302
REUBEN A. BROWER
and the
right
evaluation of what we have read. The nearest parallel
among American critics is Yvor Winters.
The larger social import of the critic's role is most apparent in the
"Sketch for an English School" (IX) that Leavis offered to his surely
surprised colleagues in the Cambridge English Faculty.
It
is regrettable,
and also a measure of the effective inertia of the academy, that this
. interesting plan and the related discussions of it in
Scrutiny
have been
largely forgotten. One benefit of the present republication is that the
planners of this generation may be reminded of the lesson largely wasted
on the last.
Leavis's thinking about literary education led him to re-define the
"Idea of a University" in a series of articles later incorporated in
Education and the Univ ersity,
a volume that had the honor of being
quoted by President Pusey of Harvard in his second annual report.
American readers may also be interested to note that the occasion for the
first of the articles was the publication of Alexander Meiklejohn's
The
Experimental C.ollege
(1932), and of Brooks Otis's "Thoughts After
Flexner" (1934), which appeared in a short-lived American journal,
The New Frontier.
The basic "Idea" is stated in not unfamiliar terms:
An
urgently necessary work, consequently, is to explore the
means of bringing the various essential kinds of specialist
knowledge and training into effective relation with informed
general intelligence, humane culture, social conscience and
political will. Indicated here we have the function that is
pre-eminently the university's; if the work is not done there
it will not be done anywhere. (III)
The contrast with the humanism of Babbitt and of the authors of various
General Education and Great Books schemes is clear from an earlier
reference to Meiklejohn in the same volume:
The true tribute to Dr. Meiklejohn and his colleagues would
be to suggest how the spirit, and, to a great extent, the technique,
of the Experimental College might be applied in a real training
of intelligence, a real education, which should start from, and
be always associated with, the training of sensibility in the
literature of the student's own "language (where alone it is
possible) .
It is the point made in the last half of the sentence that American "gen–
eral educators" have often neglected. Consider for example the emphasis
at Chicago on Great Ideas embalmed in the hoariest of translations
and finally extracted in the
SyntopicOTI.
