The Limits of Aesthetic Separatism: literary education and Michael Oakeshott's philosophy of art

Abstract

The belief that literature can teach us something about life is intuitively plausible but there is a view of literary education that would preclude a teacher from making a direct link between imaginative literature and life. A comprehensive epistemological position that supports this view is to be found in the work of Michael Oakeshott. In challenging this theory of literary education and the philosophy of knowledge that informs it, the article discloses in Oakeshott's work evidence of a more nuanced and defensible view of the role of literature in education.