He wrote volumes on education but don’t expect the books of Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) to show up on an education school’s library shelves.
For one thing, he noted that “it is almost impossible to learn to read from contemporary writing,” and that was when contemporary writing was a lot better.
Many would-be education reformers and activists would do well to cogitate over Oakeshott’s ideas. “The pursuit of learning is not a race in which competitors jockey for the best place, it is not even an argument or a symposium; it is a conversation,” Oakeshott stated. “And the peculiar virtue of a university (as a place of many studies) is to exhibit it in this character, each study appearing as a voice whose tone is neither tyrannous nor plangent, but humble and conversable.”
