John Henry Newman by James Arthur, Guy Nichols (review)

NEWMAN STUDIES JOURNAL 88 John Henry Newman. By James Arthur and Guy Nichols. Continuum Library of Educational Thought, 8. London–New York: Continuum International Publishing Group,2007. Pages:x + 234. Hardcover,£75.00,$144.00,ISBN 978–0–8264–8407–9. This attractively bound volume,which focuses on“Newman the Educator,”is part of a series that includes: Thomas Aquinas, Pierre Bourdieu, Jerome Bruner, John Dewey, John Holt, John Locke, Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rudolf Steiner, Lev Vygotsky, E. G.West, and Mary Wollstonecraft. If these other educators are as well served as Newman is by the authors of this volume, this series will be a valuable contribution to “educational thought.” In Newman’s case, it has been a half-century since Dwight Culler’s comprehensive study of Newman’s educational views in The Imperial Intellect.1 During those decades, a considerable amount has been published both about Newman in general and about The Idea of a University in particular;simultaneously, there have been enormous changes in the world of higher education. Thus, the authors faced a moving target: first, the multiplication of studies on Newman’s educational thought; second, the changing dimensions of higher education from a relatively privileged domain prior to the Second World War to the extensive higher educational enterprise that exists in many parts of the world today;third,the ongoing dialogue between Newman’s thought and recent educational theorists;and finally,the globalization of educational endeavors. Thus,the topic is impossibly vast,but to their credit, the authors provide a well designed and well written overview of Newman’s educational thought and pedagogical practice in relation both to his own time and to education today. The volume begins with an “educational biography,” which emphasizes that a significant amount of Newman’s time and energy was devoted to education—as a student,as a tutor,and as an administrator—and that these experiences furnished the context for the development of his educational ideas and their practical implementation. As bookends to his educational biography were his experiences as a precocious student at Great Ealing School—where he played the leading roles in several plays and was awarded prizes for speechmaking—and his final educational endeavor—the Birmingham Oratory School—where he coached students and directed their plays (12). In between were many other formative educational experiences:his student days atTrinity College,where he was not only self-motivated, but in many respects, self-taught; his tutorship at Oriel, where his educational innovations were terminated by the provost;his rectorship of the Catholic University, where his administration was often frustrated by the Archbishop of Dublin. Yet often overlooked in Newman’s educational biography is the series of essays published as “The Tamworth Reading Room” (1841),2 where he enunciated many of his convictions about education that would later appear in The Idea of a University. The heart of the present volume is a four-part “Critical Exposition” of Newman’s view of education. Central to his educational theory and practice was his conviction 1 The Imperial Intellect:A Study of Cardinal Newman’s Educational Ideal (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1955). 2 “The Tamworth Reading Room” is available at: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/arguments/ index.html. 89 that all education must have a religious dimension;for example,in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851), he counseled his audience: I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold, and what they do not, who know their creed so well, that they can give an account of it,who know so much of history that they can defend it.3 Simultaneously, Newman insisted on the importance of what might be called “character formation”as essential to an integral education. His insistence upon both “a religious dimension”and“a moral purpose”for education ran counter to“the liberal creed”that“education could change the behaviour of the masses and raise the moral tone of national life”(118). Unfortunately,this“secular gospel”has prevailed in much of Western...