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Boundaries between Liberal and Technical Learning: Images of Seventeenth-Century English Writing Masters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Richard S. Christen
Richard S. Christen*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota University of Portland
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Extract

Contrary to philosopher A.N. Whitehead's assertion that “the antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious,” a distinction between intellectual studies and the learning of manual and vocational skills has marked curricular discussions and structures at least since the ancient Greeks. Both Plato and Isocrates, although at odds in many ways, attacked the sophists' marketing of persuasive technique while venerating studies that cultivate the intellect, virtue, and contemplation of higher truth as the only learning befitting the free citizen with leisure. Similarly, Aristotle contrasted manual labor and related technical arts that “tend to deform the body… and degrade the mind” with liberal studies that prepare one for decision making and other civic duties. By the fifth century C.E., the seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, music, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy) had emerged as the normative curricular expression of the classical liberal ideal—a course of study that would dominate the schooling of clerics and non-religious scholars for the next thousand years. Meanwhile, technical learning remained separate from the liberal arts and schools, yet the core of commercial and craft apprenticeships as well as a central component of chivalric education for medieval secular elites.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , Spring 1999 , pp. 31 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the History of Education Society 

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