Spens (1938)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages Membership, Analysis, Preface, Introduction
Chapter 1 Development of the secondary curriculum
Chapter 2 The present position
Chapter 3 Physical and mental development of 11-16 year olds
Chapter 4 The curriculum of the grammar school
Chapter 5 Scripture
Chapter 6 English, classics, mathematics, general science
Chapter 7 The School Certificate Examination
Chapter 8 Technical schools
Chapter 9 Administrative problems
Chapter 10 Welsh problems
Chapter 11 Conclusions and recommendations
Appendix I List of witnesses
Appendix II Liberal education (Young)
Appendix III Secondary curriculum (Kandel)
Appendix IV Faculty psychology (Burt)
Appendix V Transfer of training (Hamley)
Appendix VI Curricula in the Dominions (Clarke)
Index

London: HM Stationery Office

Appendix II Note by the secretary on the development of the conception of general liberal education
[pages 403 - 414]

The Greek sophists of the fifth century before Christ professed to teach most of those arts (technai) which in later times were included in the regular course of education (enkyklios paideia). It seems probable that Hippias of Elis (about 425 BC) should be regarded as the founder of the system of education based on the liberal arts. So far as can be ascertained from ancient sources, he professed to teach all the standard subjects - rhetoric, dialectic, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, grammar and music. (1)

The distinction between liberal and illiberal education underlay all Greek thinking (2) on educational values. This could readily be illustrated by quotations from Plato (427-347 BC) and Isocrates (436-338 BC). It is perhaps most clearly and explicitly stated in the following passage from Aristotle's Politics: 'It is therefore evident that we shall have to teach our children such useful knowledge as is indispensable for them, but it is equally clear that all useful knowledge is not appropriate for education. There is a distinction between liberal and illiberal pursuits, and it is manifest that only such knowledge as does not make the learner mechanical (vulgar) should form a part of education. By mechanical pursuits we should understand all arts and studies that make the body, soul, or intellect of free men unserviceable for the use and exercise of virtue. This is the reason why we call mechanical such arts as produce an inferior condition of body, and all wage-earning occupations. They allow the mind no leisure and degrade it to a lower level. There are even some liberal branches of knowledge, (3) the acquisition of which up to a certain point is not unworthy of freemen, but which, if studied with undue intensiveness or minuteness, are open to the charge of being injurious in the manner described above. The object with which we engage in the arts or study them, also makes a great difference. If it be for our own sakes or that of our friends, or to produce goodness, they are not illiberal, while a man engaged in these very same pursuits to please strangers would in many instances be regarded as following the occupations of a slave or a serf.' (4)

In later phases of Greek thought in the Alexandrian period, there was a growing tendency to stereotype the so-called liberal arts or studies (eleuthera mathemata) which were regarded as constituting the general education or regular round of education (enkyklios paideia) appropriate for freemen, namely, grammar, music, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and certain aspects of rhetoric and dialectic. This conception of the seven liberal arts or branches of knowledge, which so profoundly influenced education in western Europe and in England during the middle ages and down to the eighteenth century, is first found explicitly stated in the lost treatise of M Terentius Varro (116-27 BC) entitled Disciplinarum Libri IX, in which he discussed the seven liberal arts (5), to which he added medicine and architecture. It is almost certain that Varro took the idea of the seven liberal arts from some Hellenistic writer or writers of the first or second century BC - possibly from Poseidonius of Apamea (135 BC-50 BC). (6)

These arts were called liberal because they were originally regarded as the branches of knowledge appropriate for freemen as opposed to those trades and skills practised for economic purposes by slaves or persons without political rights. For instance, Proclus in his Commentary on Euclid (I, p. 19) states that Pythagoras (about 530 BC) converted geometrical learning into a form of education suitable for freemen, as opposed to surveyors and business people, many of whom were slaves, or at any rate did not possess full civil rights.

Plutarch in Chapter XVII of his Life of Marcellus explains that Archimedes (287-212 BC) had such an exalted spirit, so profound a soul and such a wealth of scientific theories that, though his discoveries had gained for him a name and reputation for an understanding more than human, he would not consent to leave behind him any formal work on mechanics. Regarding engineering and every art that ministers to the necessities of life as mean and vulgar, he devoted his strenuous efforts only to those studies the subtlety and charm of which were not affected by the claims of necessity. (7)

Cicero (106-43 BC) uses the expression free born, humane or liberal arts, which in his view consisted of geometry, literature, poetry, natural science, ethics and politics, and contrasts these liberal arts with the mean or illiberal arts (artes illiberales vel sordidae) which he describes as the mechanical occupations of slaves. (8) [De officiis I, 42.)

Seneca (4 BC-65 AD) refers to the liberal studies or liberal arts and to the 'primary course' in grammar given to boys to prepare the ground for instruction in the liberal arts. He quotes the Hellenistic Stoic philosopher Poseidonius, as contrasting the arts which are common and low, belonging to workmen and concerned only with equipping life, with the liberal arts which the Greeks called the cycle of studies or the regular course of education 'but which we Romans call the liberal arts'. (Ad Ludilium epistolae morales. LXXXVIII Section 23.)

Seneca gives his general views about liberal studies at the beginning of Letter LXXXVIII as follows:

'You desire to know my opinion regarding liberal studies. I neither respect nor rank with manifestations of the good any study which sets out to get money. Such studies are profit-making crafts, useful just so far as they train the intellect without engrossing it. We should linger over them only so long as the mind can do nothing more important. They are our elementary schooling, not our real work. You know why liberal studies are so called: because they are worthy of a free man.'

Among the Romans grammar and rhetoric were the first of the liberal arts to obtain general recognition. The Romans were inclined to identify culture with eloquence, as the art of speaking and the mastering of the spoken word, based on a varied and extensive knowledge of things. In his great work on the Education of an Orator, Quintilian (35-88 AD) begins his course of instruction with grammar (i.e. Latin and Greek grammar). He then proceeds to mathematics and music, and concludes with rhetoric, which in his view comprise not only elocution and an extensive knowledge of literature, but also logical, or in other words dialectical, instruction. As is shown in a later paragraph, this view of the liberal arts was adopted by the scholars of the Renaissance and tended to displace the mediaeval view of the seven liberal arts, which was based on the ideas of later Greek thinkers such as the Stoic philosopher, Poseidonius. In the view of the ancient Greek writers philosophy was the culmination of these seven encylical [encyclical? = general studies] studies, which stood to it in the relation of maids to a mistress. Thus the conception of the liberal arts originated in a society based on the slave system, was essentially aristocratic, and was divorced from the practical illiberal arts.

The idea of the seven liberal arts was taken over as part of the cultural heritage of the western church from the ancient world and was transmitted to the middle ages largely through the writings of St Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), Martianus Capella of Carthage (about 430 AD) and Cassiodorus (490-570). (9) St Augustine wrote short treatises on each of the seven liberal arts, or disciplinae, as he himself calls them. (10) Capella in the first two books of his textbook entitled Satyricon Libri IX allegorically describes Phoebus as presenting the seven liberal arts to the bride Philology who is wedded to Mercury.

Cassiodorus describes the seven liberal arts in the second book of his little treatise entitled Institutiones saecularium litterarum, which was intended chiefly for the monks of his foundation at Vivarium near Squillace.

He quaintly derives the word liberalis not from liber, free, but from liber, a book. The seven liberal arts were thus regarded by Cassiodorus, and probably by many mediaeval writers (11), as the literary or bookish studies. The seven arts are described by St Isidore of Seville (570-636) at the beginning of his encyclopaedic compilation entitled Etymologiae which was widely read in the middle ages. The English ecclesiastic, Alcuin (Albinus) (735-804), the adviser of Charlemagne, discussed the liberal arts in several works, of which only the treatises intended as guides to the trivium are extant. In his Grammatica Alcuin sees in the words in Proverbs IX, 1. 'Wisdom hath built herself a house, she hath hewn herself out seven pillars' - a reference to the seven liberal arts. (P.L. Cl. col. 853 B.) It is unnecessary to attempt to trace in detail the development of the seven arts through the middle ages. (12) It is, however, broadly true to say that the mediaeval view of the seven arts or sciences (13) with which the three philosophies, natural, moral and mental, were associated from the twelfth century onwards, had a closer connection with the Hellenistic conception of the arts than with the ordinary Roman conception of these arts as a mere appanage to rhetoric the view of writers such as Cicero, Quintilian and Tacitus. The reason for this was that the trivium was regarded as having a formal character and as aiming at training the mind rather than imparting knowledge. (14) For instance, John of Salisbury (1120-1180), Bishop of Chartres, writes 'If grammar be the key of all literature, and the mother and mistress of knowledge, who will be bold enough to turn her away from the threshold of philosophy?'. (15) The mediaeval universities, which developed all over western Europe from the thirteenth century onwards, accepted the arts as a part of their course. (16) The ordo artistarum, afterwards called the faculty of philosophy or the faculty of arts, was the basic faculty in the four faculties (ordines): 'Universitas fundatur in artibus'. The philosophical or arts faculty furnished a preparation for the superior faculties of theology, law and medicine. The general aim of these seven liberal arts was to prepare the student not primarily for earning a livelihood, but for the pursuit of science in the strict sense of the term (i.e. the combination of philosophy and theology known as scholasticism). The arts were disposed in two groups. The first, known as the trivium, included grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, in other words, the science of language, oratory and logic. These were known as the language studies (artes sermocinales), The second group, known as the quadrivium, comprised arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, i.e. the mathematico-physical studies or disciplines, known as the artes reales vel physicae. (17)

The important place occupied by the faculty of the liberal arts in mediaeval universities may still be traced in expressions such as 'arts and sciences'; 'Bachelor of arts'; 'Master of arts'. In some continental universities the title 'Master of the Liberal arts' is still granted in connection with the Doctorate of Philosophy.

In practical teaching the importance of the seven liberal arts has steadily declined since the Renaissance, though in England and Wales the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the grammar schools, local and non-local, which were so intimately connected with them retained the framework of the system till the middle of the eighteenth century. (18) In practice, the scholars of the Renaissance regarded the technique of style (eloquentia) in Latin or in the vernacular, and the miscellaneous learning required for understanding the classical authors (eruditio), as the main object of collegiate education. This tendency may be clearly observed in the original statutes of Harvard College founded by the Puritan settlers at Cambridge in Massachusetts in 1636. In their main outlines the courses of study prescribed at Harvard were modelled on those of Cambridge University. Thus, in practice, grammar and rhetoric came to be the principal elements of the preparatory studies in the grammar schools (19), while the sciences of the quadrivium were incorporated in the miscellaneous learning (eruditio) associated with rhetoric. In the higher schools in Roman Catholic countries philosophy remained as the intermediate stage between philological studies and professional studies, but in the Protestant states of Europe philosophy was usually transferred to the university as a faculty subject. The Jesuit schools had the following gradation of studies: grammar, rhetoric, philosophy (including logic and dialectic). The miscellaneous learning (eruditio) was the germ of that encyclopaedic learning which was regarded with such respect in the seventeenth century. JA Comenius (1592-1670), the best known exponent of this tendency, sought in his Janua Linguarum (1631) and Orbis Pictus (1658) to make the 'small encyclopaedia' the basis of the earliest grammatical instruction. He speaks with contempt of those seven liberal arts a knowledge of which is demanded from a doctor of philosophy. (20)

In most of the grammar schools, local and non-local, in England and Wales the main subject of school 'business' from the sixteenth century onwards was in practice Latin literature based on an intensive study of Latin grammar. Thus, the trivium had, in effect, been reduced to grammar and rhetoric, logic having dropped out or having been relegated to the academic course at the university. (21) Nevertheless, though the system of the arts was, in effect, disintegrated and was a mere shadow of its former self, the expression 'liberal education', which had originally meant a training in the liberal or free arts, survived to describe an education based on the classical languages.

A liberal education was regarded as the appropriate preparation for the 'liberal' professions.

In the latter half of the 18th century several factors combined to give a new or at any rate an enhanced value to classical education as a social label. Among these factors were the revival of interest in Greek studies in the universities and public schools about 1765; the convention that a gentleman should be able to quote Virgil and Horace; the art of cultured conversation, which involved some knowledge of classical literature; the cult of antiquarianism and archaeology; the prestige of Westminster and Eton among the governing class. The expression 'liberal education' was used by a succession of writers as meaning primarily an education based chiefly on the classics (22), eg Vicesimus Knox, Liberal Education (1789); Essays on Liberal Education (1867) edited by the Rev. FW Farrar (afterwards Dean of Canterbury). In most instances, however, no attempt was made to define the precise meaning of the expression 'liberal education', save for the assumption that it was to be based on the classics. In the nineteenth century, however, largely owing to the influence exerted by Matthew Arnold on the Schools Inquiry Commission (1864-68), for which he prepared in 1866 special reports on the systems of secondary education in France, Germany, Italy and the Canton of Zurich, an effort was made to evolve a more reasoned concept of a 'liberal education' based on the neo-humanistic conception of general culture (Allgemeine Bildung) which had dominated the Prussian gymnasia since the time of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1809) and which also had a wide vogue in France owing to the influence of Victor Cousin (1792-1867), Villemain (1790-1865) and Victor Duruy (1811-1894). It is accordingly necessary for our purpose to give a very brief account of the evolution of this conception of higher education based on general culture in Prussia, and of the parallel development in France down to 1866.

The idea of general liberal education in the form in which Matthew Arnold gave it a wide currency in England in 1866, derives from the celebrated Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), who was head of the newly created Prussian Bureau of Education (23) at Berlin from 1808 to 1810. In the sphere of secondary education Humboldt defined the aim which continued to be accepted in Prussia for the next hundred years.

Von Humboldt, who was himself a distinguished scholar, was a convinced supporter of the neo-humanist movement, which had been gathering force in German educational circles since about 1755, largely owing to the influence of Winckelmann (1717-1768) and Lessing (1729-1781). He believed that the highest example of human development was to be found in ancient Greece. Inspiration and guidance might accordingly be drawn from a study of that wonderful period of human development, which harmonised with the new national movement in Germany in seeking to release the potentialities of the individual in the interests of a self-governing community of fellow citizens. An all-round education on humanistic lines was now to replace the old narrow training in Latin grammar, Latin speaking and religious instruction. Real insight into the spirit of the Greek and Roman civilisations and the assimilation of their great literary masterpieces in form and content, were to furnish solid foundations for a new nationalism expressing the living spirit and genius of the German people.

Von Humboldt's basic idea was to make a synthesis between the humanity of the old world and the ideals of the modern world. His zeal for classical culture did not however lead him to ignore the value of modern studies and so the purpose of the secondary school (gymnasium was defined by him to be the promotion of comprehensive general culture (Allgemeine Bildung). A revised scheme for the secondary school course was drawn up under von Humboldt's guidance. The length of the course was ten years and the subjects to which the greater part of the time was allotted were Latin, Greek, German and mathematics. Religious instruction, natural sciences, history, geography, drawing and writing occupied the remainder of the time. Hebrew and French and other modern languages were optional. The general purpose of higher or secondary education was envisaged as the harmonious development of all the faculties with the comprehensive formal cultivation of intelligence, a mastery of languages, a considerable attainment in mathematics, and some knowledge of science and history.

This higher education was designed for a limited number of boys who were preparing for university studies leading to the learned professions and from whose ranks were to be recruited the higher officials of the Prussian state. (24)

The liberal phase in Prussian higher education did not last for long, and the enlightened ideas of von Humboldt and his collaborator Suevern were considerably modified by a succession of reactionary ministers and permanent officials between 1819 and 1856. The general subjects of instruction in all Prussian gymnasien when Matthew Arnold visited them in 1866, were: languages, viz. German, Latin and Greek; religion; mathematics with physics and natural history; writing; drawing and singing. (25)

Matthew Arnold was also much influenced in the development of his conception of general liberal education by the ideals underlying the state secondary schools in France (lycees and collèges), which he visited in 1866. The curriculum of these schools in their main outlines embodied the reaction against the modern and scientific curriculum of the écoles centrales established by the Directory in 1795 and abolished under the Consulate in 1802. (26) The system established by Napoleon under the Consulate and the First Empire thus represented in the main a reversion to the tradition of the colleges kept by the various teaching Orders and Congregations in the eighteenth century. Classics and literary studies occupied the principal place in the curriculum though a considerable amount of time was also assigned to mathematics and various branches of science. Under the liberal monarchy of Louis Philippe (1830-1848) and during the Second Empire repeated attempts were made to break down the dominance of the classics and to secure more time for the study of the sciences and of modern languages. It was urged that France required more industrialists and engineers, who might be prepared by a scientific course, and fewer journalists and lawyers, produced by a training that was mainly literary. Accordingly, on 30 August 1852, a decree was issued establishing a common course of studies in the lycees for three years, followed by a bifurcation (27) into two courses, one of which was literary and the other scientific, with a number of subjects (Latin, French, history, geography, modern languages) common to both. The literary course led up to the baccalauréat ès lettres and to the Faculties of Letters and Law at the University; the scientific course led up to the baccalauréat ès sciences and to the Faculties of Medicine and sciences and to special schools or to commercial and industrial careers. This experiment was not a success. The scientific course was regarded as a method of escaping from Latin, and the teaching of modern languages largely failed through a shortage of suitable teachers. Accordingly, in 1863, M Victor Duruy, the Minister of Education, suppressed the system of bifurcation and in 1865 established a special course (enseignement spécial) intended for managers and foremen of industrial and commercial undertakings and for minor officials. This course, planned as a three or four years' continuation of elementary education, was to exclude the classics and to comprise French, modern languages, mathematics and science, geography, history, drawing, surveying and bookkeeping.

The passages in Matthew Arnold's Report on secondary education in France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland (1866) outlining his own views on general liberal education run as follows:

'The ideal of a general liberal training is, to carry us to a knowledge of ourselves and the world. We are called to this knowledge by special aptitudes which are born with us; the grand thing in teaching is to have faith that some aptitudes of this kind everyone has. This one's special aptitudes are for knowing men - the study of the humanities; that one's special aptitudes are for knowing the world - the study of nature. The circle of knowledge comprehends both, and we should all have some notion, at any rate, of the whole circle of knowledge. He whose aptitudes carry him to the study of nature should have some notion of the humanities; he whose aptitudes carry him to the humanities should have some notion of the phenomena and laws of nature. Evidently, therefore, the beginnings of a liberal culture should be the same for both. The mother tongue, the elements of Latin and of the chief modern languages, the elements of history, of arithmetic and geometry, of geography, and of the knowledge of nature, should be the same for all boys at this stage. So far, therefore, there is no reason for a division of schools. But then comes a bifurcation, according to the boy's aptitudes and aims. Either the study of the humanities or the study of nature is henceforth to be the predominating part of his instruction.' (Schools Inquiry Commission, VI, 599.)

'The secondary school has essentially for its object a general liberal culture; whether this culture is chiefly reached through the group of aptitudes which carry us to the humanities, or through the group of aptitudes which carry us to the world of nature. It is a mistake to make the secondary school a direct professional school, though a boy's aims in life and his future profession will naturally determine, in the absence of an overpowering bent, the group of aptitudes he will seek to develop. It is the function of the special school to give a professional direction to what a boy has learnt at the secondary school, at the same time that it makes his knowledge, as far as possible, systematic - develops it into science. It is the function of the university to develop into science the knowledge a boy brings with him from the secondary school, at the same time that it directs him towards the profession in which his knowledge may most naturally be exercised. Thus, in the university, the idea of science is primary, that of the profession secondary; in the special school, the idea of the profession is primary, that of science, secondary.' (ibid, VI, 601).

If these passages from Matthew Arnold be carefully studied in the light of the brief account given above of developments in the French and Prussian systems of secondary education at this period (1866), it will be seen that Arnold endeavoured to make our traditional insular conception of 'liberal education' more precise by describing it as 'general liberal culture'. (28) He took the expression 'general culture' from Humboldt's Allgemeine Bildung. Again, Arnold borrowed the idea of the bifurcation of humane and scientific studies, respectively, from the decree issued by the French Ministry of Public Instruction on 30 August 1852. (29) It will be noted that no explicit reference is made either to physical education or to the aesthetic subjects. The fact is that at the time when Matthew Arnold adumbrated this conception of general liberal education, largely on the basis of existing arrangements in secondary schools in France and Prussia, the whole idea of a general liberal culture for a limited élite of future professional men and higher officials was beginning to disintegrate, partly owing to changes in the structure of society, partly to the development of the sciences, partly to the vast increase in knowledge about literary subjects, and partly to the demand of modern industry and commerce for technicians and specialists. It will be noted that there is hardly any recognition of the desirability or indeed of the need of some infiltration of quasi-technical or quasi-vocational work at some stage of the course in a general liberal education. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, public opinion came more and more to recognise the claims of technical education and, as is shown in Chapter 1 of this Report, the best educational opinion in England and Wales during the last two decades of the century was reluctant to draw any rigid line of division between secondary education and technical education. An excellent statement of this new point of view is to be found in the passage from the Report of the Royal Commission on Secondary Education (1895) quoted in Section 31 of Chapter 1. In point of fact, a series of great thinkers in England and on the Continent had long before that period recognised that the antithesis between a liberal education and a technical or quasi-vocational education was unreal and misleading. There can be no adequate technical education which is not in some sense liberal, and no liberal education which is not, from some aspects, technical.

For instance, in the seventeenth century GW Leibniz (1646-1716), who was not only a distinguished humanist, historian and diplomat, but also a great mathematician and man of science, criticised the traditional training given in the higher schools and universities of western Europe in the most scathing manner, protesting especially against the use of Latin and the survival of the scholastic tradition in the universities. Leibniz urged that the teaching of youth should be centred not so much upon poetry, logic and scholastic philosophy as upon realia, history, mathematics, geography, vera physica, moralia et civilia studio; instruction in realia should be pursued in collections of rarities, the study of man in anatomical theatres, chemistry in the apothecary's shop, botany in botanical gardens, zoology in zoological gardens. The pupil should constantly move in the theatrum naturae et artis, receiving living knowledge and impressions'. (30)

There is an instructive passage on the difference between liberal and technical education in a valuable work by the Rev. Henry Latham (1821-1902), Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, entitled The Action of Examinations (1877), pp. 5-7:

'It will be of service to fix precisely the meanings in which the terms Liberal and Technical Education will be used. These two phrases are commonly employed so loosely as to be useless where precision is required. I propose to use them in a rigorous sense; premising that most Liberal Educations are so far Technical that they enable a man to do something which he could not do before, and most Technical Educations are Liberal ones also in so far as they really improve the man by disciplining his attention and forcing him to care and accuracy; moreover, it has a good moral effect on a youth to feel that he has acquired a mastery over matter, or the power of doing something which is of service to other people.

'An education is liberal so far as it concerns itself with the good and the cultivation of the pupil; valuing any accomplishment it may give him, for the new perceptions it opens out, for the new powers it confers, or for any other good it may do the man, and not regarding the work produced: Liberal Education would like to make a man an artist, that he may have a delightful occupation, and acquire an eye for beauty and for truth; she would like him to paint well because this would shew the possession of such an eye and many other qualities as well, but she would not care much about the pictures themselves; she would not care a bit whether his pictures were valuable or not.

'An education so far as it is technical is careful not for the workman but for the work: Technical Education wants to get good pictures, and she only values any qualities of an artist so far as they conduce to this end. She aims at moulding the man into a perfect instrument for a particular purpose.'

Professor AN Whitehead in his volume of essays entitled The Aims of Education and Other Essays (1929), p. 74, writes:

'The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical: that is, no education which does not impart both technique and intellectual vision. In simpler language, education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well. This intimate union of practice and theory aids both. The intellect does not work best in a vacuum. The stimulation of creative impulse requires, especially in the case of a child, the quick transition to practice. Geometry and mechanics, followed by workshop practice, gain that reality without which mathematics is verbiage.

'There are three main methods which are required in a national system of education, namely, the literary curriculum, the scientific curriculum, the technical curriculum. But each of these curricula should include the other two. What I mean is that every form of education should give the pupil a technique, a science, an assortment of general ideas, and aesthetic appreciation, and that each of these sides of his training should be illuminated by the others. Lack of time, even for the most favoured pupil, makes it impossible to develop fully each curriculum. Always there must be a dominant emphasis. The most direct aesthetic training naturally falls in the technical curriculum in those cases when the training is that requisite for some art or artistic craft. But it is of high importance in both a literary and a scientific education.'

In another passage, on pages 84-85 of the same book. Professor Whitehead writes:

'No human being can attain to anything but fragmentary knowledge and a fragmentary training of his capacities. There are, however, three main roads along which we can proceed with good hope of advancing towards the best balance of intellect and character: these are the way of literary culture, the way of scientific culture, the way of technical culture. No one of these methods can be exclusively followed without grave loss of intellectual activity and of character. But a mere mechanical mixture of the three curricula will produce bad results in the shape of scraps of information never interconnected or utilised. We have already noted as one of the strong points of the traditional literary culture that all its parts are coordinated. The problem of education is to retain the dominant emphasis, whether literary, scientific, or technical, and without loss of coordination to infuse into each way of education something of the other two.'

Professor John Dewey gives an admirable statement regarding the misleading antithesis between culture and utility in the following passage of his work entitled Democracy and Education (1922), page 305:

'Of the segregations of educational values discussed in the last chapter, that between culture and utility is probably the most fundamental. While the distinction is often thought to be intrinsic and absolute, it is really historical and social. It originated, so far as conscious formulation is concerned, in Greece, and was based upon the fact that the truly human life was lived only by a few who subsisted upon the results of the labour of others. This fact affected the psychological doctrine of the relation of intelligence and desire, theory and practice.

'It was embodied in a political theory of a permanent division of human beings into those capable of a life of reason and hence having their own ends, and those capable only of desire and work, and needing to have their ends provided by others. The two distinctions, psychological and political, translated into educational terms, effected a division between a liberal education, having to do with the self-sufficing life of leisure devoted to knowing for its own sake, and a useful, practical training for mechanical occupations, devoid of intellectual and aesthetic content. While the present situation is radically diverse in theory and much changed in fact, the factors of the older historic situation still persist sufficiently to maintain the educational distinction, along with compromises which often reduce the efficacy of the educational measures. The problem of education in a democratic society is to do away with the dualism and to construct a course of studies which makes thought a guide of free practice for all and which makes leisure a reward of accepting responsibility for service, rather than a state of exemption from it.'

Footnotes

(1) Hippias of Elis, unlike most Greek thinkers, did not despise the so-called illiberal arts. He made with his own hands his clothes, his ring, and his shoes. Cicero, De Oratore, III, 32, 127.

(2) M Guggenheim, Die Stellung der liberalen Kunste oder encyclischen Wissenschaften im Altertum. Programm der Kantonschule Zurich, 1893. Wemer Jaeger, Paideia, die Formung des griechischen Menschen. Band I. Berlin, 1936. pp. 364-404.

(3) Eleutherioi epistemai. On p. 1338a32 he uses the expression 'liberal education ' (eleutherios paideia).

(4) Politics, p. 1337b4-21.

(5) The expression 'liberal arts' (eleutherioi technai) is first found in extant Greek literature in Plutarch (50-120 AD) De tuenda sanitate p. 122E.

(6) Schanz-Hosius, Geschichfe der romischen Literatur (1927) I. 567. Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopadie Supplementband, VI, col. 1255-1259. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, pp. 215-217.

(7) cf. Chapter XIV, Sections 5 and 6 of Plutarch's Life of Marcellus, in which he says that the art of mechanics had formerly been entirely separated from geometry and had for a long time been ignored by philosophers, who thought that it detracted from the pure excellence of geometry to leave the incorporeal things of abstract thought and descend to the things of sense, making use, moreover, of objects which required much mean and manual labour. For this reason, mechanics, which in Plutarch's time was so celebrated and admired, had formerly come to be regarded as one of the military arts, and had been separated from geometry.

(8) Ovid refers to 'the free born arts' - 'Adde quod ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes Emollit mores nec sinit esse feros.' Epistolae ex Ponto, II, 47-48.

(9) P Gabriel Meier, Die sieben freien Kunste im Mittelalter, two articles in Jahresbericht uber die Lehr-u. Erziehungs-Anst. des BenediktinerStiftes Maria-EinsiedeIn, Studienjahr 1885-86, pp. 1-30, and Studienjahr 1886-87, pp. 1-36. HI Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, Paris (1938), pp. 187-275.

(10) Retractationes, 1.6, printed in Patrologia Latina (ed. Migne) XXXII. col. 591.

(11) Norden, Eduard. Die Stellung der artes liberates im mittelalterlichen Bildungswesen. In: Antike Kunstprosa, 2, Leipzig, 1898. p.670ff. Paré, G La Renaissance du XI Ie siècle. Les écoles et l'enseignement, par G Paré, A Brunei, P Tremblay. Paris: Ottawa. 1933. p. 97 ff.

(12) In the early middle ages the seven arts were described as Methodus Hybernica on account of the educational activities of the Irish monks in Germany and Northern Italy. The arts are enumerated in the mediaeval hexameter: 'Lingua, tropus, ratio, numerus, tonus, angulus, astra'. cf. the following line from the metrical epitaph on Gilbert Crispin, Abbot of Westminster (died 1117) 'Doctus quadrivio, nec minus in trivio'. (John Flete's History of Westminster Abbey, edited by JA Robinson, p. 87.)

(13) The terms 'arts' and 'sciences' were used almost interchangeably in the middle ages and down to the end of the eighteenth century. See A New English Dictionary, 'Science' 3. cf. also the Royal Charter (dated 1693) for the establishment of the College of William and Mary at Williamsburg, Virginia, as 'a place of universal study or perpetual College of divinity, philosophy, languages and other good arts and sciences'. The text of the Charter of 1693 is printed in history of the College of William and Mary, Charleston (1874).

(14) 'Light sciences called trivials, be grammar, logyk and rhetorick in comparison of the quadrivial sciences.' Botoner, Tulle on Old Age (1481).

(15) Metalogicon, I, 21.

(16) The seven liberal arts were frequently represented in sculpture and painting. Among the most famous representations are those in Pinturicchio's frescoes (1493) in the Appartamento Borgia in the Vatican.

(17) The terms trivium and quadrivium first came into general use in the ninth century. P Rajna, Le denominazione Trivium e Quadrivium in Studi medievali, (1928) I., pp. 10-35. The term quadrivium in this sense first occurs in extant Latin literature in Boethius (480-525 AD), Institutio arithmetica I. 1, printed in PL (ed. Migne), LXIII, col. 1079D.

(18) Skelton, Why Not to Court (1522) 'A poore maister of arts ... had lyttel parte of the quadri vials, nor yet of trivials'. cf. M. Davies, Athenae Brit. (1712) II, 12. 'Edward Seymour was educated in trivials and partly in quadrivials at Oxon'.

(19) New England's First Fruits etc, London (1643), reprinted as Appendix D to The Founding of Harvard College by SE Morison, Cambridge, Mass. (1935), p. 433: 'Rules, and Precepts that are observed in the Colledge. When any Schollar is able to understand Tully, or such like classicall Latine Author extempore, and make and speake true Latine in Verse and Prose, suo ut aiunt Marte; And decline perfectly the Paradigm's of Nounes and Verbes in the Greek tongue: Let him then and not before be capable of admission into the Colledge.'

(20) Great Didactic (1657) xxx, 2.

(21) cf. Pepys' Diary under date 4 February, 1662-63: '... from him to Paul's School it being Apposition Day there. I heard some of their speeches, and they were just as schoolboys used to be, of the seven liberal sciences: but I think not so good as ours were in our time'.

(22) cf. Joseph Priestley (1733-1804): A Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (1765). Priestley used the expression 'liberal education' in a wider sense.

(23) This newly established Education Department was organised at that time (1808) as a branch of the Ministry of the Interior at Berlin.

(24) F Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts, II, 281-299.

(25) F Paulsen, op. cit. II, 316-351; 445-542.

(26) F Vial, Trois Siècles d'Histoire de I'Enseignement Secondaire, Paris, 1936, pp. 71-126; pp. 170-218. G. Compayre, Histoire Critique des Doctrines de l'Education en France, depuis Ie Seizième Siècle, Paris, 1879, II, 359-373.

(27) F Vial, op. cit. pp. 206-218; pp. 217-231.

(28) No reference is made here to TH Huxley's famous definition of a liberally educated man, or to the description of liberal education given by Cardinal Newman in his University Education (1852), since they relate to liberal education at the university stage. It is probable, however, that these and similar descriptions of general academic culture exercised some influence on the development of the conception of liberal education at the grammar school stage.

(29) In Russia bifurcation between the classical and realistic courses within the secondary school system had been introduced as early as 1829, but it is improbable that Matthew Arnold knew about educational developments in that country.

(30) A Foucher de Careil, Oeuvres de Leibniz (Paris, 1875) VII. 52; Leibnizens Gedanken liber die Erziehung eines Prinzen, printed in GW Bohmer, Magazin fur das Kirchenrecht, Band I, Gottingen, (1787). pp.18S-190. cf. Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Two Books of the Advancement of Learning (1605): 'But this is that which will indeed dignify and exalt knowledge, if contemplation and action may be more nearly and straitly conjoined and united together than they have been; a conjunction like unto that of the two highest planets, Saturn, the planet of rest and contemplation, and Jupiter, the planet of civil society and action.' (Book I.) 'In general, there will hardly be any main proficience in the disclosing of nature, except there be some allowance for expenses about experiments; whether they be experiments appertaining to Vulcanus or Daedalus, furnace or engine, or any other kind; and therefore as secretaries and spials of princes and states bring in bills for intelligence, so you must allow the spials and intelligencers of nature to bring in their bills, or else you shall be ill advertised.' (Book II.)