Beyond the simple facts

A. C. Grayling says understanding, not knowledge, makes an education higher.

AFTER listening to an A. C. Grayling oration, one feels strangely compelled to light up a cigarette and recline on a pillow of his books.

Philosopher, public intellectual, UN human rights activist, keen defender of the Enlightenment, Grayling is a professor of philosophy at Birbeck College, London, and a supernumerary of St Anne's College, Oxford. He is the author of 29 publications including To Set Prometheus Free, Ideas that Matter, Liberty in the Age of Terror and, most recently, Thinking of Answers.

His contemporary works are plain-speaking treatises to reason against the excesses of ideological zeal and inspired by the traditions of ancient Greek philosophy, the Enlightenment and the Renaissance.

I had the pleasure of hearing a Grayling oration at the Rise of Atheism convention in Melbourne this month, at which he spoke on atheism, humanism and secularism as three distinct but coeval dimensions of history.

In a silent room filled with a thousand strangers, I was intoxicated by oratory. Grayling delivered without pause, error, or reticence, a journey through time animated by the ideas of Aristotle, Galileo, Descartes, Mary Wollstonecraft and Bertrand Russell.

His dedication to history and philosophy drives a commitment to a broad liberal education aimed at developing the whole person rather than simply their utility as an economic unit. It was on the question of what makes higher education higher in the context of international reform that I subsequently approached Grayling for an interview.

Jennifer Oriel: Australia is undergoing the most significant reform to higher education in 20 years, much of it derived from Britain's New Labour government. You have described the effect of New Labour on higher learning thus: "All education is now viewed as subordinate to the task of training infantry for the economic struggle." Can you elaborate?

A. C. Grayling: Yes. As you know, the Labour model in Britain has been to try to get as close to 50 per cent of school leavers into universities as possible. That conformed to a number of changes that predate the Labour government.

The Conservative government under John Major in the early 1990s gave permission and funding to polytechnics, which had been mainly vocational higher education institutions, to become universities and to broaden their curriculum and they also introduced at the same time these sort of coercive measures . . . things such as quality control inspections by outside groups looking at teaching and research and the like, and channelling funding according to the success of the institution. If you did well in these inspections you got more money. If you did less well, you got less money.

So instead of giving overall funding for improvement of facilities in the institutions, they tried to economise a bit more on the basis that you were succeeding. And I suppose that's reasonable. But what lay behind it is the idea that a higher education really is something controlled and defined by the need for educated workforces in the developed economy.

The developed economies, with the exception of China, are no longer primary production economies, factories where you need factory workers on shifts. But they are economies based primarily on service: on computing, on knowledge about finance and so on.

JO: In The Guardian recently, you wrote that the British Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills Peter Mandelson has forgotten what the gold standard of an Oxford education in the humanities is like because his responsibility for higher education is annexed to his role as business secretary. What is the gold standard of the arts and humanities?

ACG: The point of a higher education in [the humanities] is to build on the basis which, in the ideal, people ought to have acquired at school. So, when somebody comes to university, it's not to learn something new, but to be able to reflect and consider, and analyse and extend, explore, to make use of everything that they have acquired at school and to do it through reflective reading, through discussion, through writing about it, through challenging, criticising and responding to those elements of our culture, of our tradition, of our literature, of our body of understanding of the world and humanity offered by the humanities . . .

So, it's not a question of mastering the text; that should have happened already. It's not a question of learning dates and facts and

names; that should have happened already. But it's an opportunity really to sit down, think about it and engage with it. And that is best done - and this is where the gold standard comes in at an Oxbridge tutorial style education - that's best done by talking to people in the tutorial setting who themselves are engaged in research, thinking and writing and discussion of these things.

JO: In many countries, certainly in Australia, the school curriculum has been subjected to an advance of postmodernism which has meant the Western canon and the classics and so forth aren't taught. So, how might citizens of a country who haven't experienced a liberal arts education at school begin to understand its worth in higher education?

ACG: It's a very good question . . . what's tended to happened is that at universities a lot of, as it were, remedial work has to be done and a lot of gaps have to be filled and the texts, ideals, periods of history, things that haven't been offered at school have to be introduced. If at school, you were given a good chronological overview of world history, let us say, then you've got a really good basis on which you can go back and start raising questions about how that history was arrived at and how these perspectives stand up when you examine the data for them, and on what kind of basis they stand.

You know, you can do the critical and reflective work when you've got something to get your teeth into. But if you try to avoid that because you're afraid that you're going to give a distorted perspective, or a Western perspective, or if you're too relativistic about these things, you are going to end up with there being no firm place on which to stand in order to begin that enterprise of deduction and criticism.

JO: Australian Nobel Laureate Elizabeth Blackburn has argued that the increasing bureaucratic pressure on academics to prove their research has immediate utility would prevent the form of inquiry that led to her Nobel Prize. How important are academic independence and a long-term view to the pursuit of knowledge?

ACG: Absolutely crucial, she couldn't be more right if she tried. It used to be the case that academics were given tenure and they didn't have to answer to anybody for what they were doing. This, of course, can be abused, so you can get a lot of lazy and non-productive academics . . . Perhaps a rather happy eventuality now is that the bottom is dropping out of the academic publishing market, so less nonsense will be published.

But the benefit of that kind of independence is that it really does allow people to do blue sky. They can research, they can think, they can make mistakes, they can start again, they can develop strange, seemingly irrelevant lines of inquiry that just might, as has so often happened in the past, turn into something of enormous significance. It takes space for this kind of thing to happen.

If the inspectors and the bureaucrats and the form-filling . . . if all that takes over, it is going to squash out creativity, it is going to squash out possibilities. And so what people have to accept here is that there is rent to be paid to the universe for possibilities, the possibilities that emerge from an open space of inquiry.

JO: I want to shift the focus to international relations for a moment. The Australian Prime Minister is a Sinophile, and you are a past chairman of a human rights group concerned with China and a representative to the UN Human Rights Council for the International Humanist and Ethical Union. What role, if any, do Western political leaders and universities have in encouraging the recognition of human rights in China?

ACG: By encouraging sharp awareness and critical reflection, a higher education should have as a standard outcome citizens of the world, cosmopolitans, who are interested in, informed about and concerned for how things are everywhere. A corollary of that is that they would know about countries regarding which major human rights questions arise, and they would have a view about them.

Many might therefore be concerned to question how those countries comport themselves and what their own country should do in response.

In the case of China and Australia, as the latter is a major supplier to the former, and making a good living out of it, and as the former is a major human rights violator being supported and sponsored by its strong trading relations with Australia, one would see a case for vigorous debate about Australia's relationship with China, at very least in connection with the positive contribution Australia could make to impressing on the Chinese the need for improvement in its human rights observance.

So, the contribution of universities is, in this general case, indirect but strong. But when universities are teaching Chinese language, history and culture, or in political science, or in human rights MA programs and the like - all growth areas in Australian universities because of the China connection - there must of course be challenging confrontation with the question of Australia's close relationship to one of the world's worst violators of human rights.

JO: What, in conclusion, makes higher education higher?

ACG: Higher education is the place where you should begin to understand that the barriers that separate geography from history and history from literature and literature from philosophy and philosophy from physics don't exist. It is all one thing. It is the great endeavour to understand the world and ourselves in it and we want to try and start feeling things in connection . . . we want to cross-fertilise the things that we studied at school and take them further, advance them, advance our understanding of them.

Higher education is higher and advanced education is advanced because it is taking onward the thing that is greater than knowledge and that is understanding. In the humanities and the arts, in the ideal, it shouldn't be that there is more to be learned, but more to be gained from what one has learned; that there should be an extension and an enrichment and a deepening of everything that one has acquired so far so that one can go on and cease to be only a discoverer, and become a contributor.

Jennifer Oriel is a higher education analyst.