Chapter 1 in Ian Ker’s The Achievement of John Henry Newman (University of Notre Dame Press, 1990) is titled “The Educator.” It engages Newman’s arguments in The Idea of a University (1873). He opens the chapter by explaining the structure of Newman’s book. The first half consists of nine Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education (1852), talks that Newman gave in preparation for the opening of the new Catholic University of Ireland. The second half (Lectures and Essays, 1859) includes a collection of talks and articles which Newman wrote while serving as Rector of the university.
Ker observes that “the principle which is the heart and soul of his educational philosophy” is what A. Dwight Culler has called simply “the ability to think.” Ker points out that the assumption made by many that Newman “wanted people to study the liberal arts for the kind of reasons that it is conventionally argued they should be studied” miss the point of this central principal, a surprising mistake given how Newman often hammered home his commitment to the idea that the principle task of education is (in his own words) “how best to strengthen, refine, and enrich the intellectual powers.”
As Ker explains, “Whatever the value inherent in the subject matter of studying arts subjects, that is not Newman’s central concern: it is not ‘culture’ in the modern sense of the word that he is concerned with, but ‘mental cultivation,’ that is, the training of the mind. Newman’s understanding of a liberal education, then, is much more narrowly and specifically intellectual than that of the conventional advocate of an arts education.
“In the Preface to the Discourses he states his case in the simplest terms and all interpretations of the Discourses should be compared with and tested against this basic statement of the thesis to ensure that hyperbole has not obscured the issue.
“There ‘real cultivation of mind’ is deemed to be ‘the force, the steadiness, the comprehensiveness and the versatility of intellect, the command over our own powers, the instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us.’ Newman appeals to our ordinary experience of life, not to draw our attention to the lack of ‘culture’ or knowledge in people generally, but rather to the fact that so many people in everyday conversation are illogical, inconsistent, ‘never see the point,’ ‘are hopelessly obstinate and prejudiced.’ He is not, in the first place, desiderating people who appreciate classical music or painting or literature, let alone people who have achieved a high degree of knowledge. The object of a university education is to produce thinking people, no more and no less.
“When the intellect has once been properly trained and formed to have a connected view or grasp of things, it will display its powers with more or less effect according to its particular quality and capacity in the individual. In the case of most men it makes itself felt in the good sense, sobriety of thought, reasonableness, candour, self-command, and steadiness of view, which characterize it. . . . In all it will be a faculty of entering with comparative ease into any subject of thought, and of taking up with aptitude any science or profession.
“Pointing out that the Discourses ‘are directed simply to the consideration of the aims and principles of Education,’ Newman excuses himself from entering into practicalities (‘the true mode of educating’) but contents himself with the following fairly lengthy statement of method, which he would elaborate later in great detail in one of the Lectures and Essays:
Suffice it, then, to say here, that I hold very strongly that the first step in intellectual training is to impress upon a boy’s mind the idea of science, method, order, principle, and system; of rule and exception, of richness and harmony. This is commonly and excellently done by making him begin with Grammar; nor can too great accuracy, or minuteness and subtlety of teaching be used towards him, as his faculties expand, with this simple purpose. Hence it is that critical scholarship is so important a discipline for him when he is leaving school for the University. A second science is the Mathematics: this should follow Grammar, still with the same subject, viz., to give him a conception of development and arrangement from and around a common centre. Hence it is that Chronology and Geography are so necessary for him, when he reads History, which is otherwise little better than a storybook. Hence, too, Metrical Composition, when he reads Poetry; in order to stimulate his powers into action in every practicable way, and to prevent a merely passive reception of images and ideas which in that case are likely to pass out of the mind as soon as they have entered it. Let him once gain this habit of method, of starting from fixed points, of making his ground good as he goes, of distinguishing what he knows from what he does not know, and I conceive he will be gradually initiated into the largest and truest philosophical views, and will feel nothing but impatience and disgust at the random theories and imposing sophistries and dashing paradoxes, which carry away half-formed and superficial intellects.
“It is noticeable how Newman says nothing here about the actual acquisition of knowledge, scientific or otherwise, or of the appreciation of the arts — important, of course, as he thought both to be. Rather, the entire emphasis falls on training the mind to be accurate, consistent, logical, orderly. And at the end of the passage just quoted, he surely makes it quite clear that what he calls ‘a science of sciences’ or ‘Philosophy’ is not a further subject in the curriculum, nor is it some kind of supergeneral science which embraces all the other sciences: on the contrary, far from being a subject you can study, it is only as a result of learning to think properly that one is ‘gradually initiated into the largest and truest philosophical views.’ In other words, the more the mind is formed and trained, the more ‘philosophical’ it becomes.”
Related reading and listening
- What higher education forgot — FROM VOL. 84 Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
- The formation of affections — FROM VOL. 101 James K. A. Smith explains how education always involves the formation of affections and how the form of Christian education should imitate patterns of formation evident in historic Christian liturgy. (15 minutes)
- A Christian philosophy of integrated education — FROM VOL. 61 Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)
- Education for human flourishing — Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
- The social irrelevance of secular higher education — FROM VOL. 85 Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)
- The history of Christianity and higher education — FROM VOL. 50 In tracing Christianity’s relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God’s ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)
- In praise of a hierarchy of taste — In a lecture at a CiRCE Institute conference, Ken Myers presented a rebuttal to the notion that encouraging the aesthetic appreciation of “higher things” is elitist and undemocratic. (58 minutes)
- How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
- On wonder, wisdom, worship, and work — Classical educator Ravi Jain dives deeply into the nature, purpose, and interconnectedness of the liberal, common, and fine arts. (43 minutes)
- Orienting reason and passions — In an essay titled “The Abolition of Mania” (Modern Age, Spring 2022), Michael Ward applies C. S. Lewis’s insights to the polarization that afflicts modern societies. (16 minutes)
- Christian education and pagan literature — Kyle Hughes on learning from Basil of Caesarea about the curricular choices for Christian educators
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 160 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Jessica Hooten Wilson, Kyle Hughes, Gil Bailie, D. C. Schindler, Paul Tyson, and Holly Ordway
- The aboriginal Vicar of Christ, the voice of God in the heart of Man — Reinhard Hütter on John Henry Newman’s insistence that conscience — rightly formed — bears witness to the law of God
- Conscience and its counterfeits — A 2014 lecture by theologian Reinhard Hütter examines “Freedom of Conscience as Freedom in the Truth: Conscience according to Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman.” (64 minutes)
- Teaching for wonderfulness — Stratford Caldecott on why education is about how we become more human, and therefore more free
- Education and human be-ing in the world — In championing a classical approach to teaching, Stratford Caldecott was an advocate for a musical education, affirming the harmonious unity in Creation. (26 minutes)
- The university and the unity of knowledge — Biographer Ian Ker discusses John Henry Newman’s understanding the goal of “mental cultivation.” (17 minutes)
- The future of Christian learning — Historian Mark Noll insists that for Christian intellectual life to flourish, a vision for comprehensive and universal social and cultural consequences of the Gospel has to be assumed. (18 minutes)
- Earthly things in relation to heavenly realities — In this lecture, Ken Myers argues that the end of education is to train students to recognize what is really real. The things of this earth are only intelligible in light of heavenly realities. (59 minutes)
- Sustaining a heritage of wisdom — Louise Cowan (1916–2015) explains how the classics reach the deep core of our imagination and teach us to order our loves according to the wholeness of reality. (16 minutes)
- Parsing the intellectual vocation — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose. (39 minutes)
- Teachers and Learners — Ian Ker shares John Henry Newman’s ideals of learning, and Mark Schwehn discusses the virtues of good teachers. (27 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
- Visionary education — Josef Pieper on the mistake of confusing education with mere training
- On the re-enchantment of education — Stratford Caldecott on teaching in light of cosmic harmony
- Healthy habits of mind — Scott Newstok describes how many efforts at educational reform have become obstacles to thinking well, and he offers a rich and evocative witness to a better way of understanding what thinking is. (20 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 151 — FEATURED GUESTS:
Richard Stivers, Holly Ordway, Robin Phillips, Scott Newstok, Junius Johnson, and Peter Mercer-Taylor
- Wise use of educational technologies — David I. Smith articulates the difficulties Christian schools face as they seek to use technology in a faithful way. (24 minutes)
- Educational provocations — Steve Talbott on establishing ends for education before selecting means
- The flickering of the American mind — Diana Senechal on problems of distraction in education
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 150 — FEATURED GUESTS:
David I. Smith, Eric O. Jacobsen, Matthew Crawford, Andrew Davison, Joseph E. Davis, and Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
- Guarding our tongues — John Henry Newman on the manner of speech fitting for Christian faithfulness
- How should we then teach? — Following three years of research, David I. Smith discusses what he and his colleagues learned about how educational technologies can be profitable servants and not tyrannical masters. (56 minutes)
- Stephen Gurney: “John Henry Newman: The Poetics of Devotion” — Stephen Gurney shows how in his sermons, John Henry Newman draws the listener in through the craft and beauty of his prose while nonetheless removing himself from the spotlight in order to convey his listeners to the True Presence of Christ. (51 minutes)
- The Liberal Arts tradition, II — context and extension — Kevin Clark explains how the book he co-authored defines a framework in which the Trivium and the Quadrivium are the core of a curriculum that includes piety, gymnastics, music, philosophy, and theology. (20 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 145 — FEATURED GUESTS:
David I. Smith, Bruce Hindmarsh, Jason Baxter, John Fea, Laurie Gagne, and Matthew O’Donovan
- On Christian teaching and forming Christian minds — David I. Smith argues that teaching methods are as important as educational content in forming Christian minds. (9 minutes)
- The Practice of Christian Pedagogy, Volume II — David I. Smith argues that more attention needs to be given to the meaning conveyed in teaching methods and assumptions about teaching.(63 minutes)
- Thoughts about higher education — Four thoughtful academics discuss how the fact of the Incarnation should inform the ends of higher education. (16 minutes)
- Learning to love the truth — Fr. Francis Bethel talks about his book John Senior and the Restoration of Realism. (17 minutes)
- When reason is detached from truth — Benedict XVI on what threatens true academic freedom
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 132 — FEATURED GUESTS:
David I. Smith, Susan Felch, D. C. Schindler, Malcolm Guite, and J. A. C. Redford
- Culture as legacy — Hannah Arendt on the place of authority and tradition in education
- Learning to live within a hierarchy of goods — Richard M. Weaver on the ends of education
- Seeing the world from somewhere — Robert Spaemann on why education can’t be “objective”
- How literature becomes a habit — Flannery O’Connor exhorts English teachers to maintain high standards
- Education as the formation of taste — Flannery O’Connor on the shaping of literary experience
- Irrigating deserts — C. S. Lewis on why teachers must train the sentiments
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 116 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stratford Caldecott, Fred Bahnson, Eric O. Jacobsen, J. Budziszewski, Brian Brock, and Allen Verhey
- The Practice of Christian Pedagogy, Volume I — David I. Smith argues that teaching is not merely the transmission of ideas. Rather, there is a formative power in classroom practices and in the culture of schools.(56 minutes)