#Diogenes lamp free#

The Snow-Leavis debate spread also to this side of the Atlantic, triggering for a time serious and searching discussions regarding the aims of higher education and the importance of the humanities. Leavis defended the primacy of the humanities for a civilizing education, insisting that science must not be allowed to operate outside of the moral norms that a first-rate humanistic education alone could provide. In a vitriolic response to Snow, the literary critic F. R. He took Britain's literary aristocracy to task for its dangerous dismissal of scientific and technological progress, which Snow believed offered the solutions to the world's deepest problems. Snow delivered his famous Rede Lecture at Cambridge University, 'The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.' Snow did more than warn of the growing split between the old culture of the humanities and the rising culture of science.

Fifty years ago, when Europeans and Americans still distinguished high culture from popular culture, and when classical learning was still highly esteemed in colleges and universities, C. P. But the larger and more important educational issue of what college students should be learning and why - and especially in the humanities - is a subject below the radar for nearly everyone.

#Diogenes lamp free#

Attention might be invited also to political correctness in college classrooms or campus restrictions on free speech. The sorry state of elementary and secondary education would surely make the list, as might the need to improve scientific literacy and technological competence, so that, as we are often told, America may remain 'competitive' in the globalized economy and high-tech world of tomorrow. If asked to identify important topics for a new journal on national affairs, few of us would think first - if at all - of the humanities and their condition in American life today. Not touched by what has been, to issues of

Tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were