Robert Maynard Hutchins

The Substance of a Liberal Education

The Great Conversation

Matthew Royal

This is a great intro philosophically to the Great Books collection and what a liberal education should look like. It presents a 10-year reading plan through the series -- yay! :)

Simon Elliott Stegall

Back when I was doin' time at my local university (prison de l'intellect) my roommates and I allowed a nearly-complete set of The Great Books of the Western World to slip through our fingers. I don't remember where it came from, or what we did with it, but I remember flipping through the 50+ volumes, which contained everything from Homer to Aquinas to Cervantes to Freud, and concluding that the dual-columned font was too small for my pathetic eyesight. Plus, I wanted to build my own library and I preferred to do it with individual volumes rather than furniture-esque anthologies. So to the dustbin they went, all 50. Fast forward to the present day: Madeleine and I have accrued well over 1100 volumes of our own (our library is beginning to take on the scope and mien of a vice) and I am starting to realize the value of economy.

Luckily, the school where I teach has their own nearly-complete set of The Great Books of the Western World (purely for the furniture-esqueness) which I discovered last week with a cry of recognition. As I pulled down the introductory volume to caress it lovingly, my eyes accidentally fell upon the first page. Before long I was late for class.

Robert Hutchins' introduction to the massive anthology ostensibly answers the question: why these books and not others? What, exactly, is so great about this selection? In answering this question Hutchins puts forward a brief theory of education, one which is more germane now than ever. In his view American universities since 1900 have catastrophically failed to instill in its students an intimacy with what he calls "The Great Conversation," or, the 2000+ years of thought beginning in Ancient Greece and continuing through the growth of Europe and its American offspring, the ideals of which were human excellence, proper government, and free inquiry, and which birthed the industrial wealth, rich artistic legacy, and democratic government we now enjoy. 

In brief the argument goes like this: before the era of democracy, political power in the West and the education that it necessitated were held by a lucky few; these few constituted an aristocracy, which varied in flavor (if not nutrition) from government to government. The education they received (which more or less consisted of studying the Western "canon": Plato, Shakespeare, Dante, etc, as well as math and the natural sciences) was considered to be necessary because 1) in order to understand your government, one must know the history of the ideals and processes on which your government is founded, 2) in order to govern, one must understand mankind, which is best explored in literature and history, and 3) there's an image of cultivation to be maintained for the benefit of the disenfranchised peasants. Doubtless the third point was emphasized to the detriment of the first two; but this is a failure of the aristocrats, not of the curriculum. 

Ok, so if this is true (and I admit I'm skimming over possible objections to get to the point), and the defining characteristics of an aristocracy are political power and leisure (about 20 hours of free time a week to devote to whatever) then it follows that every person in America today who works under 50 hours a week falls into this category. This is the boon of an industrial democracy. The catch is that it falls to the individual to decide what to do with that time. And here's where Hutchins delivers the clacker:

If leisure and political power are a reason for liberal education, then everybody in America now has this reason... If leisure and political power require this education, everybody in America now requires it... If the people are not capable of acquiring this education, they should be deprived of political power and probably of leisure. Their uneducated political power is dangerous, and their uneducated leisure is degrading and will be dangerous. If the people are incapable of achieving the education that responsible democratic citizenship demands, then democracy is doomed, Aristotle rightly condemned the mass of mankind to natural slavery, and the sooner we set about reversing the trend toward democracy the better it will be for the world. (p 18)

These are "if" statements, because Hutchins' view is that this responsible education is within range of everyone... as long as they have a good teacher and read the right stuff. If this sounds aristocratic and gatekeepy, that's because it is, to a degree. But consider: you are already part of a sort of historical aristocracy, especially if you went to college. Consider further: maybe it sounds gatekeepy because we aren't used to hearing that our citizenship entails responsibilities. In America we tend to think a citizen's responsibilities are: don't break the law, don't hurt other people, and vote occasionally. These responsibilities in no way extend to how we use our free time or how lucidly we understand the ideals of our country, let alone the "Great Conversation" which gave birth to its Constitution. We tend to take enfranchisement and the ability to run for office which every American enjoys for granted, and it rarely crosses our minds that these powers are dangerous in the hands of any person who doesn't know how or why those powers were bequeathed to them. 

If you think that the reading of great books (including, by the way, the great scientists or mathematicians) is an activity best left to intellectuals and professors, (in short, assholes), you are doing your own abilities a great disservice and, more importantly, you are displaying an ignorance of the books themselves; books which were considered "great" in part because they were written to be understood by any literate person. They are, for the most part, the opposite of gatekeeping. But if you persist in your skepticism I would rejoin that you should read this book, thoughtfully, and then see where you stand. If you reply disdainfully in the negative once more, I would ask this: has 100 years of the leisure-for-entertainment model produced a national consciousness which is historically knowledgeable, individually motivated, patriotically self-critical, and devoted to the realization of their own excellence? 

It hasn't. We are selfish, entitled, and breathtakingly ignorant, especially if we were educated at college, where ancient ideas are most violently and irresponsibly truncated. We have no sense of personal vision, no concept of the history of ideas, and are pathetically vulnerable to the propaganda wizards which surround us. We swallow the low-protein narratives we are fed and throw ourselves into partisan performance politics, or worse, eschew the world of ideas altogether in favor of amygdala-tickling diversion. We think ourselves as intellectual apexes of civilization, but if we've read Dante, Locke, or Plato's Republic all the way through (rather than just excerpts in a 301 class) we are an exception to the rule. We are addicted to entertainment which serves no purpose but to addict. We are not, perhaps, worthy of our liberties.

Hutchins lays out his view:

We believe that the reduction of the citizen to an object of propaganda, private and public, is one of the greatest dangers to democracy. A prevalent notion is that the great mass of the people cannot... be educated, in the sense of developing their intellectual powers, but they can be bamboozled. The reiteration of slogans, the distortion of the news, the great storm of propaganda that beats upon the citizen twenty-four hours a day all his life long mean either that democracy must fall prey to the loudest and most persistent propagandists or that the people must save themselves by strengthening their minds so that they can appraise the issues for themselves... 

Though we do not recommend great books as a panacea for our ills, we must admit that we have an exceedingly high opinion of them as an educational instrument... The aim of liberal education is human excellence... Its object is the excellence of man as man and man as citizen. It regards man as an end, not as a means; and it regards the ends of life, and not the means to it. For this reason it is the education of free men...

The liberal arts are not merely indispensable; they are unavoidable. Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant, undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining. The question, in short, is whether he will be a poor liberal artist or a good one.

Read great books. This country may be doomed, but you can still save your soul.

The Great Conversation The Substance of a Liberal Education

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