A LIBERAL EDUCATION 1 



SUPPOSE it were perfectly certain that the life and for- 

 tune of every one of us would, one day or other, depend 

 upon his winning or losing a game of chess. Don't you 

 think that we should all consider it to be a primary duty 

 to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces; 

 to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the 

 means of giving and getting out of check? Do you not 

 think that we should look with a disapprobation amount- 

 ing to scorn, upon the father who allowed his son, or 



1 This definition is taken from one of Huxley's early addresses, 

 delivered to the South London Working Men's College, in 1.368, 

 entitled A Liberal Education: and where to find it. The whole 

 address was published in Macmillan's Magazine, in Lay Sermons, 

 and in Science and Education, Collected Essays, III: 76-110. The 

 address commences with a review of the reasons for the growing 

 interest in popular education and of its supposed aims. Huxley 

 then gives his view of education as a very practical preparation 

 for the business of living. The main part of the essay is de- 

 voted to a criticism of the whole English educational system, the 

 system that Huxley later helped to improve by his work with the 

 School Board. 



Huxley's ideas about the value of science in education brought 

 him into a conflict more apparent than real with the educational 

 ideas of Matthew Arnold. A careful comparison of Huxley's 

 two addresses, A Liberal Education and Science and Art, with 

 Arnold's Literature and Science (Discourses in America, 1885), 

 will show that they were in closer agreement than they are usually 

 credited with being. Leonard Huxley seems to be defending his 

 father against the popular misapprehension of Arnold's views in 

 the following comment upon this address: "This is not a brief 

 for science to the exclusion of other teaching; no essay has in- 

 sisted more strenuously on the evils of a one-sided education, 

 whether it be classical or scientific; but it urged the necessity 

 for a strong tincture of science and her method, if the modern 

 conception of the world, created by the spread of natural knowl- 



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