The purpose of this paper is to illuminate the question of freedom and authority as it relates to the formal education of children in schools. My focus will be narrow, largely ignoring many of the important conceptualanalytic problems inherent in the use of the two terms. Instead, I will concentrate on issues suggested by the preference of professional educators for educational theories which appear to support granting more or less freedom for the child, or authority for the teacher. I will argue that the preference among educators for either freedom or authority is one of a cluster of logically related preferences which are essentially methodological or procedural in nature, and that such a set of preferences is relatively superficial, unstable, and, in fact, unimportant in comparison with other relevant aspects of a personal belief system. To elucidate and support this argument, I refer to a conceptual-analytic model of modern educational theories (that is, theories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), and to the results of a recent University of Alberta study of student and teacher attitudes toward education. In conclusion, I suggest that if the issue of freedom and authority is to acquire genuine theoretical significance, it must be viewed not merely in a procedural and pedagogical context, but rather in relation to the content of education, and to the ultimate metaphysical, epistemological, perhaps even theological beliefs and commitments which that content implies.

Review of Patrizia Bettella, The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Univ. of Toronto Press, 2005); Nicola McDonald, ed., Medieval Obscenities (Boydell Press, 2006); Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (Zone Books, 2006); and Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Boydell Press, 2006).

Increasing pessimism about the state of liberal education has characterized the history of American higher education in the twentieth century. The multiplicity of complaints can be boiled down to two specific indictments. First, liberal education is insubstantial. It bears little relation to a cultural life beyond the campus. Students have small use for and derive little benefit from the knowledge they acquire in undergraduate courses, except insofar as it happens to prepare them for some vocation; otherwise college education tends to be irrelevant. Second, college education is incoherent. Prevailing beliefs about the character of worthwhile learning bear little resemblance to the daily activities of undergraduates. Most faculty members would like to see undergraduates trained in the habits of scholarly inquiry.' But most of the training undergraduates actually receive is in activities popularly called bullshitting and regurgitation. Consequently it is widely felt that students are not really being educated. Unsatisfactory relations between undergraduates and their teachers are often cited as the root of the problem. There is a great gulf between college students and their research-oriented professors. Even relations between undergraduates and the instructors and teaching assistants who directly supervise their work are transitory, perfunctory, and impersonal. Impersonality, worst in the large state universities, plagues every institution to some degree. These conditions are usually ascribed to the invasion of the masses into colleges and universities. There is a myth that in the nineteenth century when college students were a small elite liberal learning flourished, but that now democracy has triumphed over excellence.2 Though there is a grain of truth in this, it is only a small part of the story. Actually, though enrollments have grown enormously, faculty growth has kept pace. The current student-faculty ratio is not appreciably different from the ratio of a century ago-about nine to one.3 The real cause of today's impersonal relations and the disintegration of liberal education lies in the uneven historical development of the roles of student and teacher. To grasp the meaning of this, one