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Some Nineteenth-Century Views on the University Curriculum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

J. P. Powell
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Extract

Many contemporary disputes about higher education have their origins in the nineteenth century, and it may well be the case that closer attention to these earlier controversies would help to clarify our own thinking on what are basically the same problems. My purpose here is to follow the fortunes of the family of concepts and theories relating to the university curriculum to bring out both the persistence of the problems and the varying strategies which have been adopted in the attempts to resolve them. Questions of this nature can never be finally answered but it is most important that they be constantly discussed. One of the most striking features of current talk about the universities is the absence of any widespread awareness of the historical background to the debate: the extensive nineteenth century literature on higher education has been largely forgotten and traditional issues are canvassed in a manner which suggests that they are a product of the mid-twentieth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , June 1965 , pp. 97 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © 1965, University of Pittsburgh Press 

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References

Notes

1. Curtis, M. H., Oxford and Cambridge in Transition 1558–1642 (1959).Google Scholar

2. Ibid., 227.Google Scholar

3. Winstanley, D. A., The University of Cambridge in the Eighteenth Century (1922), 5.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., quoted on p. 6.Google Scholar

5. Whewell, W., In a fly-sheet printed in 1848; quoted in Winstanley: Early Victorian Cambridge (1940), 202.Google Scholar

6. I am indebted to Dr.Clark, Kitson for drawing my attention to the importance of this factor.Google Scholar

7. Todhunter, I., The Conflict of Studies (1873), p. 12.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., 5.Google Scholar

9. Hamilton, W., On the Study of Mathematics as an Exercise of Mind (1836). Reprinted in Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education and University Reform (1853), 273.Google Scholar

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11. Ibid., 282.Google Scholar

12. This struggle has been documented in great detail by Davie, G. E.: The Democratic Intellect (1961).Google Scholar

13. Ibid., quoted pp. 170–171.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., 175.Google Scholar

15. Loc. cit., 322.Google Scholar

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21. Ibid., 157. The remainder of this section gives details of his conception of the liberally-educated man which it is the prime function of the universities to produce.Google Scholar

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