On a Liberal Education

that is, one that sets us free, on the Feast of the arrival of the Wise Men from the East:

...In what does a liberal education consist but those things we are not at liberty to omit? And why is that? Because, at the deepest level, such things determine what it means to be human, i.e., free. Here are things which aspire to the highest possible perfection of the human personality, the pursuit of intellectual excellence for its own sake. There is the operative phrase, the crucial distinction at the heart of what a liberal education aims to accomplish. To use the language of Newman, "there is a knowledge worth possessing for what it is, and not merely for what it does..."

What ought the governing question to be? Why not ask to what extent this or that proposed course is likely to touch upon the most elemental dimension of the human person? Will it promote the desire to know the truth, the aspiration to do the good, the capacity to take delight in the beautiful? These transcendental pursuits are precisely what warrant the existence of a liberal education in the first place. And to that end courses in theology, philosophy, literature, history, natural science, music and art ought to be found at the center of the curriculum.

Asked once which books young people ought to read, the philosopher George Santayana said that it didn't matter so long as they all read the same ones. Can it be so hard to come up with a provisional list? While perfect curricular consensus may be quixotic, could not a cross section of our own University faculty produce a handful of books every student should be expected to read? Do not in fact such texts come almost trippingly off the tongue? After all, didn't we have to read them?...

Missing out on such stories and songs and speculations, the stuff of who we are and where we come from, is tantamount to a loss of complete civilizational identity. Why would a University want to deprive its students of so basic a patrimony? Why would it wish to commit suicide in this way? An education unmindful of the whole of human experience, of the best that has been thought and said, can only be contemptuous of the students it is charged with teaching. As Lionel Trilling once put it: "The best citizen is the person who has learned from the great minds and souls of the past how beautiful reason and virtue are and how difficult to attain." Or, to quote an old professor's pithy definition: the ideal citizen, he said, is someone who, in a pinch, could re-found his civilization. Are we preparing our students to become citizens in this way?...