Higher Education Policy 15 (2002) 61 – 75 www.elsevier.com/locate/highedpol The future of general education in mass higher education systems Peter Scott * Kingston University, 53-57 High Street, Kingston-upon-Thames KT1 1LQ, UK 1. Introduction The synergies—but also, perhaps the contradictions—between general education and mass higher education are the subject of this article. 1 Are they complementary ideas because mass higher education must inevitably be general (at least in the sense that it is not specialist in academic and= or scientic terms; mass education can—all too easily?—be specialist in vocational terms)? Have notions of general education, which in  elite higher education provided the foundations on which more specialist academic and professional superstructures were built, become pervasive in mass systems—arguably rendering the term itself redundant? Or are the opposed ideas because general education is convergent inevitably espousing generic, even holistic, approaches of learning, while mass education is divergent instinctively endorsing eclectic, even chaotic, approaches? These are the issues, and some others, that will explored here. General education has manifested itself in three main historical forms. The rst was as liberal education most pronounced within the Anglo-Saxon—or, more precisely, the English (and British-Imperial)—university traditions (Rothblatt, 1993). The second was as bildung (for which “formation” is an entirely inadequate English translation) within the continental European university tradition, particularly in Germany, Scandinavia, the Low Countries and parts of eastern Europe (Liedman, 1993). The third was as general education—Gen. Ed.—as it developed within the American higher education system. It is tempting to label these three forms as respectively aristocratic (because liberal education in the English mode was intimately linked to the formation of a governing class, at home and in the empire); cultural (because bildung was associated rst with Biedermeier culture and later with more vigorous denitions of Kultur and the growth * Tel.: +1-20-8547-7001; fax: +1-20-8547-7009. E-mail address: p.scott@kingston.ac.uk (P. Scott). 1 This article is based on the Laurier lecture given at Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario in March 2001 on the topic “Is Liberal Education Possible or Desirable in an Age of Mass Higher Education?” 0952-8733/02/$22.00 c  2002 International Association of Universities. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII:S0952-8733(01)00036-8