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O’Grady, Jean and French, Goldwin. (Eds.) (2000).
Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
pp. llivii + 684
$100 (Cloth) 0-8020-4827-7
Reviewed by Brian Russell Graham
University of Glasgow
August 20, 2004
In addition to his numerous works as a literary critic (Note
1), Northrop Frye also produced a vast amount of work on the
philosophy of education, and this volume of the Collected Works
of Northrop Frye includes what the editors term ‘essays on
the teaching of literature in the schools and universities’
and ‘papers and addresses on the university in modern
society’ (NFWE, p. xxiv). These writings span the
entire period of Frye’s association with Victoria
University (Note 2) : they include, on the one hand, student
articles and, on the other, pieces composed just a couple of
years before his death in 1991.
In one respect, Frye produces an unflattering picture of the
twentieth century university, every bit as pessimistic as the
late Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.
Frye's starting point is the development of universal education.
The education system had been anti-democratic in that it had
sought to keep class distinctions on a permanent basis. Universal
education, then, was a profoundly democratic cause. “For
once in his long, stupid, muddled history,”Frye argues,
“man could be reasonably sure that in adopting universal
education he was heading in the right
direction”(NFWE, p. 318). However, in Frye's view
the development of universal education resulted in some
unforeseen changes in society. Universal education came with the
notion that “there ought to be a period of life, between
puberty and voting age, in which young people should be, to some
extent, segregated from what's going on” (NFWE, p.
408). For Frye, the conception of the "adolescent" was a
construct dreamed up by society in a spirit of benevolence, but
the end result of it was "benevolent segregation" (ibid.).
Furthermore the notion of the adolescent was not simply a
mind-set. In Frye's view this protective instinct also led to
changes in the education system in the United States, essentially
a "dumbing-down" process. In the 1920's and 30's, he argues,
"optimism combined with the lazy good-natured
anti-intellectualism of American life to produce a kind of
education that prolonged the play period and postponed all
serious study as long as possible" (NFWE, p. 319). Citing
Robert Hutchins, Frye comments that a good deal of American
university education was a "vast playpen designed to keep young
people off the labour market" (ibid.). According to Frye, his
generation had created a "social proletariat", "a group of people
excluded from the benefits of society to which their efforts
entitle them" (NFWE, p. 329), analogous to that of women
in the nineteenth century. A social policy oriented towards the
weakening of the class structure served to develop a new kind of
social stratification
In Frye's view it was this process of segregation which led to
student protest in the late sixties in North America. The
recognition of the importance of education that followed the 1957
Sputnik led students to conclude that they "were participating
fully in society by being students" (NFWE, p. 320) and
that consequently should not be treated like children and
segregated. Unlike those associated with the New Left, Frye did
not support the aims of the Students for a Democractic Society or
the form the protest took. (Note 3) But he did sympathise with
the situation of the students. Frye admitted that teachers and an
entire older generation had consigned students to a life bereft
of a social function.
Frye's writings, then, provide us with an honest account of
the state of the twentieth century university. However, in his
writings on education his focus is not on the state of
institutions. "My own view of an ideal system of education is a
Utopian one" he states in "Education and the Rejection of
Reality" (NFWE, p. 426), and the reader of this volume is
left with the impression that when writing about education it is
the ideal system he has in mind.
Frye's philosophy of education is bound up with his ontology.
In The Educated Imagination (not included in this volume)
Frye argues that the world of ordinary perception is largely an
illusion. "For one thing," argues Frye, "it changes very rapidly
[…]. If Canada in 1962 is a different society from the
Canada of 1942, it can't be the real society, but only a
temporary appearance of real society." By contrast "the ideal
world that our imaginations develop inside us " is "the real
world, the real form of human society hidden behind the one we
see" (ibid.).
The university is composed of two parts, humanities and
sciences (NFWE, p. 81), and during different historical
periods the fortunes of the two aspects of the university vary:
in one period we see the ascendancy of science, in another the
ascendancy of the humanities (NFWE, pp. 51-2).
Mathematics represents the centre of the natural sciences and
English literature and language the centre of the humanities
(NFWE, p. 72). In Frye's view taken together the sciences
and humanities form the ideal world of the imagination. In his
essay ‘We Are Trying To Teach a Vision of Society’ he
sums up his ontology and view of the significance of the
humanities and sciences:
The future will disappear into the bowels of time like the
past, and it is rather the permanent and invisible present, the
world behind the world of current events, the world that
won’t go away, that I want to direct your attention. This
is the form of society, the vision of what humanity has done and
can do, that is revealed by the arts and sciences and by the
great professions that mediate between them and the public.
(NFWE, pp. 190-1)
Sciences deal with the world in its present state, while the
arts are concerned with the desirable world which mankind yearns
for:
The sciences, in other words, are primarily concerned with the
world as it is: the arts are primarily concerned with the world
that man wants to live in.
(NFWE, p. 81)
In Frye's view vision impacts on society through work. Work
bereft of an educated imagination is drudgery. "The more
alienating and less creative it becomes," he explains, "the more
completely it becomes an observance time, a clock-punching and
clock-watching servitude." But vision transforms work into a more
creative enterprise. Now our endeavours represent a part of an
attempt to bring the ideal society we can see into existence. It
is conventional, Frye argues, to think of education in society in
connection with the human body, but if it was once possible to
associate a leisure class in society with "the brain, with its
eyes and ears" (NFWE, p. 501) that analogy no longer
applies:
What really occupies the place of the brain, the seat of
judgment, the ultimate source of authority, is a kind of
informing vision above action. For example, a social worker
trying to work in Toronto obviously has all his or her activity
motivated by an inner vision of a healthier, cleaner, less
neurotic, and less prejudiced Toronto than the one which he or
she is actually working in. Without that vision, the whole point
of work being done would be lost; hence it is in the informing
vision of action that the real source of authority in education
is to be found.
(NFWE, p. 502)
In his writings Frye spells out the importance of this source
of authority. The university goes to work in society through
those who have been taught its vision of society. Frye often
provides us with illuminating insights into the nature of this
group. In ‘Convocation Address, University of British
Columbia’ Frye speaks of the ‘real elite’:
‘they are ‘an invisible group, and nobody but God
knows who they are’ (NFWE, p. 181). Mainly, they do
not hold positions of conventional power. Frye offers an
affectionate, lightly humorous portrait of this group:
They include the quiet self-effacing people who are busy
teaching school or fixing teeth or saving money to send their own
children to university, who sit through endless dull committees
and board meetings because it’s a public service to do so:
in short, the people who devote as much of their lives as
possible to keeping up the standard of culture and civilization,
both for themselves and their communities.
(ibid.)
In even more revealing statements he throws further light on
his notion of this elite. Clearly, Frye's "elite" is in truth a
number of distinct elites, and Frye is a passionate advocate for
them:
There is no such thing as "an elite": democracy is a
society of specific and decentralized elites, in other words
skilled workers, people particularly good at certain jobs, and
whenever anything is taught it creates such an elite.
(NFWE, p. 237)
For Frye the standard of society descends from the presence of
this elite in it. On occasions Frye speaks of the possibility of
this minority growing to a majority. "Society depends heavily for
its well-being on a handful of people who are imaginative
[…]. If the number became a majority," he goes on, "we
should be living in a very different world, for it would be a
world that we should then have the vision and the power to
construct" (NFWE, p. 159).
The Introduction to the collection includes a section by each
of the two editors. In his section of the Introduction Goldwin
French traces Frye’s studies and teaching at the University
of Toronto, tying the various phases of his life at the
university in with his writings on education. French provides the
reader with some interesting details of Frye’s teachers,
the colleges where he studied and the pedagogical issues he had
to deal with later in his career. He devotes a considerable
amount of space to the question of Frye’s response to the
student unrest, presumably with a view to pre-empting
misunderstandings of Frye’s robust response to that chapter
in twentieth-century North American history.
Jean O Grady’s section deals with Frye’s view of
university education, particularly the humanities and sciences,
Frye’s engagement with elementary and secondary education,
his participation in a joint committee concerned with curricula
in elementary and secondary schools and his subsequent
supervision of a new series of “readers,” and the
historical background of the collected pieces, focusing, like
French, on the student unrest. The latter part of her section in
which she explains how “the university must remain within
the area of the myth of freedom” (NFWE, p. xlviii)
(Note 4) and discusses the extent to which Frye believes
education can foster self-development in individuals and in
society as a whole represents the most sophisticated segment of
the Introduction.
Notes
- Northrop Frye first gained recognition after the publication
in 1947 of Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake.
International renown followed in 1957 after the publication of
Anatomy of Criticism, a work of theory which was to have
a colossal impact on a whole generation of critics. In the years
that followed, Frye also published further influential books on
literary theory as well as practical criticism on Shakespeare and
Milton. Toward the end of his life, he turned his energies to
studies of the Bible and literature. The Great Code
(1982) was followed by Words With Power, but none of
Frye’s books could eclipse the Anatomy, and
posterity regards Frye as the author of Anatomy of
Criticism.
- Northrop Frye began his studies at Victoria College in 1929
and graduated in 1933. He then embarked on theological training
at Emmanuel College which led to his ordination as a United
Church of Canada minister in 1936. Two periods of study at Merton
College, Oxford, followed before Frye finally became a full-time
member of the Victoria College faculty in 1939. By 1948 he was a
professor; in 1952 he became the head of the English department;
in 1959 he became principal of Victoria College; in 1967, he
became the first university professor at the University of
Toronto; and in 1978, he was appointed chancellor of Victoria
University.
- In her section of the introduction, Jean O’Grady sums
up the ambitions of the student radicals. ‘On the level of
studies and curriculum,’ she explains, ‘they demanded
a flexibility and a “relevance” […] On the
level of university policy, they wanted to co-opt the university
for a socially worthy aim’ (NFWE, p. xlv). The
whole purpose of education, from Frye's point of view, is "to
make one dissatisfied with one's environment, to compare the
bumbling and bungling world around us with the precision and
profundity of what, in the arts and sciences, the human mind
shows itself capable of doing" (NFWE, p. 321), and so the
student radicals' call for “relevance”was an
unappealing one for him. Frye was teaching at the University of
California, Berkley, in the spring of 1969 when police and
students clashed, and he reflects on the incidents in ”The
Day of Intellectual Battle” (NFWE, pp. 385-7). Frye
had no sympathy for the police who harassed ”ordinary
students” (NFWE, p. 386) that day: ”It was
the police who were rioting” (ibid.) he comments. But,
similarly, he had little sympathy for the ”agitators”
(ibid.), the S.D.S. (Students for a Democratic Society). For Frye
the conflict involved two groups who were against the
university.
- The ”myth of freedom” in Frye’s social
criticism is roughly the ”liberal” element in
society.
References
Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination (Toronto:
Canadian Broadcating Corp, 1963), p. 66.
Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye on Religion, ed. By Alvin
A. Lee and Jean O'Grady, Collected Works of Northrop Frye, Volume
4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), p. 46.
About the Reviewer
Brian Russell Graham is a Ph.D candidate at the Department
of English Literature, University of Glasgow. My thesis deals with
the works of Northrop Frye, and his philosophy of society. My other
research interests include the poetry of William Blake, the fiction
of Swift, Sterne and Fielding, and twentieth-century popular
literature.
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