On Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:02:08 -0600 "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
> Didn't Joanna mention lately that an Oakland teachers union officer
>
> Carrol
>
> P.S. I read Newman's Idea of the University in 1957 or so & I may
> have an
> incorrect memory of this. Early in the book he notes of the 18th-c
> British
> University that it was intellectually, morally, socially,
> spiritually
> corrupt --
I take it that Newman was referring to 18th century English universities (i.e. Oxford & Cambridge) rather than the Scottish universities. Back in the 18th century, Adam Smith in his "Wealth of Nations" harshly criticized Oxford, arguing that the quality of instruction provided there was of inferior quality in comparison to the instruction provided in the Scottish universities. Smith himself had studied first at Glasgow and later at Oxford, and by his own account, he was quite unhappy at Oxford. In "The Wealth of Nations," Smith argued that the very fact that the English universities were much better endowed than their Scottish counterparts, was behind this inferiority. Oxford and Cambridge could afford to provide their faculty with generous salaries thereby undermining incentives for dons to become good teachers. The Scottish universities on the other hand, could not afford to pay their professors decent salaries. Therefore, most of them were dependent on the collection of fees that offered voluntarily by their students, with the students determining for themselves how much to pay. In Smith's view, this gave them a strong incentive to pay heed to the quality of their lectures.
>
> BUT: (and I'm vague here as how he expressed: this is my paraphrase)
> iit
> turned out several generations of men who built the English Empire,
> did
> this, did that.
That brings up another contrast between the English universities and the Scottish unversities in the 18th and 19th centuries, which is that the former were more inclined to include practical subjects in their curriculae, whereas Oxford and Cambridge were disdainful of teaching students practical knowledge. As I understand Newman, he strongly concurred with that view. For him, universities would ideally concern themselves with the cultivation of gentlemen, and one of the best ways to do that would be to have them study classical literature (i.e. the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans). That sort of an education, he believed was the kind that was best suited for forming young men who were destined to become political leaders.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math
>
> It did so merely by collecting a bunch of young men together for a
> few
> years, though it offered nothing else, that collecting was enough.
> That
> 'rhymes' as it were with Riesman's hypothesis.
>
>
>
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