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PARTISAN REVIEW
private ones. Since-in the short run and perhaps in the long run-the
application of actual standards of admission and of grading will result in
declining enrollments, only a new political basis for the funding of higher
education could secure the changes I have been advocating on a broad scale.
Given the enormous political and financial investment in the higher
education system, it's hard to be too optimistic that any new dispensation
in this lucrative sector of the economy might actually be realized. Still, I
think it may be possible to shift the role of government away from its pre–
sent, ostensibly democratic concentration on access and numbers to a more
truly democratic emphasis on ensuring an educationally diverse and com–
petitive system of higher education. Government ought actively to
encourage the mos t important competi tion appropriate to colleges and
universities, the competition of ideas, including educational ideas. To trans–
form the present role of government, the higher education lobbies ought
to be encouraging experimentation with other means of funding than
reliance on enrollment numbers.
In
addition, I think it would gready clar–
ify the functions of various parts of the existing system if the proliferation
of co-op education and of internships and similar things were taken to its
logical conclusion by active government support of university, school, and
employer partnerships organized around a variety of workplace-related
educational enterprises. I see no reason why we could not in the United
States borrow, but turn to our purposes, the extremely useful differentia–
tion in the British system between "further" and "higher" education.
The reforms I have been oudining would,
if
they were adopted, redress
many of the failures of our schools. I'm less sure that my prescriptions would
redress the larger failure not only of our schools but even more of our uni–
versities, the loss of purpose and
aim,
the failure to educate the spirit.
Inevitably, someone like me, schooled in the literature of the nine–
teenth century, thinks at this point of Matthew Arnold. One of his most
distinguished editors,
J.
Dover Wilson, described Arnold's educational
vision as "the indefinite multiplication of non-residential Rugby schools
under state supervision."
More than one hundred years after the publication of
Culture and
Anarchy,
I suspect that many of us, I certainly, look back on the realization
of Arnold's vision both with amazement and with the gnawing sense that
his idea of liberal education may have run its course. The universal spread
of public education and its ideal of a liberally educated citizenry represents
a great and perhaps unparalleled educational experiment. But by today, in
the universities, Arnold's notion of education has been overcome by the
dissolution of its basic tenets under the assault of specialization, of the seis–
mic changes in scientific theory and knowledge and the equally seismic
changes in the nature of national and global politics and economics, and
