A wheel turning full circle

From the Scottish Enlightenment to the United States and back

Thinking about Adam Smith’s work all through last week, it now seems that everything relates to him. I was very taken with Prof. Heather Cox Richardson’s account of the British Army’s evacuation from Boston in March 1776. The British commander, General William Howe, ordered his forces’ withdrawal on 10th March, the day after The Wealth of Nations was finally published, with arguments that the colonists’ cause was just and that they would secure their independence. Smith’s judicious timing helped to ensure good sales.

Another two articles made me think of Smith. Here, from the rhetoric expert Jay Heinrichs, Do the Humanities Have a Future in the Age of AI? while on LinkedIn, David Jaeger of the University of St Andrews responded to Juergen Bracht’s claim that the postgraduate public policy degree is uniquely American.

The main quadrangle of Robert Adam’s Old College at the University of Edinburgh

Juergen Bracht, from his base at the University of Aberdeen, suggested that there are important differences in the origins of German, British and American universities. In his characterisation, German universities emphasised scholarship (with the state training its own managers separately), while in Britain (Oxford and Cambridge), graduates with a general education then entered the civil service, acquiring skills in administration through employment. That left the United States to develop postgraduate training in professions within the university sector - with David Jaeger claiming that the University of St Andrews is following in that tradition with its new Master of Public Policy.

Interesting that an academic working at a Scottish university would refer to a ‘British’ system - when for 250 years, there were more universities in Scotland than in England, with Scots, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries, looking not to England but to the world’s richest territories, the Netherlands, as the fount of useful ideas about how to organise education. Scottish university education gradually encompassed medicine and science. When thinking of Adam Smith writing The Wealth of Nations in Kirkcaldy, I imagine him looking out from his house to where the waters of the Firth of Forth lapped against the end of his garden and seeing not a barrier, but rather the highway to Europe and those vital intellectual connections.

Jay Heinrichs was also thinking about university education, making the argument that with the emergence of AI, people will need more, not less, grounding in the liberal arts and humanities. Looking back to the medieval division of academic learning into the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric and the quadrivium of music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, he concluded:

My suggestion: A New Trivium. Here’s a slide show I did for a lecture in Chicago years ago. A New Trivium major would graduate with some sophistication in argumentation and collaboration (Rhetoric), communication across space and time (Grammar), and discrimination (Logic as well as “decision metrics.”)

(I strongly suggest following the link to the slide show - that’s where the interesting ideas about the content and approach of the new trivium are to be found. It would be excellent preparation for the Masters of Public Policy.)

Adam Smith was of course immersed in the trivium and the quadrivium from his youth. Returning to Scotland from studies at Oxford, he lectured on rhetoric and belles lettres before becoming professor of logic and then moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He wrote a “History of Astronomy”, relating his epistemology to aesthetics. And specifically on education, he foresaw the need for craft workers, especially in emerging industries, to understand arithmetic and geometry. (That idea was quickly taken up. I used to work at Heriot-Watt University, whose origins go back to the School of Arts in Edinburgh, founded in 1821 “for the instruction of mechanics in such branches of physical science as are of practical application in their several trades”.)

In The Wealth of Nations, we find plenty of stories but little quantitative data. The concept of statistics was just emerging in Germany, so when Smith’s correspondent, the liberal landowner Sir John Sinclair, began his work on the "Statistical Accounts" in 1790, the year in of Smith’s death, no one understood well what might count as useful data. Hence the "Old Statistical Accounts" are rich in narrative, with its (plentiful) numerical data difficult to retrieve from the surrounding text. My Heriot-Watt colleague Arnab Bhattacharjee has noted that Scots took this method of collecting data around the Empire and even to some former colonies. In launching the MPP programme at St Andrews, David Jaeger is perhaps less introducing a transplant than reconnecting with an ancient tradition. Seeking to include data analytics in his new trivium, Jay Henrichs is proposing an intelligent modern approach to data literacy and its uses in illuminating powerful arguments.

But there is perhaps more. John Witherspoon, President of Princeton College was the only ordained minister and the only Scot to sign the American Declaration of Independence. Finally persuaded to leave his ministry in Paisley in 1768, partly because of his disagreements with the Moderate Party in the Church of Scotland, he nonetheless took with him many of the ideas of the leading Moderate, Principal William Robertson of the University of Edinburgh. In effect, Witherspoon took ideas about curriculum development from the Scottish Enlightenment to the American colonies. That makes it arguable that the American concept of a liberal arts degree emerged from the Scottish debates about how to improve society in the third quarter of the 19th century. Americans could build on European traditions which were distinct from both German and English practice.

This is a very good time for us to remember how old Scottish debates on the nature of education influenced developments in other places. The Smith on Education conversation in the Library of Mistakes in Edinburgh last week confirmed that in the much needed reform process for Scottish higher education, the first need is to agree upon the purposes of the education system. People with the capabilities developed in a Masters of Public Policy should have an important role in that debate. If we understand the purpose of education once again as being to equip people to live well as active citizens in the society which seems to be emerging today, then there is much worth considering in Jay Henrichs’ ideas.