The Oregon Review: Michael Oakeshott and Educational Change

An excerpt. Find the entire article here.

The question of education’s value to the individual versus that value to society as a whole is one we hear and see all the time, and I need not ride that horse for long. However, it must be saddled briefly in order to look at what Oakeshott viewed as a core purpose of education as he conceived it. That is, whether there is a loosely related set of ways of thought that people should know in order to be considered educated.

The Oakeshottian view is to some extent the opposite of the E.D. Hirsch approach: there are few facts to be learned to be considered an educated person in the universe of Oakeshott’s education. What Oakeshott really wanted, and what he considered education, was the development of critical thinking. Not just its development, but a recognition that critical thinking was the distinction, or at least the most important one, between an educated and uneducated person, and that calm, measured thought was a goal and outcome of education, especially what we would call “higher education,” a term he disliked.
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Education in the Oakeshottian mold is today largely a private matter. If it happens at all, it happens in private homes and small circles of people with similar interests. I see it occasionally in the stupefyingly precise discussions that some teenage birders have with each other over such subjects as sandpiper molt cycles. It can be seen here and there in public universities, somewhat more often in private colleges, in spots at community colleges and essentially never in for-profit colleges.

For the most part, though, it is accidental, because it has been decoupled from the curriculum in most colleges and operates only as a function of personality: only certain faculty are interested and make any effort to advance the ideas that Oakeshott would recognize as educational. Indeed, many faculty, hired to haul on the fourth starboard oar of the pasta-press, have neither the time or inclination to engage in “education,” for they are paid to train. Then again, only a few students are capable of linking with the best faculty to produce the superreaction that we would all recognize as the Socratic ideal transmuted into 21st-Century minds.

Sadly, the students and faculty who really want to have education, disconnected from contingent want, are spread around the higher education universe and do not often meet. The ideal norm of an Oakeshottian college, in which most of the inhabitants are capable of this kind of interaction and performance, requires that people who want it gather in community, and this is a rare animal in the wildlife park of colleges today.