Education and the University: A Sketch for an 'English School'

by F.R. Leavis

Education and the University was first published in 1943; this reissue follows the text of the 1948. The book deals with the problems facing universities in a world in which the demand for specialisation has increasingly overshadowed the ideal of a liberal education. Deeply disturbed by this state of affairs, Leavis puts forward a proposal for a University English School which would offer a programme of liberal studies designed to bring various disciplines into relation without promoting superficiality. This in turn leads him to consider the wider issue of the idea of a university in modern society as a 'focus of the finer life of cultural tradition'. 'Such prepotency,' he writes in the preface, 'as this country may hope for in the English-speaking world of the future must lie in the cultural realm, and … in the performance of this function the universities have an essential part'.

176 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1972

About the author

Frank Raymond "F.R." Leavis, CH was an English literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught for much of his career at Downing College, Cambridge but often latterly at the University of York.