Education

Christopher Dawson has an excellent book called The Crisis of Western Education. In the last chapter he might be Richard Weaver in Ideas Have Consequences. As can be expected, the main part of the book is historical. Dawson explains the development and purpose throughout the ages of liberal education. He is as always sweeping and clear both, offering his usual scattering of offhand insights quite beside the excellent main point he’s trying to make. His purpose is to understand what education has been, what the contemporary situation is, and what can be done. It is an old book by now, but it doesn’t seem to me that it is dated. Dawson is one of those chaps like Scruton or Barfield or Lukacs or Weaver: will write with insight and impart understanding, and you’ll always be glad you read whatever it is he writes about.