Brian Crittenden’s book, Education for Rational Understanding, is a defence of liberal education. By a liberal education Crittenden means an induction into the principal modes of understanding and evaluation which have evolved in our culture with the aim of enabling human beings ‘to act in the light of rules and standards that they apply with understanding and discrimination’, thus setting them ‘free from prejudice, ignorance, blind feeling, dull imagination and irrational action’. At the secondary-school level, the aim should be adapted to the needs of the majority of students, and so should be ‘to provide a systematic introduction to the major modes of thought, not as a prelude to the professional life of a scholar but for an intelligent participation in the critical and reflective domains of culture’.
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