Malcolm McLean's Blog: Faith schools and Catholic culture. - Posts Tagged "ac-grayling"
New College of the Humanities
The philosopher AC Grayling has actually founded and set up his own college of higher education, the New College of the Humanities. Plenty of people fantasise about doing this, Cardinal Newman wrote a book about it ( The Idea of a University but Grayling has done it.
It's possible to be too cynical, It sells itself as an alternative to Oxford and Cambridge. But Oxford and Cambridge retain their cachet largely because it is so difficult to obtain places there. Not because of the one to one tutorial system. The New College of the Humanities can't help but be a place where rich kids who can't accept that they are no clever enough for one of the two ancient universities go. However that's inevitable for any new institution. You can't start off at the top of the pile.
The main problem with the project is that Grayling is a leftie, and academic life is absolutely riddled with lefties. That includes Oxford and Cambridge. But at Oxford at least, there are always countervailing currents. The students know that their colleges are ancient theological foundations, some of the residual practices survive - most colleges have a chapel, for example. And conservative political organisations are quite strong amongst students, if conservative staff are getting rarer and rarer. Grayling has eliminated theology from his college. It seems to me that it's teaching a narrow little left-wing vision, parasitic on the works of great men, but refusing to take seriously the ideas that those men took seriously.
Adam and Abagail Go to St Tom's is another fantasy paper institution of learning. Grayling's is real, I have to give him that.
It's possible to be too cynical, It sells itself as an alternative to Oxford and Cambridge. But Oxford and Cambridge retain their cachet largely because it is so difficult to obtain places there. Not because of the one to one tutorial system. The New College of the Humanities can't help but be a place where rich kids who can't accept that they are no clever enough for one of the two ancient universities go. However that's inevitable for any new institution. You can't start off at the top of the pile.
The main problem with the project is that Grayling is a leftie, and academic life is absolutely riddled with lefties. That includes Oxford and Cambridge. But at Oxford at least, there are always countervailing currents. The students know that their colleges are ancient theological foundations, some of the residual practices survive - most colleges have a chapel, for example. And conservative political organisations are quite strong amongst students, if conservative staff are getting rarer and rarer. Grayling has eliminated theology from his college. It seems to me that it's teaching a narrow little left-wing vision, parasitic on the works of great men, but refusing to take seriously the ideas that those men took seriously.
Adam and Abagail Go to St Tom's is another fantasy paper institution of learning. Grayling's is real, I have to give him that.
Faith schools and Catholic culture.
The blog deals mainly with my book Adam and Abagail Go to St Tom's. Like many British Catholic boarding schools, St Tom's is a monastic school. I intend to deal with issues concerning education, and h
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