Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education

This volume brings together 95 different pieces on education by Northrop Frye, dating from 1931 to 1989. It traces Frye’s thinking about education from his student days through the campus unrest of the 1960s and the more recent budgetary crises facing higher education in Canada. Frye’s consistent affirmation that the goal of a liberal education is to make one maladjusted may give some hint as to the richness and variety of the writings collected here. Among the range of subjects that Frye addresses are teaching (from kindergarten to university), literary studies, the nature of the university, student radicalism, educational policy and procedure, and particular occasions in the life of Victoria University. The volume includes articles, speeches, reports, a short book, introductions, letters to the editor, and some obscure and newly discovered texts. As former students and colleagues of Frye, the editors have brought personal as well as scholarly knowledge to the volume. Each provides part of the introduction: the first placing the works in the context of Frye’s biography and the changes in university education over his lifetime; the other discussing them theoretically and in relation to his ideas about literature and the imagination. Frye was influential not only as a theorist of education but as a teacher and administrator. His writings on education are a central part of his life’s work, and no Frye scholar or enthusiast should be without them.