The Making of an Academic Rebel

The Early Years

Donald Bligh was born in 1936, the youngest of five children. His father — a headmaster he feared and hated — expected scholastic success as a matter of course. His mother was a different kind of force entirely: a gas engineer by research, a local politician, a moral welfare worker, and a deaconess cycling the streets of London into her late eighties. Her reforming zeal, her instinct to challenge the Establishment, left their mark.

Yet the young Donald found there were opinions it was better not to challenge. Schools were places of discipline and fear. In silent rebellion, he studied just enough to stay out of trouble. At sixteen, after failing his exams, he was told he was not university material. He trained as a teacher instead.

"I was interested in the truth wherever I could find it — but not in subjective opinions and appearances."

The Philosophical Turn

As a teenager, still vacillating over religious belief, Bligh chanced upon a line in A.N. Whitehead's Adventure of Ideas: that theory dictates method and the relevance of evidence. He concluded the opposite — that method dictates the relevance of evidence, and consequently any theory built on it. This single insight became the springboard for everything that followed.

He graduated eventually in geography, then in philosophy and psychology. Alasdair MacIntyre sharpened his interest in whether morals could be grounded in facts alone. Professor Brian Foss showed him that psychologists could talk past one another entirely when relying on incompatible methods. By the 1960s, Bligh had arrived at a clear conviction: education would come to depend on neurophysiology, and scientific determinism would require a radical rethinking of justice and punishment.

The Academic Career

University teacher training didn't exist yet — but Bligh knew it would come, and he spent years preparing. He taught a wide range of subjects to adult learners. He observed, developed, and assessed teachers of physical medicine. Then, after joining the staff of London's Institute of Education, he published his first book in 1971.

What's the Use of Lectures? was an instant success. It became a classic almost immediately — earning Bligh a worldwide reputation and remaining, forty years later, unrivalled in its field. Other books followed. He was consulted internationally until his retirement, moving from Exeter to Dundee (where he served as Professor of Continuing Education and Head of Education) to Moray House Edinburgh as Assistant Principal, and finally back to Exeter as an Honorary Research Fellow.

The Long Quest

Dominated by others in his early life, Bligh developed an intense inner world — working out everything for himself, in his own language, in images or in none at all. His forthcoming book, Explaining Everything!, is the outcome of seventy years of that silent, solitary quest. It has never previously been expressed.

His career broadened his academic interests to every university discipline — their methods of enquiry, and how they relate. He took what he called an aerial view of human knowledge. He developed "cognipathy": the ability to think in the same patterns as the colleague he was trying to help. He predicted the knowledge explosion that followed when biology, chemistry, and medicine began to converge.

Explaining Everything! provides an overview of knowledge from methodological viewpoints. It explores how ideas relate. It will broaden the outlook of intending undergraduates. It opens a contemporary neuroscientific view of old philosophical problems — and it remains, at its heart, a personal testimony.