Opening Address given by the Provost of Trinity College at the Dental Educators Conference on 16 September 1998
First I would like, in my capacity as Provost, to welcome you all to Trinity College and to this Conference and the entire programme of events and celebrations surrounding the opening of the new Dental School and Hospital. It is a great celebratory occasion for Trinity, the end of a long hard road, and I think we would have fallen by the wayside were it not for the passionate commitment and dogged persistence of Professor Shanley. It is a privilege to have been associated with him in the completion of an outstanding medical facility and a School designed with care and vision to provide an innovative and effective brand of dental education.
It is also a great pleasure to participate with this distinguished gathering of educators in a discussion of some of the issues facing us in an exciting period in the midst of the knowledge revolution. The title of my own talk, which, I hasten to add, was the brainchild of Professor Shanley, alludes to a period of two and a half millennia, but I am not going to treat you to a potted history of western education in thirty minutes, but hope to explore the relatively constant first principles of educational theory that have continued to shape and sustain our great educational tradition, and that must, I believe, be jealously safeguarded.
Educational theory had its beginnings in the latter half of the fifth century B.C., which produced a great era of Enlightenment in Greece, and particularly in Athene. With it came the so-called Sophists, a new breed of professional teachers, whose goal was to train young people to succeed in a new world of personal and intellectual freedom and democratic institutions.
They shifted the focus of education from the traditional emphasis on physical education, practical skills and the inculcation of traditional religious and moral values to the cultivation of the mind and of the intellectual gifts of speech and of rational analysis and disputation. These gifts, they believed, could be nurtured by acquiring broad knowledge of man and his world (the word used was polyrnathy) and through rhetorical virtuosity and a practised intellect.
The Sophists revolutionised higher education. Their goal was eminently practical, and a goal that has never been far from the minds of educators, to produce citizens equipped to succeed in the circumstances of their society, but the content and method were new, focused on brainpower and on well-honed powers of speech and reason.
Socrates and his most famous pupil, Plato, were contemporaries of the Sophists, and indeed could be described as part of the same movement. Their contribution to philosophy and political science was, of course, fundamental, but they also had a profound impact on educational theory. They strongly criticised the emphasis of the Sophists on rhetorical artifice and on winning arguments without regard to truth or morality, but they affirmed the basic sophistic principle that education is primarily concerned with the cultivation of the mind and the creation of expanded intellectual proficiency.
The means to this end for Plato, and one presumes for Socrates, again involved broad knowledge of man and his world as the basic building blocks, followed by a programme of rigorous intellectual activity and the application of pure reason to the search for knowledge and for answers.
The ultimate goal of this form of education was the perfecting of the rational faculty as a means to truth and right thinking, right in the sense of that which serves the true interest of human beings and promotes their true happiness.
Socrates introduced another famous innovation in his approach to learning and rational enquiry, what Aristotle called the use of inductive arguments or what is more commonly referred to as dialectic or Socradc conversation. Socrates never lectured or expounded a set of dogmas for his students. He asked questions; he set problems; he rigorously and methodically analysed and criticised answers, leading the argument from the less adequate answer to the more adequate and reaching towards an unshakeable conclusion, though in most cases he rarely got that far. It was a disconcerting, sometimes humiliating method for students, but its goal was to eliminate sloppy thinking or acceptance of unfounded assumptions and to instil intellectual rigour. It was active learning, problem-based learning, the antithesis of the passive, unthinking, uncritical absorption of information and ready-made answers that sometimes passes for education today.
Plato went on to found the world's first real university and he called it the Academy (named rather disappointingly after an Attic hero, Academus). It was a close-knit fraternity of scholars pursuing truth through reason and dialectics and occasions that he called symposia, which were dialectic enlivened by alcohol. It lasted over 900 years, as long as our very oldest universities. It had some famous students such as Aristotle and Horace, and during its long history it would seem that it never organised an examination or received a penny of public money. It was sustained by its precept that the pursuit of knowledge is the highest and most valuable of human activities.
The educational ideas of the great Greek thinkers eventually found favour among Roman intellectuals, notably Cicero, who has left us, in a number of works, eloquent statements of the purposes of education and the means to achieve them. In the process he has given us some of our most common educational terminology such as 'humanities', liberal arts' and 'liberal education'.
For Cicero, the primary function of education was to inculcate humanitas, by which he meant the attributes of the individual whose peculiarly human capacities had been developed to their full potential, and who had therefore become humanissimus. These capacities included the gifts of speech and of reason, but also the social, inoral and aesthetic instincts that are peculiar to human beings.
Humanitas was achieved through the study of what he termed the artes liberates, the disciplines befitting a free man. They comprised literary and rhetorical studies to develop the skills of communication, law and history to provide an understanding of one's society and of human achievement, and philosophy to provide right thinking and the secure inoral moorings of the good citizen. It was a thoughtful and laudable ideal and gives Cicero a right to be regarded as the father of classical humanism.
The particular views that I have cited from classical antiquity do not, of course, reflect a consensus in the ancient world about the purposes of education or the means to achieve them. Nor do they reflect the system that operated in practice. But they do represent seminal principles that have had an enduring influence and that establish with compelling logic that, while education should develop human worth and talents as broadly as possible, it must give primacy to the cultivation of the unbounded reaches of the mind and its power to think, to communicate, to imagine, to create, to innovate, to increase knowledge and understanding, to advance the social, political and inoral order, to enrich the range of human experience and the quality of human existence.
This insistence on the paramount Importance of developing the full potential of the mind is the greatest legacy of antiquity to our educational heritage. The ideal of a liberal education, with its appealing CiceroniaJl vision of graduates who are highly literate, articulate, broadly knowledgeable, mtellectually able and morally enlightened has also prevailed, though in different forms in different places and at different times. The Socratic/ Platonic dialectic has had a lasting effect as well as an important influence on methods of pedagogy and intellectual enquiry. The Greco-Roman genius of the classical age had identified and articulated first principles of higher education that were to become abiding influences on western educational thought, and that were again memorably reaffirmed by Cardinal Newman 1,900 years after Cicero's death.
The Middle Ages and the period of Renaissance humanism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought the rise of the great universities of Europe and of other parts of the world and important developments in the organisation of higher education and the community of scholars. The period saw variations in methods and in subject matter, but few fundamental changes in educational philosophy. The traditions of the classical era were largely preserved and the long- established Seven Liberal Arts remained the core of the curriculum. These comprised the so-called trivium, consisting of grammar, rhetoric and logic, and the quadrivium of mathematical sciences, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and musical theory or harmonics. Thomas Aquinas and his scholastic tradition would insist on including also Natural and Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics.
By far the most notable new feature that developed in this period was the inclusion within universities of professional faculties, initially the so-called learned professions of Law, Medicine, and Divinity. Later in the first half of the nineteenth century, the impact of the industrial Revolution and the coming of railways brought pressure on universities to extend further their role in professional education and to establish Schools of Engineering. Trinity College was one of the first to do so in 1841, but only after intense debate.
The introduction of the professional schools raised once more fundamental questions about the purpose of higher education as provided by universities. The communication of the practical, applied skills required by vocational training seemed totally at variance with the aims and methods of a liberal education.
Cardinal Newman, though he wrote long after professional schools had become part of universities, illustrates the nature and continuing depth of the resistance to the idea of vocational training within the halls of Academe.
Newman contends that a university should be formally based and should, in his words, emphatically live in the Faculty of Arts. For him the true business of a university is liberal education, 'the process of training by which the intellect, instead of being sacrificed to some specific trade or profession, is disciplined for its own saJke, for the perception of its own proper object and for its own highest culture'.
He did not, however, seek to banish the professional schools from the realms of university education.He is content with insisting that professional training must be preceded by a liberal education that would provide the individual with the intellectual capacity and body of theoretical knowledge that could link his professional training to the broader world of learning and bridge the gap between craftsman and intellectual.
And this was the means adopted by most universities to reconcile new educational responsibilities with traditional aims. Those seeking a professional degree were required also to take a degree in the liberal arts, a safeguarding of the traditional benefits of a general and intellectually demanding education while adding a practical skill. It involved a considerable mental shift, but was a necessary adjustment to changing social needs. The scope of university education widened but the vision and the basic principles remained intact.
The last hundred years, and especially the last fifty years, has brought a transformation of the world of the university unparalleled since the great era of change in the time of the Sophists and Plato. A knowledge revolution centred around dramatic technological advances has vastly accelerated the change in the last thirty years.
Demand for higher education has grown relentlessly, fed by higher birth rates in most western countries in the post-war era and by the knowledge revolution which has made education the key to professional success and has more than tripled participation rates in a generation in many countries like Ireland. Increased demand has also come from mature students and from those seeking a degree on a part-time basis.
The range of societal demands on universities has similarly grown. Graduate education, or fourth-level education, has expanded, as demand grows for researchers and for continuing education and ever higher levels of expertise. A multiplicity of vocational courses that could never have been imagined by Newman or by the nineteenth-century Provosts of Trinity seeking to Justify an Engineering School, have entered universities in response to the voracious appetite of the technological age for specialist skills.
The need for research and innovation in economies that are becoming incerasingly knowledge-based has given universities an expanded role in this area also and a more direct influence on economic development. In general, the technological age is heavily dependent on the large research capacity of universities to produce the breakthroughs that can sustain technological progress.
In addition, the explosion of knowledge has transformed many disciplines and created a host of new ones.
And technology has opened up new possibilities in distance education as well as creating new modes of teaching and learning and new aids to research, a subject that will be discussed in some detail in the course of this Conference.
These are but some of the changes that have challenged and, to an extent, battered universities in recent decades.
Has this frenetic pace of change been good or bad for education and the universities? How have the universities coped with it? How in particular has it affected the quality and the character and the vision of higher education, especially the crucial area of the undergraduate curriculum?
There have been positive effects. University education has been made accessible to far greater numbers of young people, and they have been given the prospect of greater personal satisfaction and professional success.
The aids to learning have vastly improved through the wonders of information technology.
Expanding knowledge and opportunities for curricular innovation have enlivened the academic world. Greater research opportunities and technological aids to research have created more vibrant research environments to the benefit of scholars and students.
Universities have become more directly involved with the public and with business and industry and the professions because of the expanded services they provide. They have shed, at least to some extent, their ivory tower image and have gained from the broader contact with the wider community.
International networking through information technology and greater mobility for staff and students have enriched academic life and the experience of Students.
But the rapid change and the plethora of new demands have inevitably also brought problems. Some are serious and threaten the traditional mission of universities and the greatest benefits they bestow.
In the last half century, universities have tended to grow too big, grasping every opportunity for new activity, often a topsy-turvy process of ad hoc development. As a result the mission has become fuzzier, the institutions have become more impersonal, more fragmented. In these conditions students become cyphers and isolated within their areas. The faculties as a whole become ghettoised, less interactive, further removed from the synergistic community of scholars that was the glory of Plato's Academy. The greater use of information technology, which is an effective but impersonal medium, can reinforce these problems. The great expansion of knowledge in so many disciplines has encouraged single- discipline degree courses and further hampered cross-disciplinary contacts. The effects of these disjunctions can be insidious, undermining a common vision of the nature and purpose of the academic enterprise.
The welcome growth in research can have the unwelcome effect of adding to the fragmentation and loss of personal contact. The emergence of so-called research universities has often meant that undergraduate teaching has become a subordinate activity, the high-flying researchers becoming more removed from contact with students and even with peers, and from real involvement in teaching and the vital ongoing task of conceiving and reassessing the undergraduate curriculum. The benefits to students and teaching programmes that should result from leading edge research are therefore lost.
Change has also brought financial woes. Expansion has not been matched by a corresponding increase in state funding. Technology has brought better but also more expensive education and has put further strains on meagre resources. Universities around the world now face serious funding problems. University Presidents have become mendicants, their time and energy increasingly spent on fund-raising. A more worrying effect has been the pressure on universities to divert energy and manpower into the most basic, service oriented forms of vocational training that can generate significant revenue. Researchers can be similarly forced to devote more of their research effort to consultancy and to problem solving dictated by industry to earn the revenue to support their main research programmes. The result is that more of the agenda of universities is being set by market forces and funding needs rather than by the universities' own ideals and priorities.
The autonomy of universities to govern their educational destinies is being further eroded by greater government interference as the importance of education tot the economy and to the general life of society increases. The growing role of technology in industrial development is also creating an understandable preoccupation on the part of governments and industry with the production of graduates capable of using and exploiting technology. This is bringing pressure to concentrate expansion and resources in the areas of applied science and engineering, and state funding is being directed there. Curricula geared to the needs of particular forms of industry, narrowly and vocationally focused to produce technical experts with maximum speed, are being demanded.
These trends obviously have several negative effects, but perhaps the most serious is that universities are fast losing sight of the first principles that have for so long inspired our educational ideals and underpinned the intellectual and cultural attainments of western civilisation. There is no longer a shared vision of the goals of undergraduate education or of the means to achieve them, and in that vacuum of principle we are likely to see a proliferation of degree courses of uneven quality and uncertain purpose, or a laissez-faire approach to curriculum that will lead to courses based on faddism or an incoherent jumble of electives. Or we will see a rampant utilitarianism exalting practical skills and producing premature or excessive specialisation.
Universities therefore urgently need to recover full power to control their educational philosophy and ethos and to determine what and how they teach by reference to stable, objective academic principles.
I believe these principles must continue to uphold the view that the primary goal of undergraduate education is development of the mind and of the mental skills of speech and communication, of reasoning and analysis, of creativity and imagination and of moral discernment. These are the capacities that represent real brainpower and the best hope for the enlightened progress of our civilisation.
They do not come from studies randomly assembled or governed by modishness or dilettantism or from narrowly focused specialist training, They require a broad study of core areas of human knowledge, which must be backed by an active approach to learning, by problem-solving, by the Socratic challenge to use reason to test and question and explore.
I believe that all undergraduate education, whether the major focus of study is English literature, history, law or dentistry, must be governed by these considerations, and that the undergraduate experience across the range of disciplines must incorporate exposure to the seminal areas of learning and to rigorous forms of intellectual stimulation and challenge. Otherwise, universities will stifle rather than stimulate the sublime gift of mind, produce technocrats rather than professionals, pedants and intellectual eunuchs rather than scholars and thinkers, and specialists who, as the clich~ states, know more and more about less and less and cannot communicate with one another. And universities will fail in. their most sacred responsibility to society, to foster creativity and progress informed by appreciation of the different domains of learning, of the many facets of human achievement, and of the many-sided needs of a developed society.
Plato established the goals; the Internet increased our capacity to achieve them. We should ensure it is used for that purpose.
Thomas N. Mitchell
Provost of Trinity College, Dublin
16 September 1998