Word: oakeshott
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...year for Britain's heavily taxed middle-and upper-class parents to insure that their sons can wear the brown, red and black Winchester tie. Though this year there were ten applicants for every opening in the school, Winchester's slight, spectacled Headmaster Walter Fraser Oakeshott knows that the school will somehow have to broaden its student base to keep going in Socialist Britain...
...make a start, Oakeshott in 1946 got a promise of financial aid from the local school board and reserved 25 places at slightly reduced fees (?226) for boys from state-financed primary schools. But of the 40 examined, only three could pass the entrance exams, with their emphasis on Latin and Greek. In 1947, 25 were examined and none could pass: Winchester still had to draw its new boys from private primary schools. Last year again no qualified students were found among the state-school applicants. Oakeshott's proposed solution: better education in the government's schools. "Then...
...scholars," has five or six assistants in each of the ten dormitories. Under this system, which was started by the boys themselves to fill a vacuum left by a lax faculty some 250 years ago, Winchester's cloistered walls seldom echo to serious trouble. Says Headmaster Oakeshott: "The boys seem to accept the proposition that there are certain things which are just not done, not from a fear of punishment, but from a desire to conform to tradition...
Other critics of Britain's universities disagree. Editor Michael Oakeshott, in the Cambridge Journal, argues that no new tradition is needed, that the most a university has to give is "the gift of an interval ... a break in the tyrannical course of irreparable events...
...real crisis, Oakeshott holds, is somewhat different. "In the past, a rising class was aware of something valuable enjoyed by others which it wished to share; but this is not so today. The leaders of the rising class are consumed with a contempt for everything which does not spring from their own desires, they are convinced in advance that they have nothing to learn and everything to teach, and consequently their aim is loot-to appropriate to themselves the organization, the shell of the institution, and convert it to their own purposes. The problem of the universities today...