Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education (Annual New York Review of Books and Hill and Wang Lecture Series, Ser. No 1) - Hardcover

One of the defining features of our culture for the last two centuries has been a debate about the purpose of education--is it simply a matter of producing people able to perform all of the tasks needed in a complex society, or is it a matter of ensuring that each citizen is as culturally literate and spiritually enlightened as they are capable of being? Alan Ryan's lectures on the history of this debate gathered and expanded in Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education take us through this debate and consider the strengths and weaknesses of its major players, in particular, John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold. Ryan is particularly interesting on the way John Stuart Mill and John Dewey can be seen as foreseeing the debates in our time about education for a multi-cultural society. John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, he argues, "claim that the state must be 'neutral' with respect to all those cultural allegiances that do not themselves amount to attacks on a liberal state". Their reasons are good: state incursions into religious or cultural allegiances cause misery, alienate the victims, and do little good to anyone else. Mill would not have doubted it. He was, however, more ambitious than they, and hoped that an intelligently governed society could weave together what one might term "subnational" cultural attachments into something that sustained a sense of national identity.

Ryan offers a robust defence of much of what has been attempted in educational reform in the present century, while freely admitting the problems of sink schools and adult illiteracy; he debunks the Right-wing critique of liberal education as based on a Golden Age that never existed. This is an admirable book, solid in its exposition of facts and ideas and vigorous in its polemic. --Roz Kaveney