The Academic Heresy

Extract

The world today is struggling to shift immovable blocs, but there is one fast-forming bloc which, despite its great inherent dangers, seems to have received little notice. The extension of education and the emphasis laid on its purely formal side are tending to introduce a trade union as it were, of ‘men of letters’, whose blessing it will be necessary to obtain before being accepted for any profession or administrative post—I say ‘men of letters’, referring to those symbols of academic prowess which follow their names rather than to any knowledge of the humanities which might, in a more liberal age, have led to their acquiring them. In the academic world at the moment, fortunately, there are still many fine representatives of this more enlightened past, but it is very hard to see how they can find worthy successors under the present system, particularly if education is to be state-controlled. The more obvious characteristics of this system are excessive specialisation and an undue respect for the expert, but more harmful is the attitude that lies behind it. The modern pundits are not misled, as the Victorians were, into an over-optimistic belief in the powers of the human mind and its ability to obtain not only physical luxury by scientific research but also spiritual satisfaction by an idealistic philosophy of its own making; but rather, cynically disillusioned by the failure of their predecessors, they limit the sphere of the human mind, even in the so-called humane faculties, to that accumulation of facts or manipulation of words which can be tested by examinations.