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 ACS 1001
Augustine and Culture
Villanova Seminar II:
The Idea of Work
The Aim of a
University Education
If then a
practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of
training good members of society.
Its art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the
world. It neither confines its views to particular professions on one
hand, nor creates heroes or inspires genius on the other. Works indeed
of genius fall under no art; heroic minds come under no rule; a University is
not a birthplace of poets or of immortal authors, of founders of schools,
leaders of colonies, or conquerors of nations. It does not promise a
generation of Aristotles or Newtons, of Napoleons or Washingtons, of Raphaels
or Shakespeares, though such miracles it has before now contained within its
precincts. Nor is it content on the other hand with forming the critic or the
experimentalist, the economist or the engineer, although such too it includes
within its scope. But a university training is the great ordinary means
to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of
society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at
supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular
aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at
facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of
private life. It is the education which gives a [person] a clear, conscious
view of their own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an
eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them.
---John Henry Newman (1852), The Idea of a
University
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Links to ACS 1001 classnotes:
"Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which [others] have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life." --Jesse Lee Bennett
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