ABSTRACT
During my time as an undergraduate student in theology at the University of Nottingham during the mid-1990s, Douglas Davies taught the anthropology of religion. In one of his especially interdisciplinary lectures, he addressed the work of Frank Byron Jevons (1858-1936), a Victorian polymath whose life and work had fascinated Davies so much that he wrote his intellectual biography after being granted access to Jevons’ unpublished papers, housed at their shared alma mata, the University of Durham. Jevons was a classicist and philosopher, a pioneer in the embryonic study of religion, a lay Anglican and a speaker and writer on a variety of other subjects, including education. His strongly held convictions about the proper character of a good education are inspiring in their principled idealism and serve as a valuable point of reference in considering reforms to education in schools and universities in the present day. In considering Jevons’ time and work, we are alerted to the cultural changes that have transformed common assumptions about the purpose and delivery of educational processes over the last century; while Durham is a place steeped in tradition, its university is a radically different kind of institution from the one overseen by Jevons as its one-time vice chancellor at the beginning of the twentieth century. But reflection on Jevons’ perspective on the role of education as a social good also highlights the moral imperatives that have informed critical voices in his time and our own. His fiercely held and widely voiced views on education are, to a degree, echoed among critics of educational reform within twenty-first-century Britain. In this sense, Jevons epitomizes an enduring disposition, generated among university academics as a critical perspective on the very processes their institutions have come to embody.
