The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education. - book reviews

National Review, April 16, 1990 by Joseph Sobran

MICHAEL Oakeshott speaks of "the invitation of liberal learning" as "the invitation to disentangle oneself, for a time, from the urgencies of the here and now and to listen to the conversation in which human beings forever seek to understand themselves."

The Voice of Liberal Learning is a gathering of six essays the great English philosopher wrote between 1949 and 1975. One, "Political Education," has already appeared in Rationalism in Politics. Another, "The Universities," is a long book review that doesn't add enough to the other essays to warrant its inclusion here. Among the others, composed as they were for different occasions, there is some repetition. So much for the book's defects.

Its virtue is that unnamable virtue of all Oakeshott's writing, which for approximation's sake I'll call a quiet absorption in overlooked possibilities. While others debate the proper purposes of education, Oakeshott insists that education (as distinct from vocational training) is ruined by the imposition of any extraneous (the usual tipoff is the word "social") purpose. His warning keeps the grumbling to a minimum. Much more often he loses himself in describing the joys of true education:

Here, the learner is animated, not by the

inclinations he brings with him, but by

intimations of excellence and aspirations

he has never yet dreamed of, here he

may encounter, not answers to the

"loaded" questions of life," but questions

which have never before occurred to him;

here he may acquire new "interests" and

pursue them uncorrupted by the need for

immediate results; here he may learn to

seek satisfactions he had never yet imagined

or wished for.

Oakeshott understands education as the initiation of the young into their civilized inheritance." He understands that inheritance as a "conversation" among such forms of experience as history, poetry, science, etc., no one voice dominating or refuting the others. The young are to be taught competence in this conversation. Education is neither a fixed body of knowledge nor an abstract skill in "thinking," but participation in a specific patrimony, a still-living tradition. "We may recognize learning, not merely as the acquisition of knowledge, but also as the extension of the ability to learn .. as an inheritance coming to be possessed in such a manner that it loses its second-hand or antique character."

But "the way we live now" is ignorantly inimical to this kind of activity. The world is full of "seductive trivialities which invoke neither reflection nor choice but instant participation." The language of this world is "the language of appetite," slogans commercial and political, and "such discourse as there is resembles the barking of a dog at the echo of its own yelp."

The practical world naturally has difficulty imagining education as anything but training for practical purposes. If not vocational, these tend to be political, and the refinements of liberal learning are sacrificed to "relevance" and socialization," which are the very things education should emancipate the young from: "The business of the teacher (indeed, this may be said to be his peculiar quality as an agent of civilization) is to release his pupils from servitude to the current dominant feelings, emotions, images, ideas, beliefs, and even skills, not by inventing alternatives to them which seem to him more desirable, but by making available to him [sic] something which approximates more closely the whole of his [sic] inheritance."

Such a thinker resists summary. "To know the gist," he has said, "is to know nothing." And here he writes: "Not to detect a man's style is to have missed three-quarters of the meanings of his actions and utterances; and not to have acquired a style is to have shut oneself off from the ability to convey any but the crudest meanings." He has no use for the sort of liberal education that consists in acquainting students with a checklist of Great Books or Great Ideas, handily abridged. Oakeshott's own use of such Great Thinkers as Hobbes and Hegel is startlingly unorthodox, and has nothing to do with wars of every man against every man or theses, antitheses, and syntheses.

One way to approach him is through a "favorite theory" of his, "that what people call 'ideals' and purposes' are never themselves the source of human activity; they are shorthand expressions for the real spring of conduct, which is a disposition to do certain things and a knowledge of how to do them. Human beings do not start from rest and spring into activity only when attracted by a purpose to be achieved. To be alive is to be perpetually active." For example, "a cook is not a man who first has the vision of a pie and then tries to make it; he is a man skilled in cookery, and both his projects and his achievements spring from his skill." This is the sort of simple insight that can entail a lot of difficult mental adjustment. There are no a priori pies, and what the cook knows can never be exhaustively told.

In the same way, the essence of liberal learning can't be itemized. "If it is learned, it can never be forgotten, and it does not need to be recollected in order to be enjoyed. It is, indeed, often enough, the residue which remains when all else is forgotten; the shadow of lost knowledge."