The Roots of Culture
This volume forms part of a series entitled the St Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs, edited by John Haldane who directs the Centre for the Study of Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs in the university. It consists of Victor Cook Memorial Lectures delivered in seven different universities around the themes in the title. They fall into five categories: education, culture, the state, religion and science. The contributors are all distinguished and well-known figures: David Carr, Lord Quinton, Anthony O’Hear, Richard Pring, Baroness Warnock, Sir Jonathan Sacks, Lord Sutherland, Mary Midgley and Brian Appleyard. As a result, the content is profound and wide-ranging and it is only possible to pick out a small number of themes in a relatively short review.

David Carr discusses problems of values education in the context of the distinction between education and training, with their respective focus on the intrinsic or the instrumental. He argues that good education concerns precisely ‘the acquisition of those intrinsically worthwhile forms of rational knowledge and moral goodness in terms of which real quality of life requires to be construed.’ It is a slippery slope when all knowledge it is merely instrumental and everything is undertaken for the sake of something else. Lord Quinton takes this up in his consideration of the validity of Western canon of culture. He admits the criticism that it is largely Eurocentric and masculine, but rejects the implication that we should discard rationality in the process. I found his discussion of both Matthew Arnold and TS Eliot illuminating. He quotes Eliot’s list of the ingredients of high culture as consisting of learning, philosophy in the widest sense, literature, painting, music and what he calls urbanity or civility. Quinton also faces the charge of elitism head on, arguing for the maintenance of basic intellectuals values and a developed linguistic capacity. The aim should surely be, as he puts it, to enlarge the constituency of high culture rather than to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator in the name of egalitarianism.

Another related strand elaborated by Richard Pring concerns that changing aim of education away from liberal towards vocational. In 1977, the Prime Minister James Callaghan initiated a great debate in education (sounds familiar?), stressing the importance of raising standards, especially in relation to economic performance. This ushers in the era of relevance and competence which, in its extreme form, is used to attack the very notion of intrinsic worth. Vocational language is that of usefulness, fitness for purpose, and effective means to an end. Pring puts his finger on some of the key changes in language with which we are now only too familiar: transactions between providers and customers, popularity in the market, managerial efficiency, performance indicators, learning outcomes or outputs. And he points out that this represents a shift in metaphor from that of conversation to that of business audit. This means that the professional judgement of the teacher is relegated to an insignificant role when it should essentially be about the deepening and broadening of understanding.

Stewart Sutherland contributes two enlightening and entertaining lectures starting from the premise that schools reflect the nature of the societies to which they belong. Also that ‘educational practice rests upon educational theory, and that in turn rests upon an adequate account of human fulfilment and flourishing.’ He goes on to identify three fault lines within our society: pluralism, the fragmentation of knowledge, and moral atomisation. He is, however, optimistic that we possess the resources to deal with this challenge. He analyses how Kent’s rejection of Hume’s scepticism exacts a price in the separation of moral and religious matters from the domain of knowledge. He shows how this in turn is related to his other themes of pluralism and moral atomisation, which are also associated with the epistemological primacy of the scientific method. His cure comes back to pondering the conditions in which human beings flourish in terms of goals and purposes.

The last two chapters by Mary Midgley and Bryan Appleyard look more closely at the influence of the modern scientific worldview. Midgley reminds us that major ideas are generated through the imagination and that metaphors underpinning world views often go unquestioned, even to the extent of scientism rejecting the power of its own imaginative vision. Show is how atomistic thinking led to metaphysical materialism and how the idea that only matter is real leads to a devaluation of the subjective imaginative dimensional which actually gives rise to the metaphysics of materialism in the first place. Appleyard also argues for the centrality of consciousness, noting that science can describe everything except the one thing that really matters. This emphasis on consciousness turns out to be correlated with the insistence on intrinsic value discussed earlier. Perhaps it is time to import the continental notion of being into British philosophy? This is a timely and valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about education, values and culture.