From Two Cultures to No Culture: C. P. Snow's Two Cultures Lecture Fifty Years On (Paperback)

In 1959 C.P. Snow delivered the annual Rede Lecture in Cambridge under the title of 'The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution'. Snow warned of a gap that had opened up between scientists and the 'literary intellectuals' that made it almost impossible for the two groups to communicate. Snow complained that literary intellectuals were not only ignorant of science but contemptuous of it, as if scientific knowledge were unnecessary for a good education. Snow believed that improvements in the teaching of science were required in order to address the world's greatest problems, and that both the USA and the USSR were ahead of Britain in that respect. Snow spoke with the authority of a man with a foot in both camps, as a trained research scientist and a successful novelist, and his lecture provoked worldwide coverage. However, in 1962 it received an extraordinary response from the influential literary critic F.R. Leavis, who delivered an attack on Snow of unprecedented ferocity. The Snow/Leavis controversy has provoked debate ever since between the supporters of both men's positions as to the real purpose of education. Should science or the humanities be given precedence? Should education aim at the moral formation of the individual or address the world's practical problems? This volume contains two of the most articulate expositions of each point of view, by Roger Kimball and Raymond Tallis. Frank Furedi considers the implications of Snow's lecture for the current education debate, while Robert Whelan argues that the choice is no longer between two cultures but between an education system based on academic rigour and no culture at all.

Frank Furedi is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury. His research is oriented towards the study of the impact of precautionary culture and risk aversion on Western societies. In his books he has explored controversies and panics over issues such as health, children, food and cultural life. His writings express a concern with the prevailing regime of cultural confusion towards valuing intellectual and artistic pursuits and with the difficulty that society has in providing a challenging education for children and young people. His books include: Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right (2005); Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? Confronting 21st Century Philistinism (2005); Therapeutic Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Anxious Age (2004); Culture of Fear (2002); Paranoid Parenting (2001); and Invitation to Terror (2007). His new book Lost in Education will be published in 2009. Roger Kimball is co editor and publisher of The New Criterion and president and publisher of Encounter Books. He contributes to many periodicals and newspapers in the United States and the UK and writes a regular column for PajamasMedia at http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball. He lectures widely and is the author of several books, including The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art; Lives of The Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee, 2002); The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (Encounter Books, 2000); and Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, a new edition of which was published in 2008. Raymond Tallis was Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester from 1988 to 2006. He was elected Fellow of the Academy of Sciences for his research into stroke, epilepsy and neurological rehabilitation. He has honorary degrees of Doctor of Letters from the Universities of Hull (1998) and Manchester (2002) for his writings on philosophy, literature and cultural criticism. His most recent books are The Enduring Significance of Parmenides: Unthinkable Thought (Continuum, 2007); The Kingdom of Infinite Space (Atlantic, 2008); and Hunger (Acumen, 2008). He is the author of two volumes of poetry and his investigation into pointing, Michelangelo s Finger, is to be published by Atlantic in 2009. Robert Whelan is the deputy director of Civitas. His publications include The Corrosion of Charity (1996); Octavia Hill and the Social Housing Debate (ed.) (1998); Wild In Woods: The Myth of the Noble Eco Savage (1999); Involuntary Action: How Voluntary is the Voluntary Sector? (1999); and Helping the Poor: Friendly Visiting, Dole Charities and Dole Queues (2001). His edition of Octavia Hill's Letters to Fellow Workers, 1872 1911, co edited with Anne Anderson, was published in 2005, and he also edited The Corruption of the Curriculum in 2007. He is managing director of the New Model School Company, set up by supporters of Civitas in 2003 to bring independent schooling within the reach of more parents, and he teaches English to Bengali students at a Saturday school in London's East End.