Northrup Frye on liberal education

This is a great quotation from one of the great literary critics:

“I do not myself believe in any education programme that adjust the student either to an ideal or to an actual environment, and I distrust both invulnerable wisdom and backslaphappy sociability as human goals. Offhand, I should say that the purpose of liberal education today is to achieve a neurotic maladjustment in the student, to twist him [sic.] into a critical and carping intellectual, very dissatisfied with the world, very finicky about accepting what it offers him, and yet unable to leave it alone. The man [sic.] who can appreciate Bach and Dante will be bored to death by most movies, nauseated by most radio programmes, stupefied by most sermons, and sickened by most politicians. The man [sic.] who can understand Goethe and Montaigne will not be better equipped to deal with his own society; he will merely be more inclined to retch and spew at the very sight of a large proportion of its members, including anti-Semites, spokesmen of big business, and people who want to fight Russia. The man [sic.] who reads Tolstoy and Marx will not be able to find refute in an ‘ivory tower’; he will only be able to see with horrid clarity that most businessmen are living in one. In short, the man [sic.] with a liberal education will not have an integrated personality or be educated for living; he will be a chronically irritated man, probably one of that miserable band who read the Canadian Forum, which is always finding fault and viewing with alarm. One real dose of real culture, and never again will he be able to enter, with millions of his compatriots, into the Paradisal peace of the Star Weekly and the Canadian Sunday afternoon, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest (Job 3:17).”

Northrup Frye. (2000). “A liberal education” (Originally published in Canadian Forum 25 (Sept. 1945): 134-5 and 25 (Oct. 1945): 162-4. In J. O’Grady & G. French (eds.) Northrup Frye’s writings on education (Collected works of Northrup Frye, Vol. 7, pp. 40-49). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Although Frye’s rant is rooted in what I would call a modernist view of liberal education, he beautifully expresses the unsettling result of liberal education, that is, an unrelenting dissatisfaction with the status quo.