Newman Studies Journal

In "Elementary Studies," Newman provided a rare instance of pedagogical practice through dramatized oral exams in Greek and Latin and samples of a student's writing. "Elementary Studies" was first published in 1854 and 1855 in issues of The Catholic University Gazette to indicate to prospective students what they might expect on an entrance exam for admission to the new university's Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. Its placement in The Idea of a University after Newman's discussion of the liberal arts' philosophy of mind serves a new purpose by demonstrating how pedagogical practice is an instrument of this philosophy of mind and teaches students to think. However, Newman also indicated in his discussion of education that traditional pedagogical practice was imperiled by the empirical philosophy of mind of Enlightenment philosophers like Locke and Hume. For them, learning to think meant something quite different from its long tradition in the liberal arts.

Newman's observations are of present, urgent interest. In recent decades, an empirical pedagogical practice rooted in this same Enlightenment theory of mind has come to exercise an almost complete hegemony in the elementary and secondary schools of countries like the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. As a Canadian high school teacher of French and English, it was the denaturing of pedagogical practice influenced by the reductionist Enlightenment idea of reason that first drew me to the study of Newman's works on education. In particular, I found a clarification of our present dilemma in his exposition of the foundational principle of the liberal arts as an exercise in two particular kinds of reason, a practice exercised in a continuous tradition since antiquity.

As I examine Newman's demonstration of pedagogical practice, I shall begin with a consideration of the nature of these two kinds of reason cultivated in the liberal arts and their distinctive uses of language. Then, I shall examine how these two kinds of reason are exercised in "Elementary Studies." Finally, I shall investigate the aberration of reason represented by Locke that had already infiltrated the liberal arts in Newman's time and which now dominates pedagogy in our own time. [End Page 103]

The liberal arts defended by Newman in The Idea of a University taught students to think in the two ways conveyed in the title of his University's Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. Students were taught to think through the kind of reason that understands the causes of things, represented in pedagogy in antiquity by Plato, and through the kind of reason essential to matters requiring deliberation, represented by Isocrates, a rhetorician. Plato represented the practice of considering ideas and principles that illuminate large fields of thought: that is, the Greek theoria, which Newman called philosophic or scientific reasoning. In this kind of reason, the principle articulated by Aristotle that justice is both distributive and retributive illuminates the practice of justice. Books of Euclid's geometry, texts in continuous use from 300 BCE to Newman's day, exercised this same kind of deductive reasoning from initial propositions to consequences. The empirical demonstrations that follow a hypothesis in the modern sciences follow the same pattern of reason. Similarly, in the study of languages the rules of grammar illuminate large areas of usage. Language associated with this kind of reason is characterized by a univocal clarity and accuracy of definition, which stand in contrast to the more subtle use of language in the second kind of reason exercised in the liberal arts.

Isocrates, the second pillar of the liberal arts, represents the genus of deliberative reasoning as exercised in the art of rhetoric. Rhetoric locates arguments around an idea. It then organizes effectively the many facets of the argument that lead to decision through the consent of both mind and heart in matters like politics and large social questions. This same genus of reason includes personal judgments informed by converging probabilities, a process of reasoning common to pioneering work in science and to decisions in religious belief that Newman described in his Grammar of Assent. The same genus of reason is also implicit in literature in which recurring human...