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8 Un Début dans la Vie Humaine: michael oakeshott on education Paul Franco Michael Oakeshott’s writings on education form one of the most attractive aspects of his philosophy and have duly garnered considerable attention.1 They evoke an ideal of liberal learning for its own sake, freed from the narrowing necessities of practical life and social purpose. This ideal is summed up in Oakeshott’s famous image of the university as a “conversation” between the various modes of understanding that make up our civilization, a conversation that has no predetermined course or destination, an “unrehearsed intellectual adventure” (VLL, 39). Of this ideal, Noel Annan wrote, “It was the finest evocation of ‘the idea of the university’ since Newman; and more subtle and persuasive.”2 As I hope to show, however, Oakeshott’s philosophy of education is not without its difficulties, and these difficulties largely mirror the ones that run through his philosophy as a whole. In its formalism, conceptual compartmentalization, and rigid separation of theory and practice, Oakeshott’s philosophy of education does not adequately address the problems of specialization, intellectual fragmentation, and cultural isolation that currently afflict education, especially higher education, today. I break up my analysis of Oakeshott’s philosophy of education into three parts, based largely on the chronological development of his writings. In the first section, I take up his earliest writings on education: “The Universities” (1949) and “The Idea of a University” (1950). In the second section, I discuss a number of essays from the 1960s: “The Study of ‘Politics’ in a University” (1961), “Learning and Teaching” (1965), and “The Definition of a University” (1967). Finally, in the third section, I consider Oakeshott’s later essays on education, whose limpidly abstract language echoes that of his late masterpiece On Human Conduct: “Education: the Engagement and Its Frustration” (1972) and “A Place of Learning” (1974). By proceeding in this way, I do not 174 the conversation of mankind mean to suggest that Oakeshott’s ideas on education change radically from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. Nevertheless, there are subtle differences, and in each period certain themes and emphases come to the fore. i Oakeshott’s earliest essays on education, “The Universities” and “The Idea of a University,” come from the period of his early rationalism writings between 1947 and 1950. Like his early rationalism writings, these essays are animated by a deep hostility to plans, purposes, missions, principles, and ideals. Indeed, “The Idea of a University” begins with an admirable encapsulation of Oakeshott’s entire critique of rationalism: “It is a favourite theory of mine that what people call ‘ideals’ and ‘purposes’ are never themselves the source of human activity; they are shorthand expressions for the real spring of conduct , which is a disposition to do certain things and a knowledge of how to do them” (VLL, 95). Delivered as a talk for the BBC, “The Idea of a University” is largely a distillation of the ideas that appeared the year before in the much more substantial essay “The Universities.” This latter essay deserves careful attention because it reflects both Oakeshott’s profound originality and some of the characteristic weaknesses of his philosophy of education. The essay is notable in the first instance for its polemical ferocity. The target of Oakeshott’s attack was a book titled The Crisis in the University by Sir Walter Moberly. Now largely forgotten, Moberly was a prominent academic administrator in England in the second quarter of the twentieth century, serving as the vice-chancellor of Manchester University from 1926 to 1934 and as the chair of the University Grants Committee from 1935 to 1949. Even more relevant, he was a member of a group of Christian intellectuals known as the “Moot,” who met for periodic weekend discussions between 1938 and 1947. The two most influential members of the Moot were T.S. Eliot and Karl Mannheim, and the group’s discussions largely revolved around issues of cultural leadership and education.3 With respect to the latter, considerable concern was expressed about increasing specialization in academic disciplines and the lack of coordination in the university curriculum. Not surprisingly, this is a major theme in Moberly’s book on the contemporary crisis of the university. Before considering Oakeshott’s polemic, it is important to have a handle on Moberly’s argument as he himself presents it. Oakeshott succeeds in making this argument look ridiculous only by a fair amount of distortion and exaggeration, as Moberly’s later reply...

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