164
PARTISAN REVIEW
education, and especially a particular kind of education, from Van
Doren's muddy metaphysics is hopeless. It is certainly not helped by
admonishing educators to ponder "programs of being no less deeply
than
~chedules
of doing," or to realize that "the prime occupation
of liberal education is with skills of being." But whatever a program
or schedule of "being" may be, it apparently demands an
identical
curriculum, centered around
tradition,
in which languages, mathe–
matics and science are the chief subjects. Let us see how this is justified.
It
is interesting to observe that so long as educators restrict them–
selves to the statement of the formal objectives of a liberal education,
they seem to be in agreement. For example, the following objectives
of a liberal education have been culled from a few random pages in
Dewey: the development of the capacity to think, hospitality to ideas,
establishing habits of trained discrimination, cultivation of the power
of imagination, a realizing sense of basic values, freedom from class,
sectarian, or partisan prejudice. Now John Dewey is the
bete nair
of
Van Doren and his confreres, but they assuredly would agree with him
that these should be among the objectives of liberal education. They
would insist that these objectives are derivable from
the
metaphysical
nature of man: Dewey, that they could be reasonably justified in terms
of their fruits. But what interests us here is not the difference in justifi–
cation of these objectives but the difference in what is inferred from
these objectives. Progressive educators maintain that although
formally
these ends are valid for all, the methods and ways of achieving them
are difficult
empirical
questions because of the existence of a variety
of individuals in a variety of different environments. The validity of
techniques and curricula is an experimental matter. For Van Doren
and his school all these problems are evaded:
the
nature of the curri–
culum is deduced from
the
nature of liberal education just as this was
deduced from
the
nature of man.
This elementary confusion between the formal identity of the
ends of education with the material differences in the educational
means of achieving them, is the clue to Van Doren's thinking when
he considers concrete questions. There is not a single argument he
uses for a universal curriculum for everybody which cannot serve
just as well,
mutatis mutandis,
to recommend, say, a universal milk
diet.
"If
liberal education is, it is the same for everybody; the training
it requires, in addition to being formal, should be homogeneous
through four years-if the best is known, there is no student whom it
will not fit, and each should have all of it." Suppose we agreed that
everyone should enjoy health. The criterion or definition of health,
(in Van Doren's language,
the
nature of health),
is
the same for
