Classicist

All Oxford knows it has a vice-chancellor, and that the vice-chancellor runs the University,* but few can tell his name. Ask an unsuspecting undergraduate who Sir Richard Livingstone is and the chances are he will murmur something about Stanley in Africa. Last week, as Oxford slumbered in the "long vac" and Sir Richard hied himself to Ireland for a holiday, the Atlantic Monthly gave its U.S. readers (who know him even less than Oxonians do) a chance to meet one of education's most articulate thinkers.

Modern schooling makes him shudder. Curricula, for one thing, are much too cluttered. Argues Sir Richard: "Education prospers by exclusion. Overcrowding in education, as in housing, turns the school into an intellectual slum." He would have young students concentrate on two or three subjects as mental disciplines, and leave most history and literature for adults. The boy of 14 (school-leaving age of 80% of Britons) lacks the "experience of life" he needs to get the most out of these studies.

Repair Omissions, Fill Gaps. Sir Richard, who recognizes the fact that education is a lifelong process, is one of adult education's most persuasive salesmen. He believes in a special kind--"not only for those who have missed a complete education, but also for those who have received one." He would have Anglo-Saxon countries take a lesson from Denmark's "people's high schools," which are not high schools but residential colleges for adults. There men & women in their late twenties leave their jobs for three or five months, to study the humanities and live a community life. Says Sir Richard: "[Only in this way can everyone] repair the omissions and fill the gaps of early education, think afresh about the problems of politics, morals, religion [and] keep abreast of the current. . . . Human beings, like motorcars, need reconditioning."

The Livingstone credo: "The prior task of education is to inspire, and to give a sense of values and the power of distinguishing . . . what is first-rate from what is not." He restates his counsel of perfection in this month's Atlantic essay (originally a lecture at Toronto's Victoria College). Says he: "Always, soon or late, humanity turns to excellence as naturally as a flower turns to the sun: mankind crucifies Christ and kills Socrates, and they die amid derision and hatred; but in the end they receive the homage of the world. . . . To see the vision of excellence ... is to take seriously the tremendous words of Christ: 'Be ye therefore perfect. . . .' "

This Hellenic salt and Christian pepper have seasoned all of Sir Richard's life & thought. Son of an Anglican canon, a classics don since his Oxford graduation (1903) and onetime vice-chancellor of Belfast University, Sir Richard at 65 is a man with a straggly mustache, pink complexion and owlish eyes peering over gold-rimmed spectacles. Livingstone stalks across the Oxford quadrangles, mortarboard jammed squarely on his thinning hair, his black M.A. gown flowing, his chin thrust well forward.

Plato with Honey. Most undergraduates have few dealings with the-vice-chancellor--from the moment he matriculates them at the start of their university careers until, some three years later, he drones out a Latin benediction, bangs them on the head, and hands them their degrees. But those "up at Bodders" (i.e., studying at Oxford's Corpus Christi College, where he is president) occasionally breakfast with Sir Richard and Lady Livingstone at their baronial lodge. While his listeners polish off jars of honey (he keeps hives because he likes honey and because bees are so important in classical literature) Sir Richard talks "nothing but Plato and Aristotle."

Many a Corpus man is a veteran, for the war's end converted Oxford into a strange combination of unlicked cubs fresh from public schools and older men just back from the wars. When one of these veterans "went down" (left Oxford) to enlist, Sir Richard said that if he were heading for the trenches his knapsack would contain a copy of Thucydides in the original Greek. In view of the speed of modern warfare, he added, thoughtfully, a man might be justified in taking the Loeb translation.

*The chancellorship, an honorary post, is currently held by the Earl of Halifax, former Ambassador to the U.S. The vice-chancellorship, usually held for three years, rotates by seniority among the heads of Oxford colleges.

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