The Object of a Liberal Education
Thomas Huxley believed that if schools did not ground their pupils in common sense, life’s examinations would be painful.
1868
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Thomas Henry Huxley, photographed by W. & D. Downey.
Photo by W. & D. Downey, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) was an eminent biologist, a friend and colleague of Charles Darwin who was successful in persuading Victorian Britain to open its mind to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Huxley’s appointment as the first Principal of William Rossiter’s South London Working Men’s College, founded in 1868, was recognition for his gift for bringing scientific ideas to a popular audience.
Introduction
In an address to the South London Working Men’s College in 1868, new Principal Thomas Huxley attempted to define a liberal education. As befitted a friend of Charles Darwin, he spoke in terms of Nature’s university. She has enrolled us all in it, but she provides no lectures; so if we want to pass her stern examinations, we had better find out what to expect.
THE question of compulsory education is settled so far as Nature is concerned.* Her Bill on that question was framed and passed long ago. But, like all compulsory legislation, that of Nature is harsh and wasteful in its operation. Ignorance is visited as sharply as wilful disobedience — incapacity meets with the same punishment as crime. Nature’s discipline is not even a word and a blow, and the blow first; but the blow without the word. It is left to you to find out why your ears are boxed.*
The object of what we commonly call education — that education in which man intervenes and which I shall distinguish as artificial education — is to make good these defects in Nature’s methods; to prepare the child to receive Nature’s education, neither incapably nor ignorantly, nor with wilful disobedience; and to understand the preliminary symptoms of her pleasure, without waiting for the box on the ear. In short, all artificial education ought to be an anticipation of natural education. And a liberal education is an artificial education which has not only prepared a man to escape the great evils of disobedience to natural laws, but has trained him to appreciate and to seize upon the rewards, which Nature scatters with as free a hand as her penalties.
* In 1868, when Huxley was speaking, there was no compulsory education in the United Kingdom, and the first steps towards a unified system regulated by central Government would not be taken until 1870. The Education Act of 1880 introduced compulsory schooling for the first time, ordering that children attend elementary school up to the age of ten. The debate over the pros and cons of compulsory education would continue nonetheless. In 1918 the upper age limit was raised to 14, then to 15 in 1947, and to 16 in 1973, where it remains.
* See also Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Gods of the Copybook Headings, in which he scolds politicians for ignoring Nature’s life-lessons, and then wondering why their policies don’t work.
