An elegy for postmodernism has been written by Frank Lentricchia, professor of English at Duke University and for decades one of the most persistent critics of the notion that ideas have integrity. He confesses that he lived a double life. He read great literature because it transported him with insight and delight. But he taught that ‘what is called “literature” is nothing but the most devious of rhetorical discourses (writing with political designs upon us all), either in opposition to or in complicity with the power in place’. There were two of him. ‘In private, I was tranquillity personified; in public, an actor in the endless strife and divisiveness of argument, the “Dirty Harry of literary theory,” as one reviewer put it.’ The contradiction produced a crisis and a response. Lentricchia finally decided that there were writers, clever and dull, whose writings could be read with pleasure and profit. Some writings, he has concluded, transcend the accidental circumstances of the writer.17 The observation carries over to science. Some of what we see is conditioned by our upbringing, but seminal syntheses of natural knowledge transcend the circumstances of their formulation.
We do not choose our parents, our mother tongue, or the circumstances of our early years. The world is not made for our effortless gratification. Rather, we respond to the imperatives of existence. The latitude of that response – how much we do by choice and inspiration and how much we are instructed to do by way of convention and authority – is one of the most interesting problems for people who study the course of cultures and civilizations. The following pages will have succeeded if they convey a sense of the many ways that we have seen what is all around us.
1 Teaching: Before the Scientific Revolution
Well into middle age the man awoke with a nightmare about honours examinations at his undergraduate college. For years the nightmare took the same form. He was unprepared for the material. Other students streamed towards the classrooms, confident that they had mastered Heine and Heisenberg, Proust and politics, evolution and revolution. He was all at sea, barely familiar with the course syllabi. Before intimations of mortality replaced the fear of inadequacy in the man’s sleeping consciousness, the examination dream evolved a more complicated and quite preposterous plot: though the man held a doctorate, he was returning to complete an undergraduate college degree.
Most people have experienced an anxiety dream about school. The reason is clear: schooling is an unnatural and traumatic event. Children are confided to a stranger for instruction in abstractions. They are required to commit great quantities of facts to memory, largely by the intermediary of the written word. It comes as no surprise that some creative minds have questioned the value of traditional schooling, with its emphasis on examinations. Albert Einstein (1879–1955), in one of his earliest popular writings, found little to commend the traditional German secondary school-leaving examination, the Abitur. The examination was injurious to mental health precisely because it gave rise to nightmares. Furthermore, a good deal of time in the last year of secondary school was wasted in preparing students for the test.1 Einstein himself never submitted to the Abitur, although he once failed the entrance examination for the Zurich polytechnical institute, and his lover failed the final examinations there.
Einstein studied in Germany and Switzerland, and he may even have attended school briefly in Italy. He could have affirmed that many nations have a hierarchy of schools where citizens are obliged to receive state-sanctioned training. Knowledge may be imparted anywhere, and skills may be acquired on the job, but an academic institution carries an ethos and acts as a crucible for culture. Most important is teaching manners – the essential, outward features of daily life that distinguish civilization from barbarism. Some academic institutions even instruct about what to say at a cocktail reception, which utensil to pick up first at a dinner party, and how to act au courant of the latest intellectual fad. With the eclipse of gentry, priests, and community healers, academic graduates have increasingly been called to officiate in matters large and small.
Whence this prestige attached to the resources controlled by a self-perpetuating guild? The vast majority of academic diplomas no longer lead directly to a post in the workaday world. Today they do not provide evidence, except indirectly, of having mastered the skills required to succeed in business or public affairs. And in an age of sliding-fee structures, social class and family wealth are no longer associated with the crest of a particular institution.
Schools generally are conservative social institutions, and prestige radiates from their traditions, customs, and rituals. They divide the day into class hours and the year into semesters, the calendar of events culminating in colourful ceremonies at which diplomas are conferred. These rituals of formal schooling, which express a way of ordering the world, have entered into the consciousness of a large part of the world’s peoples.
School rituals deriving from religious or moral outlooks vary from place to place. Yet all schools subscribe to one common idea. They hold that knowledge may be acquired through diligent study. There are other kinds of knowledge deriving from religious or artistic inspiration. But schools hold that most things can be learned. The central notion here concerns a distillation of tradition. Learning about knowledge, largely from books, is what has been called science for a thousand years.
In schools, a master imparts knowledge to acolytes, who may eventually create something new beyond their lessons. Whether scholastic lessons are abstract or practical, esoteric or mundane, schools prepare students for a place in society. That place is generally keyed to facility with the written word, which has been the most secure means of transmitting knowledge from one generation to another. In fact, it is not unreasonable to imagine that schools invented writing, and hence that schools are the prime mover of history – the science of knowing the past by its documentation.
In this chapter and the next one we examine how schools of higher learning have been involved with scientific tradition and change. We shall see that academia has both promoted scientific innovation and also stifled it. One of the challenges facing universities in the new millennium will be to implement new ways of breathing relevance into the accomplishments and promises of the past.
What we know about science education in antiquity derives from a variety of documents: a few hundred clay tablets from several sites in Mesopotamia; a few treatises written on papyrus; and diverse histories and texts recopied and reprinted in Chinese, Greek, Arabic and Latin. To this must be added inscriptions on stone, masonry, coins, and pottery, precious castings and carvings, and the accumulated wisdom of archaeology. Because our knowledge of the distant past derives from fragmentary sources, it has sometimes been said that the study of antiquity appeals to people who like mastering a small, fixed syllabus. The sources,