error in the knowledge of the earthly world and matters on the one hand,
and as an integral part of seeking a deeper, non-empirical truth on the other.

For Aquinas, as for Plato and Augustine, knowledge is closely connected to truth and human
reason is highly valued. However, it could be said that in Augustines and Aquinas work there
is a more developed epistemology. They introduce the idea of knowledge as a symbolic
mediatory system that allows God-given truth about certain human matters to become accessible
to humans through the teaching of knowledge. In Aquinas we find a clearer and more developed
articulation of the idea of epistemic authority as something distinct from bare authority, and
the idea that internal assent for some knowledge claims could be a consequence of a prior
process of reasoning as well as from revelation alone.

Freedom in Christian Classical Education

Once human reason and God-given revelation began to be understood in terms of a dualism
necessary for human knowledge, in contrast to the unified character of Greek thought, human
reason was less tied to being wholly subservient to apprehending the Good as given by
metaphysics. Thus freed, at least in part, reason now had a greater rle in creating knowledge in
relation to earthly matters and, more importantly, in securing the authority of such knowledge.
According to Aquinas, knowledge was closely connected to truth, but truth itself did not depend
upon knowledge. Truth, he argued, rested in reality; and reality is something to be known and
understood partly through interior illumination, but also, more explicitly, through using reason
and knowledge based on authoritative texts. In this respect he stands closer to Aristotle than
Plato who was suspicious of empirical reality and texts as reliable sources for seeking truth
(Mooney & Nowacki, ibid.).

The contribution of Christian theological thought could be seen as providing a re-articulation of

the Classical concepts of knowledge, reason and truth, but in a dualist cosmology which,
unintentionally maybe, afforded a greater degree of freedom for human reason and knowledge in
the sense that it was no longer wholly determined by divine or metaphysical powers. Arguably,

34
the conceptualization of human agency was one in which it gained a little more status and
independence than was possible in Classical thought.

Renaissance, Knowledge and Education

During the Renaissance there was a revival of interest in classical culture and ancient texts, but
they began to be understood as sources with which to compare and evaluate the contemporary
world rather than absolute sources of moral authority per se as they had been in medieval
scholasticism (Bantock 1952). The natural and social world, and man himself, became
increasingly a subject for observation and experiment. This new knowledge was thought to be
better accessible through the empirical methods of the sciences, broadly conceived, rather than
in the narrow, more specialised study of classical poems and literature which characterised
scholasticism. Growing historical and anthropological knowledge of different cultures and
practices raised questions about established accounts of human life. These had been based upon
a belief in the eternal and unitary character of human nature in accordance with Aristotles law
of non-contradiction.10

The significance of the scientific revolution, and its development of empirical experiment and
analysis of causes in natural phenomena, was felt beyond the sphere of the academy or Royal
Societies alone. One of its effects was to call into question traditional, superstitious and
religious beliefs, and in doing so the progress of knowledge in the natural sciences contributed
to an ambitious quest to expand the horizons of all human knowledge (Polanyi 2012). For
example, between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries Francis Bacon wanted to:

collect out of the records of all time what particular kinds of arts and learning have
flourished in what ages and regions of the worldThe occasion and origin of the
invention of each art, the manner and system of transmission, and the place and order of
study and practicethe principle controversies in which learned men have been
engagedin a word everything which relates to the state of learning.
(quoted in Wellmon, 2015, p. 54)

Bacons words indicate the scope of his inquiry, which was broad rather than specialized, but
still within a religious framework. His aim to enable man to control nature was not in order to
counter religious doctrine or to improve practical life alone, but to return man to a state of
prelapsarian unity. During Bacons lifetime a new sphere of public intellectual life was created
10
Aristotles principle of non-contradiction holds that, it is impossible for something to both be and not to be in the same
respect at the same time and in the same manner. (Mooney and Nowacki 2011:115)

35
which arose alongside, and partly because of, the establishment of new public institutions
characteristic of more complex city states in Italy and elsewhere. The introduction of print,
book markets and public places for discussion, meant that ideas circulated beyond the confines
of the monasteries. In such new and vital civic spaces, ideas and knowledge became more
widely socialised, open to a wider range of interpretations, and free from theological
interpretation alone (Melton, 2001; Wellmon, ibid.).

Science and the Humanities and Freedom of Knowledge

According to philosophers Eugene Ihoemas and Leon Pompas reading of Giambattista Vicos
The New Science of 1752, Vico, like his contemporary Bacon, had attempted to reconcile
religious belief with a desire to embrace the gains in knowledge (Iheoma 1993; Pompa 1982).
The the tensions between theological doctrine on the one hand, which rested upon accepting the
belief in the unity of God, and the fruits of advances in scientific knowledge, on the other hand
was intensified as the study of the objects and tales brought back from distant lands by
adventurers and scholars, raised further questions about established accounts of reality (Ihoema,
ibid: Pompa, ibid.). For example, one important problem for theology was how to reconcile the
increasingly obvious fact of human diversity with the belief that Gods world was eternal and
universal.

Vicos response to the the increasingly apparent contradictions between knowledge and faith
was to re-formulate ideas from Classical metaphysics and Christianity. He argued that while
both the natural and human worlds were given by God, they stood in varying distances from the
ideal forms which remained, like God, mysterious and unknowable to human knowledge. From
this point, Vico proceeded to reason that although the natural world was closer, chronologically,
to Gods original creation, its objects remained inferior to their ideal counterparts (to
approximate the ideal form too closely would be tantamount to challenging Gods power).
Consequently, direct knowledge of natural objects was not possible; it had to be flawed in a way
analogous to its objects of study. But indirect knowledge of objects from nature, through human
senses, was possible. However, he went against the growing authority of empirical knowledge
when he argued that it could be valid, but it was necessarily an inferior form of knowledge.

Vicos most original insights were in relation to the knowledge of human societies. He argued
that because objects such as social institutions stood at a further distance from Gods original
creation than the natural world, knowledge of them did not risk the same hubris. Neither did
knowledge of past and present societies depend upon the senses as in empirical knowledge of

36
nature. Knowledge that was clearly the product of human thought based on logical and
mathematical rules and imagination was the guarantor of truth in the humanities; its authority
was vouchsafed precisely because both the objects and methods of gaining knowledge were so
different to those applicable to nature and the natural sciences. From this reasoning, Vico
concluded that the most reliable form of knowledge was to be found in history which, unlike
knowledge in the natural sciences, would not forever be standing fully in the shadow of divine
knowledge (Iheoma, ibid: Pompa, ibid.).

In Vicos coining of verum factum, and his explication of knowledge in the humanities, we see
a point of contact with an important idea in contemporary Social Realist epistemology, which is
that the social construction of knowledge is one of its sources of legitimacy, rather than its
negation. In grappling with the multiplicity and variability in space and time of human societies,
Vico freed knowledge of human institutions and their historical development from the need for
religious legitimation. In this sense his work could be regarded as expressing an early idea of
historical change and human agency, which in an important way, is as significant as the more
well-known cultural and intellectual achievements of the Renaissance.

The examples discussed above suggest that the greater differentiation in the Renaissance
between knowledge in the natural sciences and in the humanities arose initially through a
creative tension between belief and knowledge. As great thinkers engaged with important
intellectual and moral problems of their time, important ideas were reconceived with more
complexity and nuance than was possible in the unified thought system of Platos time. In this
process, the authority of knowledge, reason and truth became understood as increasingly
located in the study of contemporary society and people, rather than the study of ancient
authoritative Classical and Christian texts (Bantock, 1952; Pompa, ibid.). Thus gains in
knowledge during this period also entailed a development from a religious to a humanist
ontology and cosmology (Archer et al. 2013). The humanism of the Renaissance and, later, the
Enlightenment is articulated well by philosopher, and Kantian scholar, G.E. Michaelson:

The new arena of meaning and purposiveness is neither a hidden supernatural zone nor the
world of nature taken by itself, but rather the world of human thought, intention and
control.
(Michaelson 1990:1)

37
The thinkers of the Enlightenment attempted, in different ways, to extend this world of human
thought, intention and control to better understand their distinctly social and historical world, as
well as the nature of man as a morally autonomous individual.

Knowledge, Freedom and the Enlightenment

By the mid eighteenth century Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was concerned that the extension of
science to an increasing range of human affairs threatened the status of free will; the deeply
problematic but indispensable God-given gift to humans (Michaelson, ibid.). He was also
concerned that metaphysics was in a state of intellectual disarray compared to knowledge in the
natural sciences. Kant thought that the progress of science threatened to undermine human free
will, which would ultimately pose a threat to Gods authority. The radical scepticism of Locke
and Hume had brought into question the very possibility of knowledge and reason (Hume,
1748/2011; Locke, 1689/1975), which, in turn, Kant argued, threatened to undermine the status
of all traditional belief, customs and practices which had been guaranteed by the authority of
religion (Michaelson, op. cit.).

It was in the attempt to secure the autonomy of human free will (which Kant understood as
testimony to Gods existence), as well as to secure an epistemological basis for knowledge not
based on the natural sciences, that led Kant to his radical insight; that while knowledge had
limits the world of noumena would remain unknowable the phenomenological world was
knowable, and the authority of its knowledge lay fully with human reason. The traditional
search for the unity of all forms of divine and human knowledge, therefore, was pointless.
Instead Kant proposed that the unity of knowledge did not lay with any divine or metaphysical
power, but through the exercise of human reason alone, and the purpose of reason and
knowledge was to question rather than to affirm the status of all truth claims, including those of
science and religion.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant represent two influential strands of Enlightenment
thought. They share a general positive Enlightenment outlook regarding the improvement of the
individual, but they had different ideas and attitudes about human society, knowledge and
education. The following section begins with a discussion of their educational ideas in more
depth. I then consider criticisms of central Enlightenment ideals made by Hegel, Heidegger, and
Arendt, all of which to a greater or lesser extent, engage with Kants ideas. Lastly I consider the
criticisms of postmodernism, which are predicated on a rejection of an idea central in his

38
thought that of the individual as a morally autonomous being whose perfectibility required
expanding spheres of freedom.

Sociologist of Education, Michael Young, claims that Rousseau and Kant articulate two
fundamentally different ideas of education and knowledge and of the relationship between
knowledge and freedom.11 For Rousseau, inasmuch as knowledge was associated with societys
cultural habits and values, it was inhospitable to freedom. Knowledge was a product of a
society whose current influence he regarded as mainly corrupting. For this reason, traditional
education, in which knowledge was predominant, was understood as inhospitable to a moral life
which, for Rousseau, was located, especially for children, in natural rather than cultured
environments (Rusk & Scotland, ibid.). One of his main criticisms of existing educational
practice and thought was that they ignored the child and focused too much on the future adult.
Hence in the preface in Emile or Education, Rousseau writes:

The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking
what a child is capable of learning. They are always looking for the
man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes
a man . . . Begin thus by making a more careful study of
your scholars, for it is clear that you know nothing about them.
(Rousseau, 1750/2005, un-paginated)

In the importance Rousseau placed on making the childs imputed natural development the
starting point for education, his view of freedom in education, that according to Young, could be
characterised as freedom from knowledge. In contradistinction, Kant held a more positive
view of society and culture. His view could be better characterised as freedom through
knowledge. However, as well as the important differences, as described by Young, there are
also some important points of contact between the two, near contemporaneous, thinkers.

Rousseau, Knowledge and Education

As Platos ideas of education were shaped by his broader cosmological outlook, so Rousseaus
were shaped by his negative understanding, or evaluation, of society. The aim of education, for
Rousseau, was to inculcate two desirable capabilities in adulthood which would provide a form
of inoculation against corrosive effects of social life. The first was an ability to recognize the
11
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/educationists-have-forgotten-the-power-of-knowledge/17131#.V9L8ZLxllZo

39
falsehood and corruption which Rousseau thought was rife in society at that time. The second
was to impart a feeling of sympathy for fellow beings necessary for social stability and
individual flourishing. Thus educated, an individual would be fitted for the form of citizenship,
and peaceful social existence he explicated in The Social Contract, published in 1762
(Rousseau, 1762/2010), which was his contribution to ongoing philosophical and political
debates concerning the nature of government.

Reason and rationality were important for Rousseau, but he also valued the development of
feelings as a legitimate educational aim, in part, perhaps because of the importance he accorded
to strengthening social bonds. Kant, on the other hand, afforded very little place to feelings in
education. Rousseaus high valuation of nature meant he advocated practical learning in natural
environments, and making educational aids, rather than book and classroom-based methods, or
using traditional educational equipment (Rusk and Scotland, ibid.). He claimed direct
observation, experiment and practice were the best educational methods through which the inner
life and faculties of pupils could be developed.

Rousseau elaborated two central ideas of education which have remained influential in different
forms of progressive education. The first is that the starting point of education and schooling is
the child, and therefore teachers need to know about their pupils as much as subject knowledge.
Secondly, education is understood as a primarily empirical process aimed at developing innate,
dormant faculties (Doddington & Hilton, 2007). The orientation of a Rousseau-influenced
understanding of education is towards realization of what exists rather than towards effecting a
transformation in which what exists is worked upon to create something new.

Both Rousseau and Kant valued reason and rationality but for Rousseau reason was an
individual attribute, alongside emotions, which could be developed along universal principles
with the correct forms of education. Kant, on the other hand, understood reason as a universal
category of which all individuals partake by virtue of developing their individual faculties for
reasoning to reach a new level of enlightened reason. The pedagogic implications of Rousseaus
conceptualisation implies a minimalist model of the teacher, and the educational process
involves removing barriers which might obstruct pupils free development of their faculties.
The pedagogic implications of a Kantian model of education are that teachers need to have
attained a higher level of reasoned enlightenment than their pupils in order to act as
epistemological and moral educators who aim to improve, and not merely realise, pupils innate
abilities.

40
Kant, Knowledge and Education

Kant regarded young childrens proximity to nature, and therefore their distance from adult
culture, as something to be overcome through education, which, he argued, consisted of a
combination of discipline and reason. The former was needed in the earlier stages of education
in order to acquire the habits of study which were necessary for its later stages based on
knowledge and reason. His aim for education was akin to bildung, rather than a narrow,
intellectualist development alone, and it was associated with both individual and societal
improvement (Kant, 1803/1960) .

According to academic educator Heinrich Kanz, Kant proposed the following aims of education:
(a) disciplined thinking; (b) creation of a cultivated outlook; (c) enhancement of civilization; and
(d) imparting moral rectitude (1993:5). Taken together, Kants important philosophical works,
Answer the Question: What is Enlightenment? (1784/nd), the Critique of Pure Reason
(1787/2013), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788/2013) and the Critique of Aesthetic
Judgement (1790/2014), represent a strong commitment to the idea of the the free-willed,
morally autonomous individual, which is clearly articulated in the opening in Answer to the
Question: What is Enlightenment?

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred nonage. Nonage is the

inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This nonage is
self-imposed if its cause is not in lack of understanding, but in indecision and lack of
courage to use ones own mind without anothers guidance. Dare to Know! (Sapere
aude). Have the courage of your own understanding, is therefore the motto of the
enlightenment.12

Kants important contribution to existing accounts of freedom, reason and knowledge, is

encapsulated in the quotation above. In his three Critiques he explicated a radically new idea of
the autonomous individual, who, by the intentionally directed use of reason, the exercise of
moral judgement, and openness to aesthetic beauty and aesthetic judgement, becomes the author
of his or her life. Kant was not an atheist, and much of his motivation was, as with previous
thinkers, to salvage something of religious authority, but also to limit its reach in human affairs.
Politically, his work could be regarded as an intellectual salvo in the struggle of an emerging
bourgeois class against despotic rulers and their allies in the church.

12
From: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html. Accessed on 10th October 2016.

41
The politically interested dimension of his work does not, in my view, detract from the
importance of his breakthrough in locating human reason as the source of progress by the
development of our rational, moral and aesthetic faculties. Although Kant has subsequently
been regarded as an absolute rationalist, in fact, he gave as much prominence to morality as to
reason. If reason had an especially important status, it was because it remained the site where
all experience (including moral and aesthetic) was cognized in thought, and as thought, it was
subject to universal, regulative laws of logic and morality. Human reason, and not the world
given by God or any metaphysical power, was thus also the source of knowledge.

He distinguished between speculative and practical reasoning, and argued that understanding
which could acquire the status of knowledge, was derived from speculative reason rather than
the imprints of, or responses to, sensory data. At the time of his writing, the status and influence
of knowledge in the natural sciences was considered by many to be unmatchable: scientific
knowledge and methods were being extended to an increasing number of disciplines.
Speculative reasoning was Kants contribution to providing a method by which metaphysical (or
non-scientific) knowledge could be secured and made more reliable. But at the same time he
proposed limits to science and speculative reason, which he thought became muddled when
either tried to claim truths beyond their own spheres:

We do not enlarge but disfigure the sciences when we lose sight of their respective limits
and allow them to run into each other.
(Kant, 1787 p. 11)

Kant bracketed noumena from phenomena to avoid such confusion. The former referred to the
essential thing-in-itself that must remain unknowable; an idea not dissimilar to Platos Ideal
forms. But unlike Plato, Kant thought that this quality meant that noumena would remain
irrelevant for human concern and pursuit of truth. Phenomena, on the other hand, were all that
could be cognized in our minds. In this move Kant prioritised human knowledge and reason,
while still allowing room, albeit limited, for religious belief.13

In his preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787/2013), Kant wrote of
his worry that if the idea of causation, as was being developed within the natural sciences,
continued to be extended to all human matters, morality and its predicate, free-will, (which was

137
Kant declared his belief in God but within the bounds of reason. Religious belief could not be cognized human knowledge
without contradiction between reason and doctrine. Consequently, belief remained a private matter and was separated from
reason and knowledge. This represents a decisive rupture with all past understandings of the relationship between reason and
revelation/belief which held the former to be a means of affirming the latter.

42
a God-given gift) would be undermined (Michaelson, op. cit.). In other words, he wanted to
retain the achievements of the scientific revolution, while retaining a basis for a moral theology.
He thought the only way knowledge claims of phenomenological objects could be secured was
through the development of systematic theory of a priori concepts whose truth was verifiable
through using logic and deductive reasoning:

Now these sciences, if they can be termed rational at all, must contain elements of a
priori cognition, and this cognition may stand in a twofold relation to its object. Either
it may have to determine the conception of the object which must be supplied
extraneously [by which I understand the object exists independently of our experience of
it], or it may have to establish its reality. The former is theoretical, the latter practical,
rational cognition. In both, the pure or a priori element must be treated first, and must
be carefully distinguished from that which is supplied from other sources. Any other
method can only lead to irremediable confusion.
(Kant, ibid., p. 12)

If knowledge was to be rational, that is to say given by human reason rather than by divine
power or sense data alone, it had to exist somewhere other than in the natural or metaphysical
world where the epistemic authority lay in either the laws of nature, or divine power. Hence
Kant posited the universal category of a priori cognition which could do one of two things.
First, it could construct the conception of the object or ideas of natural objects which stood in
a relation of partial dependence on the phenomenological object, and in partial dependence upon
a priori cognition. This was the realm of speculative reasoning and theoretical knowledge.

Second, a priori cognition could establish the reality of any phenomenological object: this was
the realm of practical reasoning and cognition. In both functions speculative and practical
Kant stresses that the a priori must be treated first, and must be carefully distinguished from
that which is supplied from other sources, by which I understand him to be referring to a
concept akin to that of telos in Classical thought. The idea of telos is predicated on everything
having an intrinsic function and worth which is independent of any purposes and value
attributed from other sources. From a priori cognition we created ideal concepts which provide
the standard with which to ascertain the truth of empirical, a-posteriori concepts; if there were
no logical contradiction, the truth claim of the empirical concept was legitimate.

In Kants theory, experience had a place, but human reason was understood as more important,
as can be seen from the following example. In order to resolve the apparent paradox

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metaphysics seemed unable to overcome (arising from the belief that phenomenological objects
were ontologically prior to cognition, so knowledge could only ever play catch up), Kant
decided to emulate the example of Galileo and Copernicus who, with no empirical grounds,
decided upon a thought experiment to try and solve the problem of the movements of the Earth
and planets by reversing the assumed relationship between them:

It has been hitherto assumed that cognition must conform to the object . . . Let us then
make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in metaphysics if we
assume that the objects must conform to our cognition.
(Kant, ibid., p. 13)

Speculative reasoning was the means through which humans could attain a greater freedom of
thought, which contributed to consolidating their status as autonomous subjects, who were
capable of recreating the (phenomenological) world in systematic thought and knowledge, and
enriching their culture in the process. Hence for Kant the true worth of the revolution in science
was not so much in the contents of its knowledge, magnificent as they may be, but in the
changed relationship between man and nature. He wrote

Reason must approach nature with the view, indeed, of receiving information from it, not,
however, in the character of a pupil, who listens to all that his master chooses to tell
him, but in that of a judge, who compels the witnesses to reply to those questions which
he himself thinks fit to propose. To this single idea must the revolution be ascribed, by
which, after groping in the dark for so many centuries, natural science was at length
conducted into the path of certain progress.
(Kant, ibid.)

It could be argued that Kants account above, inadvertently, lends support to the philosopher
Ernst Cassirers point, that in crowning reason, Kant had overlooked, or underestimated, the role
of the imagination (Cassirer, 1957). Kant was openly dismissive of the imagination (Kant,
1803/1960), but his account of his thought experiments could, arguably, be regarded as an
unintended testament to his powers of imagination as well as reason, a point Polanyi makes in
relation to the hypothetical ideas of Copernicus and Galileo (Polanyi, op.cit.).

Kant and Freedom

The idea that humans were morally autonomous beings was important in Kants thought because
it was the predicate for free-will. The will had to be free in order to be moral. If the will was

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subject to any element of extrinsic determination, the moral content of the judgement or act
would not be free or unconditioned; and therefore it would be an interested judgement or act,
and not a moral one (Hannah Arendt 2003; Kant 1788; Michaelson 1990). Kant held that the
faculty of free will was the faculty through which the unconditioned universal law, the
categorical imperative (CI), was realised. But he also recognized that moral judgements in
everyday life were not free in a correspondingly absolute way; interests and knowledge played a
part in our moral judgements through which the CI was affirmed.

This element of necessary knowledge and interest posed a logical and moral problem for Kants
circular account of morality because if a moral judgement was directly given, or given via logic
or knowledge, it necessarily contradicted the idea of the will as fundamentally free; some
element of determination would have been introduced. Kant attempted to resolve the
conundrum by elaborating the relationship between the categorical imperative, which is
universal and underpins all moral acts in the human world, and moral maxims which guide
particular acts in everyday life. The categorical imperative was not a rule or a set of laws which
could be specified; but it was the source of maxims.

Kants Aesthetics

According to Michaelson, Kant explained maxims as the conceptual bridges which function to
guide us in our judgement in the practical world (Michaelson, ibid.). Our experiences here can
be referred back to our apprehension of the categorical imperative in a continuous feedback;
through this activity we make ourselves manifest as moral beings. (Kant, 1788/2013;
Michaelson, 1990). Out of the three faculties, reason, morality and the aesthetic, Kant thought
the aesthetic faculty was the source of the greatest freedom. In his Critique of Aesthetic
Judgement, he wrote:

Only by what man does heedless of enjoyment, in complete freedom, and independently
of what he can passively procure from the hand of nature, does he give to his existence,
as the real existence of a person, an absolute worth. Happiness, with all its plethora of
pleasure, is far from being an unconditioned good.
(Kant, 1790, section 4, p. 5)

The aesthetic faculty was the freest of all human faculties because its manifestation lay in the
suspension of all the cognitive faculties which are continuously exerted in everyday life. Reason
and morality were generally directed to some specific aim, the fulfilment of which would bring

45
about some degree of improvement or greater satisfaction; hence, in Kants terms, they were
associated with a degree of interest. In the creation and appreciation of art, aspects of reason,
knowledge, intuitions, feelings might play a part, but in a less directed or restricted manner than
in either rational thought, or in everyday practical life. In aesthetic appreciation our conceptual
apparatus is at rest, or in free play, and we are better able to recognise the existence of beauty. It
is important to note that Kant did not think this meant everyone would agree about either the
presence, or absence, of beauty, in any particular work, but that in disagreements over such
issues, a standard of beauty was being upheld by default (Kant, 1790/2014).

Summary

The idea of individuals having autonomous wills made manifest by rational, moral and aesthetic
judgements was the culmination of a long period of humanistic thought in which human agency
was freed from the certainty of religious belief, but also freed them for human agents to make
themselves, and their world, according to their ideas, values and beliefs. For Kant the rle of
knowledge was fundamentally emancipatory; thus it was more than an epistemological matter
alone, and his concern with morality as well as rationality is reflected in his views on education.

In contradistinction to Rousseau, Kant advocated the imposition of culture in addition to nurture

(Kant, 1803/1960). Education was an important part of culture, and in his most explicit work
on education, Kant wrote that its purpose was to ensure the following: understanding, by which
he meant of particular events or phenomenon; judgement, which he defined as the application of
a general standard; finally, reason which was, the power to understand the connection between
the general and the particular (Kant, ibid., p. 71). Culture entailed disciplining those tendencies
which could hinder moral and mental development, and encouraging those which helped their
development. Without the elements of discipline and work, pupils would be less likely to lose
the self-consciousness needed if character was to be shaped along enlightened principles.

Finally, there are two other important points of difference between Kant and Rousseau. First,
Kant understood education to be an art, by which he meant something artificial whereas
Rousseau understood education more as a natural process. Second, it could be said that although
both held a view of education as involving a relationship between the generations, Kant gave
greater importance to adult authority than Rousseau. Precisely because he held such a high view
of humans and culture, he thought it would take generations to approximate perfection. Thus it
was important that each generation passed on its store of knowledge and wisdom, so it could be
improved upon by subsequent generations. This idea of cultural perfectibility as an

46
accumulative process over generations is less present in Rousseau, who viewed culture with
greater ambivalence and for whom education was envisaged in terms of intersubjective
relationships where adult epistemological and moral authority was more equivocal than in
Kants view.

I now turn to consider important criticisms of Enlightenment thought, which are mostly
concerned with Kants formulations of reason and freedom.

Criticisms of Enlightenment Reason and Freedom: Hegel, Marx, Heidegger and Arendt

Fruitful critiques of Kantian freedom and individualism are found in the works of Georg
Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Hegel and Arendt are
perhaps best understood as developers of certain Kantian ideas, while Heidegger overtly rejected
important tenets of Kantianism, and thus prefigured later postmodern criticisms of the
Enlightenment ideals of reason, freedom and autonomy.

In his discussion of Hegels ideas of political community and individual freedom, political
philosopher Zbigniew Pelczynski writes that Hegel regarded the individual freedom explicated
in Rousseau and Kant as inadequate, or dangerous when applied to political and social life.
Perhaps influenced by Herders view of culture as being the product, and expression, of context-
specific experience rather than the product of reason, Hegel thought that reason and freedom
became abstractions when decoupled from other sources of authority including religion, or
customs and practice of civil life. As abstractions they were devoid of the particularity of
experience, and exertion of individual interests, without which freedom could not be made
concrete in an actual ethical community (Pelczynski 1984). For Hegel, the problem of
abstractions was that when imposed on actual political and social life, they could lead to the
Terror of the French Revolution.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were also critical of Kantian Idealism on political grounds.
Famously, they wrote in the Theses on Feuerbach (1968) that the point was to change the world
rather than merely understand it, and they were critical of Kants philosophy as providing the
intellectual justification for bourgeois social relations. In response it could be argued that such
criticisms underestimate the importance of ideals and ideas to action; or they misconstrue their
character and relationship. In my view this relationship was better understood by Meszaros (2006)
for whom ideals provided a necessary bridge between what is, and what ought to be. In this sense
Kants philosophy posits the possibility of an intellectual and moral transcendence, which Marx

47
reformulated and extended to the realm of political and social relations. The fact that Kantian
transcendence is confined to the realm of thought, does not, in my view, negate its value. His
conceptualization of the individual human being as a bearer of reason, and a morally free agent is,
logically, a necessary concept for freedom, and other ideals, to be made concrete in politics and
other spheres of life.

Martin Heidegger regarded Kants Critique of Pure Reason as a hermetically sealed conceptual
system which offered a false promise of infinitude of human reason and ignored the reality of
human finitude (Nirenberg 2011). In his public debate with Ernst Cassirer in 1929, he argued
that there could be no transcendental truth: it could only be relative to the contingencies of space
and time into which humans were thrown. Heideggers alternative to transcendental truth was a
form of authentic being where one was open to self and others. However, having eschewed
Kants transcendental categories, and also rejected Cassirers theories of symbolic forms (the
most important of which was language itself) through which a public culture is constituted and
upon which human inter-subjectivity depends, Heidegger was left with a mystical account of
experience with which to explain human inter-subjectivity (Krois 1983; Lynch 1990).

Heideggers criticism was that Kant posed freedom as if it were a matter of theoretical
contemplation rather than requiring an act of philosophizing. To some extent, this view was
shared by Arendt. In the Promise of Politics Arendt writes that Kants categorical imperative is
derived from thinking in agreement with the self, and that reason as giver of laws does not
presuppose other persons but only a self that is not in contradiction with the self. (Arendt, 2005,
p. 169). Both Hegel and Arendt found Kants conceptualisation of freedom wanting. For Hegel
it was too abstract, and potentially, such abstraction could be dangerous in as far as it diminished
the scope for the exercise of individual responsibility. For Arendt, the understanding of freedom
attainable through philosophical contemplation was inadequate because it lacked the force of
compulsion. Understanding alone could not compel action; this required willing and judgement
in relation to specific, concrete objects or actions in particular situations (Arendt, 1978).

The Challenge of Postmodernism

In the last quarter of the twentieth century the ideals of freedom and autonomy, which had
underpinned the Enlightenment and the subsequent historical period referred to broadly as
modernity, came to be increasingly understood in a negative light. The chief harbingers of the
critique of the Enlightenment have been academics associated with postmodern theories. The
promise of universal progress, the perfectibility of man, and the ability to reach a closer

48
approximation of the truth by the use of rational knowledge are increasingly questioned, or thought
to be problematic in themselves. The idea of the rational autonomous individual, who since Kant
had been central to Western thought (Bell 1962), and on whose actions societal progress had been
predicated, becomes increasingly understood as problematic at the very least.

In postmodern criticisms, Kants categorical imperative is interpreted as positing an atomized

individual whose existence is necessarily in an oppositional relationship to society, and on this
basis, is rejected. It is argued that as the world is more interconnected or globalised,
Enlightenment models of the individual are outdated (Sullivan 2005). A concomitant conclusion
is that truthful, objective knowledge, which we could use to extend our understanding and
control over aspects of the external world, is no longer possible. The postmodernists reason is
that Modernisms, Enlightenment-based, concept of knowledge assumed foundational beliefs in
truth and objectivity which are no longer tenable.

In his reading of Jrgen Habermas, sociologist Krishan Kumar writes that he (Habermas)
rejected the postmodernists claim that they were postmodern. Habermas thought that in using
aspects of early twentieth century aesthetic modernism to attack modernity as an heir to
Enlightenment thought and ideals, they could be more accurately described as anti-modern
(Kumar 2005). At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there had been intense
debates in European intellectual and artistic circles about the nature of linguistic and artistic
forms and their relationship to material reality and subjectivity. The central question hinged
upon the extent to which abstracted forms, particularly linguistic symbolic systems, had
representational, or constructive, powers with regards to reality. Habermas description seems
apt in relation to the work of influential postmodernist, Jean Baudrillard, for example, who
wrote in Simulacra and Simulation:

The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there
is nothing marks a decisive turning point. The first reflects a theology of truth and
secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates and era
of simulacra and of simulation in which there is no longer a God to recognize his own,
no longer a Last Judgement to separate the false from the true, the real from its artificial
resurrection, as everything is already dead and resurrected in advance.
(Baudrillard 1994:6).

The possibility of any notion of truth, and of knowledge with which the separation between
interiority and exteriority could be bridged, is rejected in Baudrillards concept of simulation; a

49
concept which eviscerates depth of meaning from knowledge and understanding. It is in effect a
position of radical empiricism; all that can be known or understood is that which exists; and
what exists is stripped of any substantive meaning and value it had in the past. Truth is relegated
to the status of theology as if the painstaking gains from the Renaissance to Enlightenment
had never happened.

More importantly, Baudrillards account removes the connection between meaning and the
exertion of subjective interpretation and judgement. All phenomena, including human beings,
can only be understood as an effect of visual signifiers of advertising or the news. The
subjectivity of the autonomous individual (a category which subsumes all cognitive, affective,
expressive, and imaginative faculties), which since Kant had been the site where the world could
be cognized, and from which human intentional will could be directed outwards, amounted to
little more than the intersection of electronically-transmitted messages according to Derrida
and Baudrillard (Kumar, op. cit., p. 103). In this respect it could be argued that the reality of
subjectivity was as big a casualty of postmodern thought as objective reality.

Philosophically, postmodernism seems close to Heideggers conceptualization of the individual

as a being defined by contingencies of experience in the moment alone. For example, in his
discussion of the debate in 1929 between Heidegger and the neo-Kantian Cassirer, Wokler writes
. . . and to Cassirer's sense of the underlying logos of discursive exchange he opposed the idea
of the Unterscheidug, or differentiation of points of view, which would later be taken up by
postmodernist thinkers, (2000, p. 343). The Kantian idea of universal progress arising from
logic-bound discourse between rational, moral beings, was ruled out of court by Heidegger.
Heidegger had dismissed Kants Categorical Imperative on the grounds that it lacked any
transcendent notion of what was good; without this, any idea of human or social progress lacked
justification; all that was possible was that individuals had to continually exert their energies in
acts of being with no means of stabilising, mediating or judging, between, competing acts and
statements.

In addition to the idea of the autonomous, self-directed, intentional individual, another

Enlightenment casualty has been the idea of social transformation or progress. This aim entailed
the belief that it is possible and desirable to organise social and political life according to
principles which could be radically different to those which might be currently influential. Ideas
of individual liberty and social progress were challenged almost as soon as sections of the
French public had attempted to put them into practice in the French Revolution. Edmund
Burkes Reflections on the French Revolution provided the classic conservative critique of

50
Enlightenment ideals which has been influential among subsequent political conservatives.
Sociologist Frank Furedi argues that postmodernism shares a similarly culturally pessimistic
rejection, or disillusionment with the Enlightenment promise. With postmodernism, for the first
time since the French Revolution, this outlook was promulgated by the political left (Furedi,
2009).

Since the emergence of postmodernism there have been further critiques of the Enlightenment,
particularly from those interested in democratic politics. For example, Furedi argues that the
thinkers of the Age of Reason were committed to upholding the ideal of freedom as a critique of
the established order, and to gain greater power for an educated lite, including, of course,
themselves (Furedi, 2013). However, he argues, they were less committed to freedom when it
came to the democratic will of the people. It is true that Kant supported the idea of an
enlightened king and also thought the white race to be superior to American and African races
(Mikkelsen 2013), so undoubtedly, by the standards of contemporary understanding of political
and social equality, Kant does not fare well. However, in my view his flaws are significantly
outweighed by the philosophical and moral importance of his central insights and ideas.

Contemporary social critics who reject Enlightenment ideas on the ground that they are an
ideological mask for inequality base their claims on the assumption that equality is more
important than freedom. In Platos times the differentiation of individuals was considered to be
given by the metaphysical divine power; if equality were extended to include those who were
not citizens of the polis, the divine will would have been contradicted, because their baser
qualities had been given by divine power. Furthermore, it could be argued that without freedom
of thought and speech, a recognition of inequality, and its elaboration into reasoned arguments
capable of persuasion and winning assent among sections of the public, would not be possible.
If equality was unthinkable in Platos time, freedom, however limited in scope, was not, which
suggests that freedom is both logically and historically prior to equality.

Early Christianity introduced the concept of equality as a universal ideal, but it remained within
a theological context: people would be equal before Gods judgment. Thus although it can be
said that important antecedents to Western liberalism can be found in Medieval moral thought,
as claimed by political philosopher Larry Siedentrop (2014) , it is also true that the meanings of
equality, and to a large extent, freedom, remained within theological parameters rather than
those of secular, social life. By the time of the Enlightenment, Kant could articulate a concept of
equality which, as an ideal, was universal and human-centred. However, Kants moral theory
existed in the context of prevailing epistemological limits. For example, knowledge in the fields

51
of biological science and anthropological history was limited as these disciplinary fields were
undergoing substantial development during this period, but they remained immature disciplines
compared to philosophy. Kants views on race, according to Mikkelsen, arose, in part, from his
interest in polygenesis, and whether there was a connection between biological markers and
different levels of cultural development. In response to contemporary condemnation of Kant on
grounds of racism, he notes that in Kants time the ideology of scientific racism barely existed
(Mikkelsen, ibid.).

Summary

There are two main responses possible from recognising limitations, or flaws, in the theories and
ideals of past thinkers. One response is to conclude that a flaw in one area, deemed to be of
overarching concern or importance today, necessarily means all the thinkers ideas and
statements must be flawed, and rejected. This response tends to close down inquiry and
entrench dogmatic positions which, ultimately, hinder the development of new knowledge or
fresh intellectual perspectives. A further point of rebuttal of this approach is that the criticisms
themselves depend upon the standards set, if not always met, by Enlightenment thinkers.
Philosopher Harvey Siegel makes the point that contemporary multicultural critics, who reject
the universalism of the Enlightenment on allegedly politically progressive grounds, are
unwittingly perpetuating a form of colonialism in denying selected groups the chance to reject
universalism for themselves (Siegel, 1995).

A more productive response would be to acknowledge the error or flaw, but to use the
contradiction constructively to probe further, consider afresh; in the case of Kants contradictory
views on race, it would involve re-considering how culture and education were thought of at the
time, particularly in relation to important intellectual questions of the day concerning whether
the true nature of humans was given by God, nature or culture. This response allows for both
criticism and the possibility of developing new knowledge or fresh perspectives on established
knowledge. It is part of the critical engagement necessary for a critique whereas the first
approach represents a rejection in toto, which can, at best, be helpful unintentionally, in as far as
it might prompt new work which seeks to defend past gains. Moreover, criticism of Kants
views on black people, ultimately, reaffirm his claims for the universalism of morality; but now
on the basis of better, improved knowledge in genetics which discredit polygenetic theories of
race.

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The historical overview of the ideas of freedom, knowledge and autonomy in this chapter indicate
how their development, in both their reach and conceptual complexity, has a historical dimension
which is closely connected to developments in wider society, which includes the subjective basis of
society; its ideals and values. Once conceptually elaborated, freedom, knowledge and autonomy,
qua ideas, are intrinsically free from socio-historical determination and acquire a new form of
reality as intellectual objects. Thus it might be true to claim, as some critics of the Enlightenment
do, that other non-Western civilisations were just as technically, or materially, advanced as Europe
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But a key difference is that for various complex
cultural and political reasons, particular sites in Europe were able to facilitate an expanding world
of intellectual endeavour in which ideas themselves were made free and available to be worked
upon. New ideas could be incorporated into existing knowledge and practices in societies whose
cultural formation permitted a greater public rle in the production and dissemination of
knowledge than was possible in other parts of the world at the time.

In this sense the Enlightenments development of knowledge did not depend solely, or even,
perhaps, mainly, on the literal and symbolic subjugation of the Other, as Edward Saids thesis of
Orientalism (Said 2001), and contemporary advocates for decolonising the academy claim,14 but on
progressive, intellectual developments internal to particular nations or states in Europe. Once
made free, such ideas need not be bound to their site of production, or the social groups in which
they were produced. In principle, anyone can partake of them provided they are, in some form,
introduced to them, as the examples of Toussaint LOverture and Frederick Douglass, among
others, testify.

The enormous cultural achievement of freeing ideas from metaphysical or theological doctrine, and
from the contingencies of experience alone, through the work of Classical, Medieval, Renaissance
and Enlightenment scholarship deepens the meaning of freedom of thought. As well as referring
to the political rights of individuals to think, speak and listen to anything, it also refers to ideas
themselves. In this way sacred or theoretical knowledge, when accompanied by a strong moral
commitment to truth and freedom, has provided the resources, with which people have been able to
advance individually and collectively. In the light of the discussion above, the current rejection, or
marginalisation, of established ideas of knowledge and reason, and the greater sphere of freedom
they represent, has a significance beyond education alone.

14
A typical argument along these lines is in Wamai. N. (2016, May 27th). Decolonising the Academy? Towards a Global
Movement? In University World News. Retrieved October 15th 2016, from: http://www.universityworldnews.com

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Having provided an account of key ideas of liberal education at a general level, my next chapter
provides a more closely focused, historical discussion of the development of Britains national
education system along liberal principles, with a particular focus on the influence of the
Enlightenment, and the central rle afforded to English Literature within a liberal subject-based
education system.

.......

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