john gibbins, old studies and new
This was Gibbins’ contribution to a collection of essays on The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain. In it, he argues for the importance of the curriculum in organising academic and intellectual life in the later nineteenth century.
The curriculum was important, argues Gibbins, because it was the architecture that defined what constituted knowledge, and how it was reproduced, through teaching. Through control of the syllabus, or canon, universities had the power to control the structure and shape of knowledge
Picking up on the debates about the professionalisation of academic life, Gibbins further argues that nineteenth cenury universities gained control over the organisation, production and reproduction of knowledge. The partnership of universities with the professions and social elites in this area made it difficult for ‘amateurs’ or individual ‘sages’ to compete in transmitting their ideas without gaining authority through inclusion in the curriculum and reproduction through teaching.
Gibbins makes a useful contribution to the debate on the nineteenth century university by pointing to the importance of the architecture of the curriculum as well as individual ideas, books or thinkers. However, I am not sure that the situation was as cut and dried as Gibbins suggests (necessarily within the confines of a short article). The delineation of university don and individual sage was becoming more defined during this period, but that boundary was still permeable, with societies and journals as well as family connections providing substantive points of intersection. There is also little mention of the definition of the authority of the university alongside that of the Church. This is a notable period in the exploration of the definition of authority in science and religion, but no substantive allusion to this is made.
Gibbins uses a couple of case studies in support of his argument, most notably the work of John Grote and Mark Pattison in exploring the nature of education and how it should prepare students for vocational or professional life. In the face of national pressure on the universities, these were men who argued that the best way for education to be professionally relevant was for it to teach studens how to think, to argue and to write. The object of study was more important than the approach – not only is this an example that supports Gibbins’ hypothesis about the importance of curriculum and the structure of knowledge, but it also allows him a segue to the current day debates where universities’ authority in structuring and conveying knowledge is being challenged.
