ABSTRACT
As I have made clear earlier, the enterprise of traditional ‘liberalizing’ education was informed by conceptions of excellence, by the search for perfection, for the Idea in its highest form. Whether the aim is to produce the Philosopher-King (Plato), the Orator (Quintilian), the humanist Courtier (Castiglione) or the Autonomous Mind (initiated by Locke)—all, incidentally, intended to take an active part in affairs-in each case it is a notion of the Ideal type which exercises the controlling influence over the content of their education. It would be absurd to deny that a philosopher is a lover of truth and reality; or that his nature, as we have described it, is allied to perfection’ (Plato). The Orator whom we are educating is the perfect orator, who can only be a good man’ (Quintilian). ‘I would like our game this evening to be this: that one of us should be chosen and given the task of depicting in words a perfect courtier’ (Castiglione); and the tradition was carried on into the nineteenth century by Herbart, Arnold, Cardinal Newman and others. It is this ‘vision of greatness’—in
Whitehead’s phrase —which has informed the determination of curriculum in the past; and, as the social role aimed at has been conceived of in its perfection, so the contributory activities, whether mental or physical, have been conceived of in their own specific perfections. Hence the frequent emphasis on ‘imitation’—of the best models; and any ‘usefulness’ was to be informed by an antecedent liberalization. The autonomy of mind was, in fact, an autonomy from daily exigencies. In these ways, the accidental events of everyday life would be encountered by a mind already prepared to assess such accidents by reference to ‘philosophic’ principle and contextual significance, by a mind initiated into the circle of knowledge.
