Education and the University

Education and the University was first published in 1943; this reissue follows the text of the 1948. The book deals with the problems facing universities in a world in which the demand for specialisation has increasingly overshadowed the ideal of a liberal education. Deeply disturbed by this state of affairs, Leavis puts forward a proposal for a University English School which would offer a programme of liberal studies designed to bring various disciplines into relation without promoting superficiality. This in turn leads him to consider the wider issue of the idea of a university in modern society as a 'focus of the finer life of cultural tradition'. 'Such prepotency,' he writes in the preface, 'as this country may hope for in the English-speaking world of the future must lie in the cultural realm, and … in the performance of this function the universities have an essential part'.