2024 Volume 91 Issue 2 Pages 183-195
This paper aims to provide a philosophical defence of the classical idea of higher education associated with the tradition of liberal education by critically examining the arguments of Ronald Barrett, a British educational philosopher and higher education scholar, on the liberal aims of higher education. Barnett's book The Idea of Higher Education is an attempt to revive the principles of higher education inherent in the tradition of liberal education through analysis of the conceptual nature of higher education, following the analytical approach to philosophy of education represented by R. S. Peters. This paper reconstructs Barnett's argument for justifying the liberal aims of higher education as ‘emancipation’ in the form of the cognitive development of students in The Idea of Higher Education as well as in the contemporary paper ‘Does higher education have aims?’, which focuses specifically on the relationship between professor and student in higher-education settings.
Barnett understands emancipation as a higher cognitive development of students than that provided by ordinary education. Emancipation brings about the highest form of rationality in the state of mind of the students it serves, requiring a critical view of the criteria of judgement circulating within a particular academic discipline and even of the academic worldview itself. According to Barnett, only by understanding the aims of higher education as emancipation can the ideals of higher education in the tradition of liberal education be restored in the context of the ‘epistemological undermining’ and ‘sociological undermining’ that higher education suffers today.
This paper critically examines these arguments as follows. First, the paper outlines the essence of higher education and the special relationship between teachers and students in higher education that follows from that essence, presented through a philosophical analysis of the concept of ‘higher education’. Secondly, it identifies the problems with Barnett's argument, taking as its main point of reference the British philosopher of education John White's critique of Barnett's view of the aims of higher education. The problems are that Barnett's philosophical analysis of the concept of ‘higher education’ is arbitrary because it is based on Barnett's subjective value judgement, and that the purpose of higher education as emancipation entails the imposition of a particular way of life on students in higher education for adults, who are in principle autonomous agents. Third, while retaining the general framework of Barnett's argument, which derives the aims of higher education from an analysis of the nature of higher education and is in the tradition of liberal education in that it aims to liberate the student's mind through the pursuit of knowledge, the paper attempts to resolve the problems with Barnett's argument thus identified by White by modifying it as an argument more faithful to the liberal education tradition.
In this way, the paper argues that only by seeing higher education as grounded in the academic disciplines can the idea of higher education as emancipation that Barnett defends be understood as an idea of higher education linked to the liberal education tradition, which serves as a more consistent philosophical argument.
