The Idea of the University by Michael A. Peters ronald barnett

Author:Michael A. Peters, ronald barnett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

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* Following is the text of a lecture presented at The University of Calgary on April 4, 1967.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Central Problem

From Universities between Two Worlds (1974)

WILLIAM ROY NIBLETT

This selection is taken from Universities between Two Worlds, by W. Roy Niblett, 1974. Published by University of London Press Ltd., London, United Kingdom. *

Editors’ Note

Roy Niblett had a life-long fascination about and passion for education. ‘Life-long’ here takes on a particular meaning. Niblett died (in 2005) just short of his ninety-ninth birthday and he was active almost until his last day.

After teaching in a school, Niblett became successively a lecturer and then (in 1945) a professor of education. As a professor education, Niblett had what was for him the enjoyable task of supporting the work of local colleges of education in their preparation of school teachers.

Subsequently (in 1959), Niblett moved from the north of England to London, to be both (the first) Professor of Higher Education and Dean of the Institute of Education. Although he formally retired in 1968, Niblett continued to be very ← 341 | 342 → active, not only writing but continuing to be part of discussion groups and forums, many of which he himself established over decades. Through his career, Niblett was also much in demand to serve on national committees concerned with the development of higher education. He was a member of the University Grants Committee for many years and chaired its sub-committee on halls of residence (the matter of students living well together being a matter dear to his heart).

As well as being vitally interested in higher education, Niblett was also a practising Christian and while the latter rarely intruded into his scholarship, it surely supplied a concern with the individual. For Niblett, students were never a mass but were individuals, with their own possibilities and potential. Accordingly, in much of his writing—as in the extracts here from his book ‘ Universities between Two Worlds’—Niblett developed a critique of the emerging dominant view of higher education. As he saw it, higher education was becoming overly focused on the acquisition of technical knowledge. In the process, a sense of the student as a person, with personal values and feelings, was being neglected. This concern had, as its context, a wider concern that the world itself—especially through the power of science and technology—was becoming preoccupied with ‘control over nature’ and that ‘human nature’ was itself becoming instrumentalised (not Niblett’s word!) as a result.

We see these concerns vividly in the extracts here. Niblett brings up ‘the question of what human life is for’ and observes that ‘more mastery of a technical sort will not in itself solve [such a question]’. Niblett warns of ‘an impoverishment of the authority of reason itself’ and to address that matter calls for nothing less than ‘turning a corner in our whole concept of higher education’. Niblett presses the case, therefore, for ‘learning of a more directly “felt” experiential kind’, and gives examples from across many disciplines as to what this could look like in teaching approaches.

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