426
JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
man (humanities, history and social sciences) and the study of nature
(biological and physical sciences). Biology itself, of course, would have
a foot in both camps. Or to have a flexible and constantly shifting
arrangement with no absolute divisions. (Why divisions anyway, which
are only an administrative convenience?) The two emergent powers in
the field of human thought are biology and mathematics (math depart–
ments are now across the country surpassing English departments in
size), and perhaps they should be at the center of things, with other
subjects ranged around them, until a new dispensation emerges and a
new rearrangement takes place.
Now all this is a far cry from general education, but that is the
point and one of the problems: can general education survive not only
specialization and fragmentation, the age-old complaint of the human–
ist,
but,
and this is important, the appeal to the young of the dynamic
brilliance and the constantly shifting character of modern thought itself,
which doesn't want an anchor in the past, one of the historical jus–
tifications for general education, but is racing ahead of the future, into
a world where subject matter
per se
in the old sense of the word has
begun to disappear and where what used to be nonconnected parallels,
e.g., mathematics and biology, or mathematics and political science, or
biology and chemistry, or, in the field of literature, the art of criticism
and the art of creation, have begun to curve and cross. The answer is
that it can survive if its proponents cease
to
make it, in Henry James's
phrase, a "seated lump of information." Today if a thing is not dynamic,
it is dead. Timeless abstractions, general schema, nontemporal genera are
"out"; the concrete and the historically "real" (i.e., the historically con–
ditioned) are "in." A popular sage recently remarked that there was no
longer a Left Wing and a Right Wing, only an up wing and a down
wing. Education, in some respects, tends to be down wing. But
to
make
it up wing does not mean jettisoning the past; rather it means making
that past come alive again. I shall try to illustrate this by reference to
the teaching of history.
I have chosen history because
Reforming General Education
asserts
that the modern student is not really interested in, or is uneasy about,
the study of the past and that he or she is inclined toward the abstract
rather than the concrete in the study of anything:
The passion for the abstract is a great danger, especially for stu–
dents, because they lose a sense of the concrete and of the actuality
of events, which give not only dramatic meaning but a kind of
sensibleness to the nature of human dilemmas.
