Liberal Education, That Vexed Thing

John Agresto: The Death of Learning: How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What To Do About It. New York: Encounter Books, 2022.

 

In the United States, “the halcyon days of liberal education are over,” John Agresto writes, citing the facts: the business of America being business, “by far the foremost major chosen by undergraduates is business, and “almost 50 percent of all students focus on just five areas: business, education, computer science/technology, engineering, and the health professions.” In graduate schools, education and business predominate. Only five percent of U.S. institutions of higher education are small, residential, liberal arts colleges—many of them in name only, one might add, having given themselves over to pre-professional training within (for example) the English departments, where ‘business writing’ more than edges out John Milton.

Agresto has long experience in higher education, including the presidency of St. John’s College Santa Fe campus, where a ‘Great Books’ program has prevailed for decades. His first task here is to curb some of the guff surrounding the liberal arts. Contrary to those who claim that a liberal education “makes us finer people—more sensitive, more concerned, more humane”—he sees no evidence that plumbers and pipefitters are less morally fine than your average Classics professor. But if so, one must then ask, “what good the liberal arts might be.” Why bother with them, at all?

And what are they? Although derived, loosely, from the medieval trivium and quadrivium, the modern liberal arts at the college and university level consist roughly of the humanities and of those elements of the natural and social sciences which lend themselves to treatment by one or more of the humanistic disciplines—for example, topics that begin with the phrase, ‘philosophy of….’ Liberal education is “rooted in thinking rather than doing,” a thinking aimed primarily of understanding ‘Why’ questions, “search[ing] out arguments and reasons rather than rest[ing] on received opinion.” Liberal education does this by having students read books, look at paintings, listen to music, solve mathematical problems, and undertake scientific experiments that focus their minds on those questions. In doing so, they learn that many of those questions are much controverted. Doctrinaire claims do not suffice, when faced with contradiction. This makes the liberal arts, as they have been practiced in the modern period, irritating. One does not savor being contradicted, yet a liberal education introduces us, so to speak forces upon us, the annoying truth that there have been persons in this world who are much smarter than we, who disagree with our opinions.

The liberal arts therefore run against the pragmatic American grain. Agresto nonetheless insists that defenders of liberal education appreciate the worth of the American grain, American practicality. “Unless we see the virtues of other forms of education besides a liberal arts education, we’ll never quite understand what our own excellence might be nor understand how we, as liberal arts professors, might actually use the liberal arts to contribute—as these others do—to the greater good.” Correlative to this is understanding the weight of the critique of liberal education. First of all, liberal education is no less expensive than any other kind, and more expensive than many other kinds. Such an education “costs as much today as getting an engineering degree but with little of the hope of secure future recompense.” Wouldn’t it be better to attend classes at a local ‘community college’ and get trained for a career in nursing? Second, the liberal arts seem useless not only to individuals but to society. What can I learn from “cloistered and inward-looking intellectuals” that can advance the cause of social justice, or even build a better mousetrap?

In sum, “the liberal arts in this country are declining because most Americans don’t see the point of them.” 

It is easy for liberally educated persons to draw themselves up from such questions and to prate about learning for learning’s sake, or some such thing. In this, one stands against (for example) Thomas Jefferson and indeed all of the prominent Founders of the American regime, who “seemed never to look at liberal education as a stand-alone project,” but happily “combin[ed] farming and philosophy” or, in the case of that city-dweller Franklin, philosophy with printing. True, the artes liberales traditionally hold themselves apart from the artes serviles, but the distinction sounds priggish to American ears and in any event, can the arts befitting a free man who is serious really fail to appreciate the arts that a free man intends to govern? And if, in a democracy, we are all free men in many ways, can liberally educated men and women avoid thinking about the several ways of freedom and the ways in which they might be organized for better or for worse? Before learning, I need humility—to know that I do not know and to understand my ignorance as a defect better remedied than concealed. 

To remedy ignorance, to gain knowledge, one needs to know how to learn but if “skills are important,” “substance is prior.” It won’t do to tout the liberal arts as the way to learn how to learn. “If we insist on seeing or making liberal education primarily ‘preparatory,’ we have narrowed and made small the true value, the true uses, of a liberal education.” “Through your reading and study, you would watch arguments being developed and challenged; you might see the tragic results of one awful mistake or how good might lead to an even greater good,” “not simply in one field or area but in many” and while attending “to clear, persuasive, and even beautiful language.” It is that substance which once made liberal education “the entry for any number of exciting and important careers.” In doing so, a liberal education offered a counterweight to the allures of “the reigning culture” in which that career would be situated. “Today’s students get more from their peers, the chaos of internet apps, music, and popular culture than from academic instruction,” but what kind of people will write the songs the whole world sings? They, and those who sing them, will have mastery of technique, but mastery of technique, however indispensable, isn’t substance. “Our students don’t usually need to ‘think like a historian’; they need to learn about and from history compellingly presented. they want to learn from fine literature and have their eyes opened.”

The dominant catchphrases in education (and much else) in the past half-century have been ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism.’ “Nothing I can think of has transformed the nature of virtually all education more than the idea and the demand for diversity,” and “I honestly do not believe there will be any turning back, at least not anytime soon.” The movement may be said to have surfaced most strikingly in the Stanford University demonstrations against the long-time required course on Western civilization, a course which was as it were shouted down and into oblivion with the slogan, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!” Although the course was the immediate target, the civilization itself was the real one. “Those who fought against ‘Western Civ’ saw it not as central to understanding our culture but only as whiteness, sameness, and hypocrisy,” the “academic mausoleum of dead white men,” and instrument of oppression. The problem was that they didn’t really know the thing they were shouting against. 

It was then, and is now, obvious that the demonstrators derived their protest from the civilization they were attacking—neo-Marxist egalitarianism not being a major feature of any other civilization other than that of the contemporary West. Agresto doesn’t want to get to that point, immediately, being a gentler soul than some of us. [1] He begins by remarking “two things all educated people must know: First, they must first know their own. Second they must also know what is not their own.” Without knowing a substantial amount about western civilization, demonstrators were not ‘critiquing,’ they were flailing. In Agresto’s more decorous language, “What was lost with the ‘going’ of Western Civilization was the opportunity for Stanford students and then many others to start on the path to being liberally educated and to see the growth and grand sweep of the finest literature and most pivotal thinking and arguments that shaped our culture and, most importantly, shaped their own lives.” Or again, “if we fail to know our own civilization—its hopes, its principles, its reasons, and its greatness—we will not be able to make comparisons that are even worth a dime.” [2]

“If you want to trace the start of political correctness, speech codes, and identity politics in higher education, begin by looking at the rise and then degradation of ‘multiculturalism’ in colleges and universities.” The educational ‘power vacuum’ caused by the demotion of Western civilization in college and university curricula soon filled with “the empowerment of, and thus the politics, of, special interest groups,” as ‘diversity’ came to mean not the comparative study of the varieties of political regimes and world civilizations but a retreat into exclusionary academic enclaves—’black studies,’ ‘women’s studies,’ ‘queer studies,’ and so on. “What began as a movement toward openness and inclusion”—ostensibly—instead “heightened the divides and made rigid the separations” among students and faculty. Multiculturalism means the multiplication of monocultures. Of course, the real monoculturalism of multiculturalism has been its pervasive political leftism, but Agresto makes the intellectual point: “Perhaps part of the reason why a true multiculturalism failed to take hold in higher education was because, properly pursued, it could easily teach a myriad of inconvenient truths,” such as “understand[ing] American slavery in the light of Islamic slavery, African slavery, and the slavery and oppression under various other ideologies,” surely not excluding Marxism. What is more, true multiculturalism could hardly ignore religion, a topic anathematized by faux multiculturalists, who are almost invariably secularists.

“On an even deeper level, an honest multiculturalism might give our students the opportunity to ask a truly serious question. Is oppression cultural—as so many seem to believe, formed by society and social structures and ‘systemic’ to that culture—or something intrinsic to the character of humanity itself?” And if so, “what moral teachings, whether from the West or the East, have been seemingly so powerful that they have been able to modify our natures such that racial and sexual are increasingly (though hardly universally) seen as unjust and slavery is now almost everywhere understood as evil?” This may be a bit optimistic. It has been the claim of the Left that ‘systemic racism’ hasn’t declined at all, but has only intensified, sometimes overtly (police brutality! gun violence!), more often covertly (triggering! hate speech!). 

This notwithstanding, Agresto is well aware of the political character of the attacks on liberal education, devoting his central chapter to “identity politics” and its pedagogical techniques, “part of the larger issue of the politicization of higher education and the decline of liberal education today,” which includes “the movement to penalize and purge from the university any positions, books, thoughts, and arguments that run contrary to student sensitivities or current social and political orthodoxies.” One is tempted to suggest that ‘politicization’ is not only unavoidable but good if one understands politics as Aristotle understands it, as ruling and being ruled in turn. But the ‘politicization’ Agresto describes misunderstands politics as the exercise of power, simply, and that is the root of the problem.

Because they (mis)understand politics as merely the exercise of power, today’s politicizers cross the “fine line between educating our students so they soon have the wherewithal to possess their own minds and trying to possess our students’ minds themselves” in an attempt “to capture minds rather than to free them.” “For a teacher to have the passion of St. Paul is one thing; to have the aims of Paul to instruct in order to convert or capture is something else”; it is indoctrination, not education. (“Is it so far beyond comprehension that one might ask students to read something so that they might take seriously the arguments and understand what is being said?”) The problem has been most acute in the humanities, which have “always tried to understand important political and social ideas such as justice and merit, freedom and community, good and evil,” all with the understanding that “much may well hinge on whether the next generation embraces a teacher’s particular views.” For three generations now, many college and high school teachers have ‘politicized’ the humanities and social sciences (and even, increasingly, the physical sciences)—successfully, in the sense that their ‘side’ has won, but at the cost of marginalizing the liberal arts. “The broader culture, which had its doubts about the value of the liberal arts even in the best of times, has now simply walked away and left the corpse to the victors.” After all, “just as dogs know the difference between being tripped over and being kicked, students know the difference between being taught and being indoctrinated, know the difference between ideas examined and ideas thrust.” 

It must be replied, however, that the corpse is rather lively. Although fewer and fewer students ‘major’ in the liberal arts, the ideas purveyed by teachers in the humanities and social sciences exert an extraordinarily high degree of influence in the regime. American citizens may have walked away from their classes, but they have increasingly seen neo-Marxist claims accepted by school administrators, business executives, and, of course, the news and entertainment media. Agresto acknowledges this, when it comes to the schools: “pick up virtually any College of Education catalogue of any major university and take in the full compendium of courses on race, privilege, whiteness, and grievance activism being taught as part of the curriculum of our teachers.” The old ‘core’ has been replaced by a new ‘core’ promulgating doctrines of social justice, diversity, environment, globalism, and race/class/gender analysis. [3] “What began as a plea for diversity now lives on as constant sameness.”

Why does the Left attempt this? The American regime is, among other things, a commercial republic. This hasn’t always been a regime favorable to liberal education, but it has at least been tolerant of it, even a bit admiring of it. But the Left opposes nothing more than the ‘bourgeois values’ of commercial republicanism, “the common views of right and wrong held by ordinary citizens” promoted “by conventional Western religious understandings.” By staging American history “as a battle between oppressors and the oppressed,” and moreover by claiming that the American regime, including the American way of life, ‘systemically’ sides with the oppressors, the Left ignores that today, it is “the ordinary view that slavery and racism are betrayals of our founding principles of liberty and equality,” and that “merit, achievement, moral responsibility and character are all to be assessed and assigned according to our actions as individuals, not by our race , ethnicity, religion, or any other form of collective identity.” By claiming “that our shortcomings result not from our principles but from our failure to live up to our principles,” the Left “leave[s] these sentiments and beliefs not only rejected but, perhaps worse, unexamined.” This gives a new and perverse meaning to Socrates’ stricture, that the unexamined life is not worth living. The aim of the academic Left “is not simply to upend the course of collegiate studies, nor to convert conservatives to progressives, nor even to push every student to become a social justice warrior, but, beyond all those, to change the culture itself,” by which Agresto means to change the American regime itself by changing the opinions by which its citizens orient themselves as they live their lives. Unlike Socrates, who seeks to know what justice is, today’s educators suppose that they know what it is, and that their sole remaining tasks are to tell their students what it is, leaving to school administrators to make them conform to it. They attempt the Nietzschean ‘transvaluation of all values’ in a manner that Nietzsche himself would have utterly despised.

As an (old) Leftist once asked, What is to be done? “To use education as a vehicle for finding the truth about the world and about ourselves is the greatest good of liberal education.” That isn’t the same, Agresto rightly insists, as ‘learning about’—learning “about history or philosophy or art and learning from those subjects.” The main reason to learn about, for example, Descartes’ philosophic antecedents isn’t to better to understand Descartes but rather to better understand Descartes in order to see if his critique of his antecedents is valid. “Contrary to all high-blown ‘academic’ teachings, a work of literature is great not because it has a long pedigree of precursors influencing its writing, not because it reveals to us ever so much about its time and place, and not because its author is a fit study for numberless biographical or psychological musings” but because “it talks about great things,” making important claims about them. “Our first task as teachers is not to hide this truth, not to reduce it, not to minimize it,” not “to learn all about an author and shrink from learning from an author.” Agresto asks, did Nathaniel Hawthorne write The Scarlet Letter primarily in order to squabble or concur with others, or did he write primarily “about devotion and hypocrisy and fear of being found out,” about “evil and sin and loyalty,” about “community needs, community standards, and the demands of conscience,” about “the different and conflicting parts of the human soul”? And which approach to his novel do students actually care about?

Students do ask, ‘Why read old books?’ One is tempted to tell them, if you don’t want to read old books, what are you doing in my class? Agresto is too temperate man to say such a thing. First, read old books because you should “learn what is ours”; the U.S. Constitution belongs to us, and so does its finest explication, The Federalist. Study them, in order to know who you are. “To be blunt…it is simply more important—initially—for an American to Know the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address than to know the principles of Eastern mysticism.”  More, read such books to learn “views and insights different from our own,” including views and insights contained in the Constitution and The Federalist which are no longer much honored today. Constitutional law rests on certain claims about human nature, and “if human nature doesn’t change all that much over time, if it’s possible that good and evil exist independent of societal customs, if the matters and madness of the human heart seem to be as much ancient as modern, why would we willingly cut ourselves off from learning wherever we can?” That is, “by trying to grasp the minds of the finest thinkers and writers who have lived, we might, for the first time, come to possess our own minds.” Aristotle is indeed a dead, white male, but his death was an event that happened to his body. The thoughts generated by his mind are still right there for you to consider. In this sense, “we can possess the mind of perhaps the greatest genius who ever lived.”

In so possessing the thoughts of that mind, you can test them against your own thoughts and, if graced with a touch of humility, you may well learn a thing or two. In comparing and contrasting what you think you know with what Aristotle thinks, you are replacing the acceptance of the opinions of “parents, patriots, priests, peers, and professors” with the activity of finding out for yourself. Agresto thus refines his definition of the liberal arts as “a way of understanding the most important questions of human concern through reason and reflection.” Although many students prefer to accept received opinions and get on with making money, teachers who present them with the frameworks in which the things they’ll be spending time and money on will spark dissatisfaction with predigested claims. They are the students who are, or will become, “forever inquisitive, who view the world with wonder.” “In the hope of cultivating independent thought, students should question everything, ferret out every real or imagined contradiction, expose all supposed weak spots, and, perhaps above all, shame hypocrisy Isn’t this, we are told, what Socrates did?”

Agresto does not, however, confuse Socrates with Descartes. It was not fear, in the form of radical doubt, “that pushes Socrates,” but Eros, “the desire to find out what people actually did know and could defend.” We hear a lot about ‘critical thinking’ from ‘educators.’ Real critical thinking aims at “understanding an author as he understands himself”; in “seeing “the complexity of an event or era”; in comprehending “the various threads of causality”; at understanding “”human motives mixed and pure”; at seeing “in great literature the immensity of our human imaginations”; at “thinking that has some sympathy for the various problems we humans have faced and know[ing] that options are often limited”; and, “above all, thinking that tries to comprehend the reasons for this idea, this action, or this event.” Under the current educational regime, however, “all too often to read critically means to approach a text looking for biases or errors, or how little the author knew compared to us.” Teachers and students should do exactly the reverse. They should assume that they are the ones hobbled by biases and errors. Begin with wonder. “Socrates began with the knowledge of his ignorance, and from a wonder at what is and why it might be so.” If fear of God is the beginning of wisdom in a life lived in accordance with the way, the regime, of God, wonder is the beginning of wisdom “in the liberal arts.” That beginning gives students the chance “to find what they think is weak or strong and show it up for what it is.” 

With all this in mind, and returning to Agresto’s original question, of what use is liberal education? What’s it good for? 

For individuals, a liberal education serves the desire to know. In so doing, it helps the student understand himself, to understand “what he might be and do.” It guides the student in how to think and, by making him more thoughtful it teaches the virtue of moderation, even as readers who follow the quest for justice in Plato’s Republic may discover moderation, something they didn’t set out to find at all. “We live, as we all recognize, in a most immoderate age. Too much is passion, too much is commitment.” One of Agresto’s early teachers advised students to “Deny little, Affirm less, and in all cases Make Distinctions!” Agresto still goes with that, writing that moderation and self-restraint are highly conducive to liberal learning,” as they are conducive to citizenship. 

For the United States, liberally educated persons are positioned to think seriously about the “what characteristics we should want our co-rulers to have,” to distinguish between those who know what the American regime is. [4] It wasn’t Aristotle but James Madison who wrote, “What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty & Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?” Or, in Agresto’s words, “If a barbarian is a person on whom no argument makes an impression, then one fruit of the liberal arts is to de-barbarize civil life and give it some notions of rationality and beauty.” In this, he resists the claim that ‘we egalitarians’ “cannot stand to have greatness stand above us.” If we can’t, then how will we consent to the rule of a Lincoln or a Churchill, against the enemies of democratic egalitarianism? 

Practically speaking, liberal arts college boards of trustees and administrators need to recognize that their students will likely make less money in their lives than graduates of technical and pre-professional schools will do. The policy consequence of this fact should be that liberal arts students should be charged lower tuitions. “To ask liberal arts majors to pay even close to what those in more remunerative fields pay is to beggar the poor to support the future wealthy.” Trustees and administrators and the teachers they hire also need “to show that there can actually be an American liberal education—one that helps civilize all of us by preserving the finest in our culture’s literature, art, music, and philosophy and that offers them [to] all students,” along with the already well-established offerings in science and mathematics. Such a liberal education will live up to “the Founders’ hopes.” 

 

 

Note

1. He rather reserves the point for a footnote in one of the valuable appendices to the book: “Multiculturalism may look like cultural relativism on the surface, but it is far from that in fact.”
2. One of Agresto’s best anecdotes: “I once met a professor of Latin who taught Roman literature with great misgivings. The Romans kept talking about such unmodern notions as manliness, virtue, the deepest of friendships, nobility, baseness, revenge, honor. It made him uneasy.” And rightly so, Agresto affirms, as “this unease, not vocabulary building or the chance to play in togas, is the true value of Latin and Greek.”
3. “There are even some dogmatic conservative and sectarian colleges that may think of themselves as defenders of liberal education but are as doctrinaire as the most left-leaning colleges.” Agresto names none, and it would be interesting to know if he has Hillsdale College in mind as one of these. Hillsdale is an institution with which I have some familiarity, and while it is true that many teachers there advocate certain doctrines in defense of (for example) the principles of the American Founders and of free-market economics, it is also true that they present the claims of rival principles in the terms of their advocates by assigning writings by those advocates—which is exactly what Agresto wants to see. And while it is unquestionably true that Hillsdale College ‘stands for’ the preservation of those principles, this may now be politically necessary, given the weight the ‘woke’ Left currently throws around. Putting it differently, if one compares the capacity of (for example) the two more-or-less apolitical St. John’s College programs (Annapolis, Santa Fe) with the Hillsdale College program, can there be any doubt that the Hillsdale approach has done substantially more to defend the liberal arts? As Agresto well knows, Socrates was not simply a philosopher but a political philosopher, but an urgent political-philosophic task today isn’t so much to bring philosophy down from the heavens as to bring it up from the gutter. In this sense, the debate between ‘St. John’s College’ and ‘Hillsdale College’ reprises the debate between Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa.
4. Agresto answers with two rhetorical questions: “Do we look for neighbors who are crude, blind to the beautiful, devoted to their own daily tasks and little else? Who in the world would want to be ruled by people like that?” The answer is: people who are crude, blind to the beautiful, devoted to their own daily tasks and little else. This is a caricature of the human type cultivated by democratic regimes, but, as the arguments and actions of Plato’s Socrates show, there is an element of truth in this, as in any recognizable caricature. The further question then becomes, how does a liberally educated citizen talk with his neighbors? Socrates shows how, if you want to get yourself killed, but the benefits of martyrdom in the service of thought have their limits. Agresto himself makes an excellent start of this, in recommending that liberally educated persons learn to appreciate the smarts of ordinary citizens and to respect their common sense. And he goes on to caution that by ‘crude’ or ‘vulgar’ he doesn’t mean “the Roman sense of ‘common'” but the Greek apeirokalia, “the lack of experience with things that are beautiful.”