Dean Hook has written the following able defence of a Liberal Education,
as distinguished from the special training for a profession:
A Liberal Education is to the present time the characteristic of
what is called a University Education. By a liberal education is
meant a non-professional education. By a non-professional education
is meant an education conducted without reference to the future
profession, or calling, or special pursuit for which the person
under education is designed. It is an education which is regarded
not merely as a means, but as something which is in itself an end.
The end proposed is not the formation of the divine, or the
physician, or the lawyer, or the statesman, or the soldier, or the
man of business, or the botanist, or the chemist, or the man of
science, or even the scholar; but simply of the thinker.
It is admitted that the highest eminence can only be attained by the
concentration of the mind, with a piercing intensity and singleness
of view, upon one field of action. In order to excel, each mind must
have its specific end. A man may know many things well, but there is
only one thing upon which he will be preëminently learned, and
become an authority. The professional man may be compared to one
whose eye is fixed upon a microscope. The rest of the world is
abstracted from his field of vision, and the eye, though narrowed to
a scarcely perceptible hole, is able to see what is indiscernible by
others. When he observes accurately, he becomes, in his department,
a learned man; and when he reveals his observations, he is a
benefactor of his kind. All that the university system does is to
delay the professional education as long as possible; it would apply
to the training of the mind a discipline analogous to that which
common sense suggests in what relates to bodily exercise. A father,
ambitious for his son that he might win the prize at the Olympian
games or in the Pythian fields, devoted his first attention not to
the technicalities of the game, but to the general condition and
morals of the youth. The success of the athlete depended upon his
first becoming a healthy man. So the university system trains the
man, and defers the professional education as long as circumstances
will permit. It makes provision, before the eye is narrowed to the
microscope, that the eye itself shall be in a healthy condition; it
expands the mind before contracting it; it would educate mind as
such before bending it down to the professional point; it does not
regard the mind as an animal to be fattened for the market, by
cramming it with food before it has acquired the power of digestion,
but treats it rather as an instrument to be tuned, as a metal to be
refined, as a weapon to be sharpened.
This is the system which the old universities of Europe have
inherited.
Philology, logic, and mathematics are still the instruments employed
for the discipline of the mind, which is the end and object of a
Liberal Education.[73]
The best education has been thus bodied forth: “Let a man’s pride be to
be a gentleman: furnish him with elegant and refined pleasures, imbue
him with the love of intellectual pursuits, and you have a better
security for his turning out a good citizen and a good Christian, than
if you have confined him by the strictest moral and religious
discipline, kept him in innocent and unsuspecting ignorance of all the
vices of youth, and in the mechanical and orderly routine of the
severest system of education.”[74]
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Footnote 73:
_Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury._
Footnote 74:
_Quarterly Review_, No. 103.
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