Cambridge Before Darwin
The Ideal of a Liberal Education, 1800–1860

This major contribution to the intellectual history of Cambridge University takes as its main theme the rise of a specific educational ideal in early Victorian Cambridge.

Martha McMackin Garland (Author)

9780521079006, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 September 2008

208 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.31 kg

In this major contribution to the intellectual history of Cambridge University, Dr Garland takes as her main theme the rise of a specific educational ideal in early Victorian Cambridge, how it enjoyed a moment of triumph, and then how it fell under the impact of a new set of challenges. The story revolves around the careers of a group of 'conservative reformers', led by the Trinity dons Whewell and Sedgwick. They were the self-designated providers of a refurbished version of traditional Cambridge values in the new environment of a rapidly industrializing England, and took as their ideal a general unified core of knowledge based upon mathematics, classics and moral philosophy. They wished to retain this general structure because they believed it corresponded to the structure of the human mind and its mental faculties. For them, belief in the harmony of science and religion was part and parcel of their basically Broad Church religious views.

1. An academic ancien regime
2. Reform from within
3. Mathematics - the core of 'permanent studies'
4. Reaction against Paley and the Benthamites
5. Religion and literature: toward the Broad Church
6. The challenge of Darwin
7. The disintegration of an ideal.

Subject Areas: Higher & further education, tertiary education [JNM]