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.

Goldwin French is President Emeritus, Victoria University.

Goldwin Sylvester French's profile page

Northrop Frye (1912-1991) was one of the twentieth century's most influential English scholars and literary critics. Northrop Frye was a professor in the Department of English at Victoria University in the University of Toronto from 1939 until his death. His works include Words with Power and Anatomy of Criticism.

Estate of Northrop Frye's profile page

Jean O'Grady served as the associate editor of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. She also worked for nine years as a post-doctoral fellow on The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, and is the author of the biography of Margaret Addison, the first dean of women at Victoria College.

Jean O'Grady's profile page