A Liberal Education: Knowing What to Resist.

The worries, the studies, the taxes, and the activities employed to reform education at each level are vain unless and until we recapture the purpose and content of liberal education. Modernity's success in health and welfare has not, it seems, been met with a similar success in education. The public memory of the twentieth century, especially its last thirty-five years, froths with enacted proposals and justifications for reform with such ideas as "progressive" education, charter schools, affirmative action, vouchers, "headstart," higher standards, testing, multiculturalism, high culture, popular culture, global village studies, sex education, and much more. Just name the idea, and its acolytes have rushed in to support it with their hubris up and their hands out, notwithstanding the inverse proportion of taxes spent to results achieved. But if we are serious about recapturing the purpose and content of liberal education, a good start would be to subordinate process to substance so as to arrest the futility. This is the revolution, if we are to have one,that must occur. And it must continue modestly with the making of a few distinctions and not with fatuous and febrile exhortations about education for the twenty-first century or for the millennium. It surely will not occur with the now rebarbative appeals to innovative and creative theories of education--as if 2,500 years of history had taught us nothing or that current and future technology could transmogrify into substance.

Motives and Ends

The first distinction signifies the real difference between the motives for going to college or university on one hand and the primary goal of colleges and universities on the other. In most cases the motives, those of the students and their families, can be formulated as the attempt to improve their economic and social conditions through the avenue of higher education. This attempt is both understandable and even laudable as the reason for going to college and university. It is not, however, the primary goal of these institutions. Nevertheless, it is consistent with their secondary goals, which are to provide students with those skills and techniques required in the world of work. But that world of work, whether it be commerce or government, can not and should not command or determine the primary goal of liberal education. Nor should those who form opinion in society always be trusted to designate the primary goal of liberal education. This includes those intellectuals who consider themselves progressive and are often found on college and university faculties. Indeed, they are now even in charge of them. Such intellectuals conceive of liberal education as redemption from poverty and suffering and, admittedly at times, even ignorance. They conceive of colleges and universities as instruments of social transformation or psychological therapy. As such these intellectuals appear righteous, but their influence has turned those institutions into degenerative instruments of their own primary goals. Colleges and universities are neither hospitals nor social clinics; nor are they churches of either the religious or secular kind. The transformation that coincides with the primary end of institutions of higher learning is the cultivation of the students' minds primarily, then derivatively their hearts and their actions in such a manner as befits liberally educated persons. It is with this end that colleges and universities prepare their students, not merely as business managers, lawyers, priests, physicians, accountants or teachers, but as human beings precisely in their humanity.

The Nature and End of Liberal Education

Liberal education, which lies at the center of every institution of higher education worthy of the name, commits that institution to excellence. As such, liberal education is that systematic cultivation of those qualities that make human beings excellent: reason and the freedom grounded in that reason. Those who believe otherwise, as Pascal once did when he said "the heart has its reasons which reason does not know," will have to bear with him the burden of that weighty paradox.

Liberal education begins with one's family and one's ethnic tradition without forgetting them, as a snob would do, and moves toward the human heritage. In this transition the student moves back and forth from societas to civilitas, from society to civilization. The important aspect and specific difference of college or university education is that it builds upon, then moves beyond primary and secondary education. At the first two levels, students are formed and informed about their own culture in a process begun in the family. They are, on those levels, to be trained in those basic and necessary skills in language and computation through which they will act as workers and citizens and by which they are prepared to learn the more specialized skills of their professions.

The college education continues this liberation from ignorance on one hand and also from an unconscious dependence upon authority and traditions on the other. It is both, again to use Latin roots, educare, to rear and to bring up, and educere, to lead out to go forth. The movement from the ethnic to human heritage is analogous to the movement of learning, which begins in perceptions and opinions and tends toward truth and knowledge. While the quest for knowledge does not forget its origin in perceptions and opinions, so too the quest for the human as such does not forget its beginnings in ethnicity, race, sex, or class. For human beings are not angels; nor are they gnostic caricatures. They are not minds trapped in bodies; nor are they mindless bodies. But they are, mirabile dictu, human, and this means that they cannot and must not be restricted to the particularities of ethnicity, race, sex, or class.