Aldous Huxley’s first eight Human Situation lectures connect education, nature, art, population, human individuality, nationalism and the future of civilization.
Aldous Huxley — 4 recordings in the archive.
Related reading: The Human Situation by Aldous Huxley.
Next: The Human Situation (Part II)
Mr. Vice Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen, I confess I feel a considerable apprehension at finding myself in this novel situation of being a professor. However, I'm slightly comforted by the qualification of this title, which is professor at large, which is a a nice old-fashioned phrase which used above all to be applied to escape lunatics. One used to be told if one walked near an asylum, be careful, there are lunatics at large. And another thing which comforts me is this that although as we all know a little learning is a dangerous thing. We can also say that a great deal of learning which now now especially means a great deal of highly specialized learning a great deal of learning is also a dangerous thing and maybe sometimes even more dangerous than a little learning. Indeed, this has become one of the major problems of higher education now is how to reconcile the claims of much learning which is essentially specialized learning with the claims of little learning which is the wider but shallower approach to human problems in general. And this of course is by no means a modern problem. I can quote a rather interesting example in this field from the case of my grandfather th Huxley who was a man who was never happy unless he was doing about three or four whole-time jobs at once and among his whole jobs in the 1870s was the creation of of modern English education he worked a great deal on the elementary education and secondary education in London. And he did a great deal too to turn London University into a modern university, that is to say, into a university with a high degree of specialization in its various fields. But the interesting thing is that before he died, a few years before he died in the early '9s, he was already deeply preoccupied with the problem of excessive specialization. And about about three years before he died, he actually worked out a plan for trying to coordinate the various specialized departments in the University of London so as to create some kind of integrated education. Well, I need hardly say the plan was never put into effect and the problem of integrated education remains exactly as it was. It's a problem which concerns everybody in the field and a number of attempts have been made of…