Education: Hope or Despair?

"An unspoilt youth . . . with his mind just waking up and his feelings all fresh and open to the good," Essayist G. Lowes Dickinson once wrote, "is the most beautiful thing this world produces."

What happens to the unspoilt youth when he gets to college has moved Sir Walter Moberly, ex-professor of philosophy at Birmingham University and one of Britain's top educators, to write a book called The Crisis in the University. Britons have decided that it is one of the most thoughtful, responsible critiques of the British university since John Henry Newman's Idea of a University. By last week...