It has been said that Oakeshott's educated person is one who possesses a Keatsian negative capability. If this is so, it simply shows how much positive content is required by an apparently negative virtue, and how this negative virtue in fact embodies the whole of human culture and learning. Oakeshott's own ideas on education flow from his general view of human experience, though they are not wholly dependent on them. In fact they represent the twentieth-century's most sophisticated articulation of the traditional conception of liberal learning. On the other hand, those who find the educational views congenial may be led by that route to examine Oakeshott's other philosophical and political views in order to see one way in which a theory of liberal learning can be given a philosophical context.
Oakeshott's educational writings have been usefully collected in a volume entitled The Voice of Liberal Learning, Timothy Fuller (ed.), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. All references are to this volume.
In this book: Wittgenstein