Theoria - DISA

in themselves enough. A liberal education from, say, the age of
five to the age of twenty-five must include a good deal of science,
a training in the use of the hands (that is to say, a selection from
the servile or mechanical arts, as the Ancients called them), and
systematic exercise of the body.
Positively, the root sense of liberal, namely " concerned with
freedom " or " befitting a free man ", must be our guide. A
liberal education is one designed for the training of free men and
women in a free community under the conditions of life as we
find them in the mid-twentieth century. We have it on pretty
good authority that the truth shall make us free. Very well.
Let me found my case on that. I would define a liberal education
as one which enables a pupil to arrive at truth for himself in as
many fields of human endeavour as time, place, and his capacities
allow.
I repeat and underline, " to arrive at truth for himself".
Obviously and inevitably, in the course of education from the
nursery school to post-graduate study in a university, those of us
who are ranged on the teaching side of this co-operative endeavour
are required to pass on to our pupils a vast collection of
established truths. This is no matter for complaint, provided
that they are established truths. Since there is no real dispute
any longer on the question whether the earth goes round the
sun or the sun round the earth, we gain nothing by not giving
the answer to our pupils categorically. Nor do we gain anything
by allowing a debate on the square root of 9. But the habits thus
established in both pupil and teacher are, I believe, the most
dangerous of all in what I have just called the co-operative
endeavour—education. They dam the stream. It ceases to flow.
It may, and often does, become a noisome, weed-infested pool.
After a very little practice on both sides, it costs the teacher no
effort to impart " information " or " doctrine ", and the pupil
no effort to swallow it, and, when called upon, to regurgitate it.
This is not education. At best, it is the preliminary to education;
at worst, a substitute for it—ersat^, a commodity dispensed and
distributed by mountebanks. Any school, college or university
which does not progressively train its pupils to discover truth
for themselves, especially when the question is one of opinion,
not fact, is an ersat\ institution staffed by mountebanks. And for
this reason : life in a free community demands just this capacity
from free men and women—the capacity to discover truth for
themselves. If their education has not developed it in them,
their education, however expensive to their parents or to the
taxpayer, has been three parts waste.
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