My latest in the American News, some of which has appeared here previously:
We are often lectured about the importance of education. Yet how often do we pause to consider what education is for?
We often speak of a “liberal education.” Liberal, of course, is related to liberty. Thus a liberal education is one that is fit for a free person.
Political philosopher Leo Strauss defined liberal education as "experience in things beautiful." Strauss worried that democracy has a tendency toward the mediocre. A liberal education should thus remind the citizens of the democracy that there are higher, more beautiful things than satisfying immediate interest or pleasure. Liberated from ignorance and with one's character molded by the highest and most beautiful, one is able to use one's freedom well.
One of Strauss's students and later a colleague, Herbert Storing, argued that for most people Strauss's version liberal education is either beyond their capacity or of little use. For them, the truly liberal education might be one that teaches them useful skills so they can provide for themselves. Able to provide for themselves, they are now capable of being free men.
Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia, saw value in both these views of education. The "primary" education for citizens, Jefferson suggests, should include both the skills needed to provide for one's self (arithmetic and literacy, for example), but also, through reading, education should "improve...his morals" and help him "understand his duties to his neighbors and country." A good student should be morally decent, have good manners, be patriotic and be able to provide for himself. One is not free if one cannot control one's passions and appetites, nor is one free if one is dependent on others for one's well-being.
Jefferson's goals for higher education are similar. For example, one goal of higher education is “To harmonize and promote the interests of agriculture, manufactures and commerce and by well informed views of political economy to give a free scope to the public industry.” Also, the university should “develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order.”
Once again, we see a combination of practicality and refinement. University-educated citizens are the leaders of society. Thus they need to know the grand theories of the political, mathematical and physical sciences (including agriculture), but also but also they should "cultivate their morals" along with cultivating the soil. Their education should help them be "examples of virtue to others."
Do our schools educate toward creating free citizens? We cannot exist without the aid of others, yet the truly dependent person is not really a free person, thus not a true citizen. Ignorant of history and the examples of literature, unable to intelligently assess the competing claims of rivals for power, the non-liberally educated are easy prey for demagogues. Also, without basic life skills, like those taught in the old industrial education, folks must depend on others to provide the essentials of life.
A citizen is able to govern himself, thus earning the right to take active part in a self-governing society. A subject, on the other hand, is literally subjected to the rule of others. The purpose of education is not, as we often have it, to make good producers and consumers of our young, to make them “marketable.” Instead, as Jefferson would have it, the purpose of education is to educate a citizen fit for self-government.
We should ask whether we are educating citizens or just a generation of subjects.
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