Homeschooling High School: Planning Ahead for College Admission Book

Ortega's "Mission of the University" was first published in 1930, but is just as relevant today as it was 83 years ago. Ortega argues that the primary purpose of the university is the educate ordinary students to be cultured/enlightened people and to prepare them for the real world of professional life. He argues against the trend that a university eduction should produce scientists, those engaged in investigatory pursues as a profession. Culture, according to Ortega, consists of those vital elements that make up life: the practice of medicine, law, business, government, education, art. Science, on the other hand, consists of non-vital elements of life: discovering truths about medicine, law, business, government, eduction, art. The difference is in the living. As he puts it: "Science is not something by which we live. If the physicist had to live by the ideas of his science, you may res assured that he would not be so finicky as to wait for some other investigator to complete his research a century or so later. He would renounce the hope of a complete scientific solution, and fill in, with approximate or probable anticipations, what the rigorous corpus of physical doctrine lacks at present, and in part, always will lack.... Science is indifferent to he exigencies of our life, and follows its own necessities."

What Ortega decried in 1930 (and would decry today) is that the university is trying to produce scientists, since it requires of its professors not to educate as much as do research. But life isn't made up of science, of the disciple to always ask questions and prove hypothesis, but of those who practice the arts of culture. And in this, I think Ortega's book is a needed reminder of the university's mission.