LIBERAL EDUCATION.
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]]
[73]. Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury.
[74]. Quarterly Review, No. 103.