Woodrow Wilson on Education

In this 1960 article Isaiah Berlin compares Woodrow Wilson's emphasis on the need to educate university students for life in the real world with the difference between Oxford 'realism' and Cambridge 'idealism' in the nineteenth century. Oxford favoured a Wilsonian preference for general education over (but not to the exclusion of) pure scholarship, and Cambridge the cultivation of private life and personal relationships. Both universities were opposed to the excessive specialisation that Wilson deprecated.