As we have seen, the history of American schooling is a story of rejecting alternatives to training and indoctrination. American society has consistently chosen to use schools to "transmit the culture," rather than to educate; and the debate has always been over which features of the culture to emphasize and which to de-emphasize. The debate has seldom been over the issues of training and indoctrination themselves.
We have also seen that this commitment to transmitting the culture, an inherently conservative concept which works best in static environments, has proved problematic in its application to American life, which is not conservative but liberal, and not static but dynamic. Despite this difficulty, those responsible for defining the American school system have consistently and resolutely committed schools to the transmission of American culture; not American culture as it always has been (for there is certainly no such thing), nor even American culture as it is currently, but American culture as it is becoming.
As the nation became more industrialized, more urbanized, more involved abroad, more demographically mobile, more socially liberal, and more culturally diverse, the schools have re-configured themselves to support these changes.
As we have also seen, calls for reform of schooling are almost always based on the concern that the schools are not supporting contemporary changes well enough, or fast enough, or effectively enough. This accounts for much of the dissatisfaction with American schooling: schools work much better at conserving than they do at preparing for unknown and controversial futures. In fact, on this understanding, American schools may be in a situation in which they cannot succeed, because they are constantly in the position of trying to meet the expectations of those who have speculated --- usually in conflicting ways --- about the future.
The great reform movement that begin in 1982 with the publication of A Nation at Risk and continues to this day, is an example of this kind of utilitarian thinking. Whether the reformist calls have been from those on the social and political left, such as Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, Paulo Freire, Jeannie Oakes, or Peter McLaren; or from those who are more-or-less in the center, such as John Goodlad, Peter Boyer, and Ted Sizer; or from those on the right, such as Diane Ravitch, Chester Finn, William Kilpatrick, Bill Bennett, Mortimer Adler, or E.D. Hirsch, the theme is essentially the same: contemporary schooling is not working well at its two most important tasks --- training to function in the economic sphere and indoctrinating into the proper social and political attitudes.
The error into which all three groups of contemporary reformers fall is a utilitarianism; that is, a belief that schools should work toward certain pre-determined goals, objectives, behaviors, aims. This is a philosophical error of the greatest significance, since it informs all the policies and practices of those institutions which provide the public part of the rearing of children.
And, even more dangerous, it is a shared and common error, precluding the important and necessary debate on the basic purposes of schooling in favor of ideological battles over power and control.
In the rest of this chapter, I will argue that such a utilitarianism is wrong; that it is wrong because it is at odds with human nature; that schooling should be for education, not training and indoctrination; and that liberal education is the best means of providing education for all young people. I will conclude with some reflections on implications for higher education, teacher education, pedagogy, and school configuration and organization.
II Arguments Against Utilitarianism
Schooling for utility, whatever its practical benefits might be, is unacceptable because it denies the single most important characteristic of being human: freedom.
By definition, schooling for utility has decided ahead of time what attitudes students should have and in what ways students should behave. The test of a school on this model, then, is whether such outcomes have been achieved. Madeline Hunter with her emphasis on behavioral outcomes as a goal for teaching is not just another theorist about the purposes and practices of teaching, but one of the most rational and organized of utilitarians. As a sign of how perfectly Hunter's model fits utilitarianism, reflect on the fact that there are no essential purposes to Hunter's teaching; her model can be applied to any set of desired behavioral outcomes. It is, in a very rich sense, value neutral. One could be a follower of almost anyone from almost anywhere on the ideological spectrum and use Hunter's method to great effect.
This is utilitarianism in sum: the question is not whether some behavior is good, but whether it is desired; and its desirability is determined by whether it works in the world; and "works in the world" is, of course, dependent on current beliefs and behaviors.
Clearly, then, schooling on this model is meant to prepare young people to perform functions in the world. This model of functionality is not entirely wrong: to prepare young people to be incapable of performing functions in the world would obviously be vicious. But to prepare them only for functionality is to emphasize their roles as parts of the great social and economic machine to the detriment of a proper emphasis on their humanity, on their ability to, their right to, their responsibility to make free moral choices. And an exclusive emphasis on preparation for functionality is part-and-parcel of utilitarian schooling.
In this version of schooling, students are conditioned not only in utilitarian behavior, but, more important, in utilitarian thinking. They are taught to think in utilitarian terms, so that utility is not just a way of behaving but also sets the parameters of language and logic that govern the processes of thought.
As generations follow one another, child-rearing is defined in utilitarian terms so that, consequently and inevitably, parents become co-conspirators with schools in passing on utilitarian models of behaving and thinking.
The result of this generational consistency is that when schools tell parents that they wish only to prepare students for the future, parents who know only this one model enthusiastically support the goals of the schools, and criticize the schools only when it appears that the schools are not preparing for the future adequately.
The result is a systemic sameness, not just in public school systems driven by bureaucratic management, but in all schools. The Groton School, Fairfax High School, a fundamentalist Christian academy, and a military school all function the same way, with the same purposes in view: utility, to fit young people into a pre-determined niche in the social and economic system.
"Education" for leadership of the kind the prep schools preach; or multi-cultural "education,"; or a parochial "education" (of whatever denomination) are all aimed not at individualism, creativity, independent thought, and leadership, but at fitting in and succeeding according to the standards of the dominant paradigm.
But the concept of success itself is problematic. First, success can only be determined by standards which are inevitably temporal and local; and second, and more important, success has to do with accomplishment in the world, with practical and physical events. Such a view is obviously utilitarian: certain activities have been defined as good and succeeding at those activities is, therefore, good. On such a view, it is the end which is important, not the means; the product, not the process. And because the ends are determined ahead of time, success almost inevitably requires the sacrifice of one's autonomy.
For human beings, it is the process which is more important than the product, the meaning which is more significant than the action. Mother Teresa was asked recently by Sam Donaldson of ABC television how she know when she had been successful. Her reply was, "We are not about success; we are about faith." While this is a particularly religious answer given by a particularly religious person, the general notion is applicable to the argument I am making: to become liberally educated is to choose to engage, to wonder, to examine, to choose freely based on one's best understanding, and never to give up that freedom, no matter how great the temptation. In a secular sense, this is a kind of faith: a belief that really being present, really doing what one believes to be right, always choosing the moral alternative will work out for the best. Or, to put it another way, it is a belief that freedom, however terrifying, is the nature of human beings and must be embraced.
The two human faculties that make schooling for utility incomplete and unacceptable are intellect and free will. Intellect allows us to examine, to question, to analyze, to interpret, to judge, to weigh, to balance, to make decisions --- moral decisions ---based on a variety of variables. Will allows us to make choices based on such determinations.
The presence of these faculties in human beings implies a responsibility to use them. To put it another way, to apply intelligence in the rich and varied ways we can is natural; to deny or reject or mis-use the intellect is un-natural. To use the will to choose freely based on one's convictions is natural; to use the will to choose without reflection is un-natural. This is analogous to the use, abuse, or lack of use of any other human faculties: appetite, emotions, intuition, sexual desire, the craving for exercise, the need for companionship and community, and so on. Anorexia and gluttony are both wrong. Sexual repression and satyriasis are both wrong. There are activities which are consistent with our nature and activities which are not.
Because we have both intellect and will, we have the implicit obligation to live freely. To sacrifice one's freedom is to give up the ability to think --- that is, to follow ideas wherever they lead --- because the conclusions of such thought would inevitably be at odds with those to whom one had sacrificed his freedom. And, obviously, to sacrifice one's freedom is to give up one's own will. To give up intellect and will is to choose an un-natural way of life. We must not do it, at the risk of losing our very selves.
To come at it another way, let us make the distinction between behavior and action. Behavior we can define as any movement made. But activity implies purpose and meaning. Walking is, by itself, a mere behavior; walking to get to work, or to exercise, or to attend church is an activity. The difference is in the motives for the movement. If one were to start out walking, with no more reflection than there is in the response to a rubber hammer being tapped on the muscle below the kneecap, that would be a mere behavior. All autonomic responses are behaviors. All conditioned responses are behaviors.
But an activity is not a purely physical event, it is a human event, one requiring choice, conscious or unconscious, based on whatever processes of judging and interpretation happened to be appropriate.
Behaviors are by definition a-moral, without moral consideration. The reflexive response of a knee is not a moral act; the tensing of muscles in response to stress is not a moral act. Such behaviors are not, in the sense that I am using the term, human.
But all activities are by definition human, and, therefore, moral in character. To choose to do anything, anytime, is a moral choice because there is meaning to the choice because there is meaning to the activity.
For example, for a believer that everything is mere behavior, it is impossible to hold the Nazi leadership, or deathcamp guards, or anyone in between, responsible for an immoral act. Such a person could be angry or vengeful, but he could not be morally condemning; he could not say, "That was wrong and those who participated in it were wrong."
Only if there can be activity, the free choosing of value-laden alternatives, can there be moral culpability and moral judgment.
Should schooling encourage behavior or activity? If schooling is for functionality, then the proper answer is "behavior". Only if schooling is for the purpose of encouraging human-ness, the process of freely choosing on the basis of purpose and meaning, can the proper answer be "activity".
Utilitarian schooling is wrong because it is un-natural. To train and indoctrinate is to control, and to control is to deny the other's freedom. Utilitarian schooling is wrong because it objectifies its students, treating them as nothing but pieces to be moved according to the latest permutation of the game; and because it eliminates the moral element of life.
Students are human beings, not economic functionaries. As human beings, they have intellect and will and the consequent obligation to live freely, not according to someone else's master plan. Schools which deny this truth and participate in training and indoctrination have failed their students in a profound way: they have made their students believe that there is no freedom.
IV Arguments Against Liberal Education
It is obvious that certain ontological and epistemological assumptions are being made here: that intellect as a human faculty exists and that rationality is possible; and that will as a human faculty exists and that choice is possible. From these assumptions follows a definition of being human, of the implicit obligation to live freely, of the inherently moral character of all activity, and the obligation of schools not to train but to educate.
As a resident of the late-20th Century, I am not ignorant of the more than three-hundred years of powerful attacks on these assumptions. In fact, the list of critics of these assumptions would include pretty much all of the major figures from the last three centuries of intellectual history: the skeptics (David Hume, Rene Descartes, and Bishop Berkeley); the pessimists (Thomas Hobbes, Freiderick Schopenhauer, Frederick Nietzsche); the utilitarians (Jeremy Bentham and James Mill); the determinists (Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud); the irrationalists (Sorel et al); the absurdists (Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco); the phenomenologists (Husserl); the extreme existentialists (Jean-Paul Sartre); and the "hard" post-modernists (Michel Foucault).
These intellectual giants have attacked the validity of sense evidence, the reliability of rationality, and the ability to choose. The very notions of rationality, freedom of the will, and the possibility of choice have been undermined so drastically that for a sophisticated person in the late-20th Century West, it is much easier not to believe in such ideas than it is to believe in them.
Without rationality, will, and choice, the notion of education, of schooling for freedom, is absurd, without meaning. Without rationality, will, and choice, the best we could ever hope for would be some kind of benevolent control, including a system of schooling that prepares the mass of people for productive work and peaceful society. And for such a system we would have to look to an elite, one which could look beyond the short-term pleasures and desires of most of the people and do for them what they need done. At first glance, such an elite might look like Plato's philosopher kings, but there is a drastic difference: our contemporary elite would not be informed by deep understandings of what is good and true and beautiful, but only by an understanding of what works.
In other words, without rationality, will, and choice, the notion of a democracy is absurd, except to the extent that people are deluded into a belief that they are participating in and influencing the economic and political processes.
The narrow questions of whether Nietzsche led to the Nazis, or whether Marx led to the Stalinists, miss the point: almost all of latter-day intellectual history leads to skepticism and pessimism and an inevitable turning to some kind of elite control.
In the face of all this powerful intellectual activity, it is odd even to raise the question; it's as if one had missed the point completely. But raise it I will: Are human beings free or not free? Is the Biblical injunction to "choose life" meaningful or absurd? Are the political theories of Robert Bellarmine and Thomas Jefferson informative or just plain silly? Is the notion of a democratic polity a realistic goal, or a means of deluding the mass of people into agreeable submission? Is schooling for individual freedom or for economic efficiency and social peace?
These are not minor questions. We live in a world that becomes progressively more "modern" all the time, and modernism, for all its talk of individualism, freedom of choice, and liberal political and social ideals, believes in conformity, mass-society, and group-think. We live in a time which places more and more emphasis on function and technique and less and less emphasis on meaning. In such a world, the technocrats are the elite, and Weber's prediction of rationalized incorporporation gets closer and closer to being universally true.
The reason for this is that modernism has become more and more identified with industrial capitalism and the logic of market forces. The "bottom line" is now the generally accepted excuse for firing workers; moving businesses out of town, out of state, or even out of country; and for any other rational, self-serving tactic. In such a situation, individuals are important because individual initiative is required, but it is results in the aggregate that count; the results for individuals do not matter.
So I will note here that which has been implicit: a call for liberal education, a call for schooling for education, a call for schooling for freedom is an attack on nothing less than contemporary modernism. We are back to the question of whether schooling is to "transmit the culture," in this case late-20th Century modernism; or to educate, in which case schooling would have to stand up against modernism.
How to support such an attack? How to argue against the notion that education is absurd and that the enlightened goal would be to join the New Class and participate in controlling the masses?
Or, to put it another way, how to stand up against the cumulative skepticism and pessimism of Hume, Hobbes, Bentham, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, and Foucault et al?
As we will see, the only answer to these questions is liberal education itself. Only liberal education can demonstrate to us that personal freedom, properly understood, is the birthright of being human. Only the personal and vicarious experiences of engaging in a liberal education can convince of the necessity, the rights, and the obligations of true individual freedom.
And once we are educated, it will be obvious that schooling should have as its broad intent the encouraging of personal freedom. Once such as conclusion is reached, then the obvious question would be, What model of schooling would best support such a process?
I will argue that liberal education, properly defined and properly understood, is the model of schooling most supportive of the development of individual freedom, and that an understanding of and a belief in the joys and horrors of individual freedom is the only effective attack against utilitarianism and the skepticism that underlies it.
V Toward a Definition of Liberal Education
By liberal education I mean a twelve- or thirteen-year immersion in reading and writing, contemplating and discussing, interpreting and explicating, analyzing and synthesizing. The content for these processes would come from what could be called the "classics," which is to say those works which through their insight into the human condition and their expression of that insight have engaged and affected many generations, over hundreds of years, and in many different places in the world. For the same reasons, these might be called the "great" books: works whose influence is lasting, not temporary, because they speak to our humanity, no matter the time or place. This is the process that Robert Hutchins described as "joining in the great conversation."
The end of such a process would not be in any way pre-determined. There is no assumption here that merely reading and discussing a list of certified books would make an educated person. Nor is there any one political, economic, or religious agenda hidden just under the surface of the "great" works, to be inevitably discovered by all students. Anyone who believes that reading Homer and Moses, Aristotle and Cicero, Dante and Erasmus, Milton and Joyce, More and Nietzsche, and Newton and Darwin would result in some narrowly Euro-centric, homo-centric vision of the world is not knowledgeable enough to make judgments about what children should read. In fact, there is no "end" to a liberal education, in either sense of the word: there is no goal, no aim, set beforehand to inform curriculum and methodology; nor is there ever a completion to a liberal education, since there are always more works to study, or works to be returned to with new understanding. Liberal education is not to prepare, not to train, not to indoctrinate; it is to engage.
But is this not both circular and non-sensical? If there is no purpose, no goal or aim, why do it? If there is no predictable conclusion to such a study, for what reason should it be chosen as the model for schooling?
While it is true that there is no utility to liberal education, no practical purpose for which it is used, it is also true that there is a purpose to liberal education, a purpose which is also predictable, although what will result from it is not predictable.
The purpose of liberal education is to liberate: to free from ignorance, to free from superstition, to free from prejudice and bias and bigotry. But even more important, its purpose is to demonstrate to the student that liberation, human freedom, with all its giddy possibilities and horrifying obligations, is in the nature of being human; and that to deny one's freedom is to deny one's humanity, to choose death instead of life.
A liberal education, the goal of which would be the freedom of the student, would inevitably lead to the student's embracing of the principle that human life is necessarily free, with all the potential joy and sorrow, triumph and tragedy, virtue and vice that freedom allows.
And such knowledge would not just affirm his own freedom, for once the student is secure in such self-knowledge, he can extend such notions to the rest of individual humanity; he will, in other words, understand that all persons are meant to be free. On this view, considerations such as race, gender, creed, and religion become irrelevant because one must behave morally or be in direct conflict with his own self-definition. Because liberal education does nothing less than define being human, one liberally educated must act morally or risk the most basic kind of self-negation.
While this would be the purpose of such a model of schooling, how exactly the results would look in each individual person would not be possible, or desirable, to predict. Madeline Hunter's methods would have no place in such a school: specific, definable behaviors would not be the goal; states of mind and heart would be.
VI Inadequate Arguments for Liberal Education
Even if schooling should have as its broad intent the encouraging of personal freedom, what is the argument for liberal education as the best model for such a process?
One could argue from a utilitarian position: liberal education is the best preparation for creative participation in an ever more sophisticated work force. Knowing how to read, write, think, and express will be far more valuable than any particular job skill, which will probably become obsolete in short order.
And liberal education is also the best preparation for participation in a democracy. Knowing how to read with subtlety and sophistication, knowing how to listen for the heart of the argument, knowing how to discuss and debate the issues with fellow citizens are all requisite skills for democratic life.
But there are three problems with this argument. The first is that it would be disingenuous to argue that liberal education is good preparation for participation in an industrial capitalist workforce. There are too many mind-numbing jobs still and in the foreseeable future. There are too many inhumane decisions made by managers for "bottom line" reasons. There is too much conformity required of consumers. An entire populace of liberally educated persons would put up with none of this.
And the current distinction between the old industrial economy and the coming service economy is trivial within this argument. Despite some changes in the specifics of the work, workers still need to be trained and socialized.
The second problem is that liberal education is the best preparation for life in a democracy only if everyone wants a real democracy; that is, one in which everyone is capable of and committed to participating in the on-going political conversation, not merely to defend parochial positions or strive for more power, but to honestly debate the substance of the issues. Our politicians know how to handle struggles for power between and among conflicting political entities; they wouldn't know where to start to participate in real political debate with, not against, an educated populace. So it is almost as disingenuous to argue for liberal education as a basis for democracy. It is, of course, but only a democracy of the kind that could come to be if everyone were liberally educated.
But the biggest problem is the third: it is contradictory to use an argument for utility to defend liberal education, at the heart of which is the contention that it has no utility. There may, in fact, be benefits to society from having an educated populous, but that must not be the goal of liberal education, lest it become just another utilitarianism.
One could argue from either of two foundational positions, a religious one or a philosophical one. The religious (or Biblical) position would be that, throughout the writings held sacred by all three of the major Western religions, the individual and the individual's relationship with a personal deity are stated, clarified, emphasized, and explicated over and over again. From the story of Creation where God gives life to His first human creature by blowing His breath into his soul, to the plight of Job, to the lesson of the Prodigal Son, to the cries of joy and sorrow in the Psalms, the individual person is at the heart of the drama. Men and women make decisions with moral ramifications, and suffer the consequences; their actions matter, the state of the their minds and hearts matters, their personal relationship with their deity matters.
This emphasis on the individual moral life, including the individual's relation to his deity, to his family, and to his community, is not only consistent throughout Scripture, it remains essentially unchanged in the Christian Gospels and Epistles, in the Islamic Quran, and in Jewish commentary on Scripture.
For there to be an individual moral life, there must be the freedom to choose. Free will is at the heart of Western moral theology; without it, the entire construct of Western moral thought disintegrates. And freedom to choose implies not just will, but the faculties necessary to making a choice: discrimination, judgment, and examination, the products of intellect.
So we could defend liberal education as the right model for schooling "cuz the Bible tells me so." But there are four problems with this approach. The first is that both religious institutions and individual religious believers tend to authoritarianism; it may be that Scripture preaches the necessary autonomy of the individual as a moral being, but the fact is that organized religion has worked very hard to standardize and codify belief in an effort to promote, not individualism, but conformity. Institutional religions create power spheres within and without their own traditions, working to convince people to follow rules
For me to be consistent with my own argument, my position would have to be that religious belief and practice should always be embraced by an individual, not imposed on him. To consciously and freely embrace religion, a person would have to educated in that religion, and educated generally, enough to be able to choose freely. So we cannot use religion as a basis for liberal education when logically liberal education should precede the embracing of religion.
The third problem is that the truth of religion is psychological, not logical. The experience of enlightenment, of prayer, of contemplation, of forgiveness, of being "born again," of, as the Hopi say, opening the trap door in the top of your head to let God in --- these are not empirically verifiable events, nor can their truth be deduced. In my eyes, this makes the religious truth no less true, but the lack of logical truth is a weakness when looking for validation for a revolutionary model of schooling.
And the fourth problem is probably the thorniest: the Biblical argument is, finally, an argument from authority, and, logically, there is no authority available here. If we ask the General Manager of the Boston Garden how many parquet tiles there are in the floor, we should be able to expect an authoritative answer. If we were to ask a statistician for a large life insurance company about the odds of a particular person living to be 80 years old, he should be able to tell us.
But the question of whether schooling should be for freedom or conformity does not yield to the same kind of factually authoritative answer. It is a philosophical question, open to reasoned discourse, and probably without any absolutely convincing answer. Authority simply does not apply here.
The philosophical argument would depend on Aristotle and his followers, who argued that there is such a thing as human nature, that it can be defined, and that the life of the individual and the community should be in harmony with that nature. The way to determine the nature of being human was through the study of philosophy; we would expand that notion to include the various ways humans have come to express their thoughts and feelings about what it means to be human.
This is an attractive argument since the philosophical approach is so similar to the definition of liberal education. But there are problems with this argument, as well. The first is that using the philosophical argument to defend liberal education is circular: it is using something to defend itself.
The second problem is that philosophical discourse tends toward dispute and fragmentation, much as religious discourse tends to authoritarianism and conformity. As a source of authority, a process which leads inevitably to dispute and fragmentation is pretty weak.
The third problem with philosophy as a source of authority is that philosophy is a process, not a product. Philosophy will never give us a set of immutable standards or rules because it is necessarily always questioning, even questioning its own conclusions.
The fourth problem is that philosophical truth is logical, not psychological. And while the absence of logical truth, as in religion, is a weakness, the presence of logical truth all by itself, without the company of psychological truth, is also a weakness.
And the fifth problem is that, like the Biblical argument, a dependence on philosophy is an argument from authority: we should use liberal education as the model for schooling because Aristotle told us to.
We could also make a political argument in which liberal education is defended as the only real preparation for full participation in a democratic polity. But this argument depends on democracy already having been defined as a good, toward which all schooling should aim.
But, in fact, we have not so determined. There is undoubtedly a commitment in the United States to something that we vaguely refer to as "democracy". But beyond that vague commitment to a vague concept, is there an argument for democracy as a basis for human activity? In other words, can we argue that liberal education should be chosen because it supports democracy? No, because such an argument requires that democracy already be accepted as a philosophical, political, and social good, the prospering of which should be encouraged by schooling. As we will see, liberal education argues for democracy, not the other way around.
So if utility, religion, philosophy, and politics are all suspect as arguments for liberal education, what is left?
VII Liberal Education as Its Own Justification
In 1981, I participated in a meeting of the History Department of a well-known, highly-reputed private independent secondary school in Los Angeles. We had recently been charged by the Headmaster to revise the six-year course of study offered by the department, to make it more developmental and coherent. We were also charged with defining the "mission" of the department, including a statement of basic beliefs from which we were to proceed in our planning, curriculum building, choosing of methodology, etc. When I suggested that one of the "basic beliefs" that the department should articulate was a belief in the inherent worthiness of the human enterprise, each of the other twelve people in the room disagreed, strongly. This was a group of men and women, young and old and in between, politically liberal and conservative, from a variety of cultural and educational and religious backgrounds, all of whom found my suggestion completely unacceptable.
I'm still not sure I fully understand why they responded the way they did. The reason I tell the story at this point is to lead in to making the point that only a liberal education can convince people that a liberal education is a good and necessary thing. If the other people in that room had been liberally educated, it never would have occurred to them to think that the human enterprise might not be worthwhile. They could have legitimately argued that human life can be sad, pathetic, even tragic; that freedom carries burdens that sometimes make it seem more trouble than it's worth; that to be human is to stumble and rise and stumble again. But they could never have doubted that the human enterprise is worthwhile.
My argument is that only liberal education can be a justification for liberal education; that is, that only the experience of a liberal education can convince individuals of their birthright to freedom, of their rights and obligations as free persons, and of the horrors of any kind of slavery, no matter how comfortable.
I realize that this appears circular, but I don't believe it is. Remember that the various arguments from utility and authority do not stand up. That leaves us with two possibilities: either liberal education is just another idea, no better or worse than any other theory about what schooling should be, or there is something in the experience of liberal education itself that is a powerful and compelling justification for it, something that cannot be understood until it is experienced. If this latter is the case, then there is actually something there that justifies liberal education, some understanding that comes from the process that makes it clear that the process was the best one for human learning and growth.
Despite the contention that the process alone reveals its own worth, I am obligated here to attempt an explanation --- however vague and general --- of how the process works. It is my contention that the compelling reason for seeing each person as an autonomous, creative individual is the presence in each of us of an incredibly rich, subtle, complex, meaningful, and contradictory interior life. As one cartoonist of recent memory put it, "It's exhausting to think about it, but everybody has a plan, everyday." Or, as many of us have realized, often, "Everybody has a story." We know from our experience of ourselves, from listening to the stories of others, and to the vicarious knowledge of the stories of others through novels, stories, plays, poems, movies, and (even, once in a great while) television that other people have interior lives made up of the most remarkable mixture of thoughts, feelings, intuitions, memories, desires, sadness, loss, hope, imaginings, dreams, responses to situations, responses to other people, and to other people's stories, and on and on and on. People, in other words, are not rocks, plants, frogs, or automatons; they are unique in the universe as we know it in their depth, complexity, confusion, and contradiction.
To see such beings as determined by economic systems or biology or the unconscious part of the mind is handy, in a 19th Century sort of way; such grand, sweeping, universalist explanations do tend to smooth out the rough edges of trying to make sense of ourselves. But our experience of ourselves, and our experience of others in books and drama and movies, belies such simplistic explanations. And our experience of our own importance, the centrality of our own individual existence to be continued at almost all costs, also denies deterministic and other reductionist explanations.
It is perhaps here that my Catholicity enters most forcefully, for the above argument is very much like the old Catholic notion of "mystery," something true and profoundly important and meaningful but incapable of explanation: only the experiencing of it can give one some understanding. But such an approach requires something very difficult from us. It requires that we give up vanity and embrace humility; there are some things that we cannot figure out, that can be apprehended only through direct experience in ways that are not always entirely rational. One of the most difficult things about the fact that liberal education can only be self-justifying is that liberal education shows us that human life is so mysterious that there can be no real revelation without the process of personal engagement. Like life itself, liberal education must be lived, not "done". To do it right, one must strive for a kind of Zen and the art of education mentality. Like life itself, liberal education is nebulous and complex, and is not to be controlled but experienced.
Liberal education requires that one is dipped into the matter of it, into the mystery of existence. But there is no way of knowing this without the doing of it.
Liberal education, then, is immersion learning in the best sense: an experience of the richness and complexity of human life through the vicarious knowing about others and the direct experience of ourselves learning. Liberal education gives us a deep understanding of human imperfection. Human interaction creates history; literature retells that creation.
And, ultimately, the basic insight is that we have free will, but that it's okay: we can survive, we can even prosper, and we have the obligation to try.
The wisdom that there is a rich, complex, meaningful interior life is no less powerful and compelling today than it was five-thousand years ago: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; Moses and Jesus; Paul and Augustine and Benedict; Aquinas and Maimonides; Dante and More and Shakespeare, all describe and respectfully value the interior life. Their arguments regarding the infinitely high stakes involved in human decision-making, their awareness of the deep complexities of the moral life of all persons, ring just as true today as they ever did, if we allow ourselves to engage them.
Contemporary rhetoric has it that every untimely death, no matter the circumstances, is a tragedy. The liberally educated person knows the difference between that which is sad and that which is tragic: what happens to Oedipus is tragic, what happens to Macbeth is tragic, maybe even what happens to Willy Loman is tragic. And a sense of life as tragic requires a subtlety of understanding, a courage to continue, and a compassion for the human condition that is not there without education.
But if every untimely death is tragic, then no examination is warranted, because there are no judgments to be made. It's all the same: we live, we die. Shadings, nuances, subtleties are dismissed in favor of simple, bi-polar concepts that invite no examination or analysis: alive or dead, fun or boring, good or bad, nice or mean.
But to engage in liberal education is to bring alive the rich and complex interior life by allowing it to be tweaked by new insights, or different ideas, or provocative analyses. It is to contemplate the mysteries, to examine the puzzles, to re-live the adventures of explorers, scientists, mathematicians, mythological characters, heroes and villains. It is to share with others one's questions and confusions, to examine together the wonders of human thought and feeling, to raise together the basic questions of human existence: who am I, why am I here, and where am I going?
This is the process that is congruent with a definition of human nature as rich, complex, and meaningful. This is the process that is so engaging that once hooked, no one would want to go back. This is the process that demonstrates that all forms of slavery --- no matter how rational or comfortable --- are hideous and heinous and to be avoided at all costs, because to become someone else's object, or to become someone else's master, is to deny one's humanity. This is the process that explains why some are willing to die for an idea, a cause, an ideal; willing to die rather than live untruly.
This is the process that demonstrates to us that doing the right thing is best not because some cleric said so, but because doing the right thing inevitably turns out best for the individual and for the group, although not always in obvious or predictable ways.
This is the process that helps us understand that certain forms of expression --- in language, in music, in prayer, in the plastic arts --- can lift us above the ordinary and the everyday, and take us to places of enlightenment.
It is liberal education that demonstrates to us, in ways that our own, necessarily limited, personal experience cannot, that there are certain eternal verities: some of them principles for good living, some of them puzzles of the profoundest kind that have perplexed our forebears as much as they do us.
We are human because of this rich and complex interior life; it is what separates us from other beings. It is this wonderful and puzzling interior life that makes up "human culture." It is, therefore, the responsibility of schools to transmit not local and temporal culture, but "human culture," and the best way to do that is by immersing students in the reading of, the discussing of, and the writing about human experience as illustrated in the best books, paintings, songs, myths, and so on. Not, I rush to say again, in order to impose on them some conventional wisdom about what it all means; the point is not to tell them what it means, but to travel with them as they make their own journey toward partial and contingent meaning, a process to be continued throughout life.
My belief is that such an immersion would make it impossible to be a barbarian, whether of the corporate raider kind, the yuppie greedhead kind, or the gangbanger kind. To be aware of the beauty and complexity, the pain and the joy, the memories and desires of other people is to become sensitized to the point that the Golden Rule and the second of the two "great commandments" would be too obvious to have to say aloud.
But these are insights that come only from a liberal education. Schooling in religious principles may provide socially beneficial behaviors; schooling in logic may provide analytical skills; schooling in literature of various languages may provide some sympathy and empathy for other peoples; schooling in technical skills may provide an attractive worker. But only liberal education can provide an understanding of what it means to be human, including the few certainties and the many questions. And only the experience of a liberal education can justify liberal education, because only the free study of the best descriptions of being human can lead us to a full understanding of what it means to be free, and how essential freedom is to being human.
And this is where we can answer the question, How to argue against the notion that education is absurd and that the enlightened goal would be to join the New Class and participate in controlling the masses?
Education is not absurd, is not without meaning, because it is reflective of and encouraging of the interior life. And we know this is true because the experience of a liberal education demonstrates it. So it is not at all "enlightened" to want to get in to the New Class in order to control the masses; in fact, liberal education shows us that both slave and master are less than human, and that to deny one's humanness is to die. Once again, we are back at the Biblical injunction, "choose life." To choose life in the contemporary world is to reject both slavery and control; to reject the unexamined life; and to reject the principle of power. And only schooling for education can teach us the importance of "choosing life."
VIII How Liberal Education Argues for Democracy
I have argued that the most basic lesson of a liberal education is that individual freedom is the birthright of being human. But, except for hermits and a few other outcasts, we do not live alone; we live in social, economic, and political groups. This is such a basic truth that social science, history, literature, theology, and philosophy all agree: we are social animals and we are political animals. Society and politics necessarily imply interaction, and interaction implies conflict, disagreement, discord.
Because we live in groups, some kind of organization is necessary, some generally accepted principles for public behavior, so that the society functions smoothly. But because human life includes so many conceptual tensions, decisions about how to organize socially and politically have always been controversial. Humans desire both freedom and order, and the tension between these two powerful innate desires leads to an inevitable dissatisfaction with existing social and political forms. In his Philosophy of History, Hegel argued, and I think that in broad terms he was correct, that the history of man has been the history of increasing amounts of social and political freedom. It was, of course, easier for Hegel to compose such an analysis in 1835 than it would be for one of us in 1995; Hegel did not have to consider the Stalinists, the Nazis, the Maoists, and all the other lesser manifestations of totalitarianism of the 20th Century.
But democracy is not without its problems. Winston Churchill once said that "democracy is a terrible political system; it's just that all the others are worse." The individual freedoms allowed in a democracy can produce such social difficulties --- drug addiction, teen pregnancy, homicide, rape, bad traffic, and littered streets --- that even political liberals can be naively impressed with the order, cleanliness, and lawfulness of a totalitarian regime, as Shirley Maclaine and her companions were during their visit to mainland China in 1971.
So, if democracy is not, on the face of it, an untroubled political system, why should we choose it; or, if already chosen, why should we support it? Remember that Mussolini got Italian trains to run on time, Hitler pulled Germany out of the Depression a lot faster than Roosevelt did in the United States, and Maoist China was virtually without crime, dirt, or bad traffic.
What is the rationale for democracy? One cannot argue from authority to support democracy: Aristotle and Plato found it disgusting, organized religions are theocratic in potential if not always in actuality, most philosophers and social critics of the last three-hundred years believed that humans are incapable of self-rule, and socially and economically democracy is usually messy and inefficient.
Nor can one depend on the will of the people to validate democracy; that is, one cannot say, Democracy is the best political system because the people want it. Only a belief in democracy could support such a statement, so the argument is circular. And, as we have seen many times in this century alone, the people often "want" totalitarianism. The German parliament voted in 1933 to give up their legislative powers and turn them over to the executive of the country, the new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.
Only liberal education can demonstrate that the freedom of the individual is essential to being human, and that social, economic, and political forms should flow from and support this essential freedom.
Democracy, in its belief in full and equal participation in the political process, is the only political theory consistent with the understandings of humanity that would come from a liberal education. The specific forms and manifestations of this theory in a practical, day-to-day way would not be predictable. But I believe it is safe to say that such forms would probably be at once more radically egalitarian and more subject to commonly held standards and principles.
So, logically, democracy is contingent on some foundational argument, unless we are to accept it as simply the right way to do things because it is the right way to do things. But that anti-logic, as we know, leads to the ovens.
The only foundational argument, the only authority, for democracy is the understanding of being human which would come out of a liberal education.
That is to say, the political system called democracy cannot be used as a validation for a liberal education. We cannot argue that liberal education is necessary to preserve democracy, because democracy itself needs validation before it can be used as a reason for something else, and that validation can come only from liberal education.
IX The Necessity of Authority for Democracy
As we saw in Chapter One, there is an inherent conceptual conflict in the political theory of democracy. In a democracy, the person as an individual is emphasized. Tocqueville's insights of the 1830's have become the sociological and psychological clichés of the 1990's: we are anxious and depressed, angry and impotent, suffused with hyper-activity and ennui, because we live in an atomistic world, without connections to family, friends, and neighbors; without what Victor Frankl called logos, or meaning; without intellectual, emotional, or vocational community. In other words, we live in a time of individualism gone bad.
It is no surprise, then, that one area of high-profile contemporary social criticism is the call for a renewed communitarianism, a revitalized understanding of and devotion to the role of connection and commitment. And it is a sign of how generally the lack of community is felt that there are "communitarians" all across the political spectrum, from Alisdair MacIntyre on the right to Paulo Freire on the left, with Robert Bellah and his colleagues somewhere just left of center.
But it is both fallacious and dangerous to pose the false dichotomy of individualism or community. Democracy requires both, not one or the other. Democracy by its very nature requires the free participation of the individual; to eliminate individualism is to eliminate democracy. But it is equally true that, in practice, democracy cannot exist without strong, vital communities, situations in which individuals can function as individuals. Without such communities, individualism does become atomism and freedom becomes meaningless. Just as, on the other hand, communities become conformist totalitarianisms when they reject individual freedom as an essential part of being human.
But community does imply sublimation and obligation, and sublimation and obligation limit freedom, so aren't the two concepts in fact antithetical? Isn't the rhetorical dichotomy between individualism and community both valid and informative?
My answer is paradoxical: neither individualism nor community can exist as it should without the full presence of the other. A community without the free association of free individuals is not communal, it is totalitarian. And, likewise, an individual whose freedom of choice is not informed by his inherent human obligation to his fellows is not truly an individual human, but something less, a mere licentious profligate, without reflection or consideration.
So democracy, because it is the form of social organization most congruent with human nature, requires both a full and proper individualism and a full and proper communitarianism.
But what is a "proper" individualism? a "proper" communitarianism? Who is to say what is "proper"?
Such questions occur because, in our time, both "individualism" and "community" are bankrupt terms. The radical relativism and subjectivism of individualism gone too far have given us a situation in which everyone is encouraged to define terms as he pleases. Arguing, therefore, for both individualism and community as necessary to democracy leaves us with serious and unanswered questions, particularly with regard to the definitions of individualism and communitarianism. While we may be convinced that "individualism" and "communitarianism" are necessary to democracy, we are simultaneously puzzled regarding what such terms might mean in practice.
Or, to put it another way, there is apparently no authority to inform us regarding what a "proper individualism" and a "proper communitarianism" would be.
It is this lack of authority which has watered down the idea of individualism, because there are no limits, and virtually destroyed the idea of community, because there are no guidelines for obligation and commitment.
But if both individualism and communitarianism are necessary for democracy, and if there is no authority to inform us regarding the proper nature of individualism and communitarianism, then democracy itself is conceptually suspect and practically insupportable. Or, to put it in a particularly paradoxical way, without authority, there can be no democracy.
Contrarily, industrial capitalism, with its dependence on impersonal, overly rationalized market forces, does not need and is, in fact, threatened by, both individualism and community.
So, without authority, democracy disappears but industrial capitalism flourishes. If we wish to revitalize democracy, and take control of industrial capitalism so that we are using it for our purposes, we must re-establish authority.
X Liberal Education as the Source of Authority in a Democracy
As we have seen, neither religion nor philosophy nor politics can provide the authority that we need, since each, for its own reasons, is suspect. I will argue that only liberal education, in its affirmation of the essential freedom of the human being, can validate notions of individualism and communitarianism.
In a democracy, authority must reside in a consensus of individually apprehended, examined, and integrated facts, knowledge, and understandings. Such a consensus can come about only through common educational experiences, not only in schools, but in the family, in church and synagogue, on the playground, at camp, at the day-care center, at the Boys' and Girls' clubs, in the Scouts, on the ball team, on the radio, on television, in the movies.
But in a democracy, those educational experiences cannot be indoctrinatory or propagandistic, but must be encouraging of personal freedom and responsibility.
The question then becomes, How can there be a consensus if educational experiences emphasize freedom?
The answer is twofold. First, any conformity of opinion arrived at by anything less than the free activity of individuals is not consensus at all, but something much less; something less than human. It can be public opinion; it can be the result of widespread emotional blackmail; it can even be Rousseau's "general will;" but it is not consensus because it was manipulated into existence, not chosen freely.
Second, as I have emphasized above, the impact of a liberal education would be to encourage not license but a responsible freedom, because a full knowledge of what it means to be human will inevitably lead to a careful balancing of responsibility to self and responsibility to others.
This is where the concept of democracy inevitably leads: To retain the authority necessary for individualism and community, each individual must come to know and understand, to integrate and practice, that which is authoritative, not just that which feels good and not just that which some powerful figure mandated.
No other model is democratic. The industrial capitalists would have us accept the remorselessly rational logic of the market in lieu of authority, but this is merely state-power is another guise and the antithesis of individualism. In addition, the logic of the market destroys community, so neither individualism nor communitarianism can exist.
But liberal education, a process of free inquiry which aims at liberation from ignorance, prejudice, and propaganda, provides the tools and the material for critical evaluation and free moral choosing. Such an informed and critical individualism is absolutely necessary for a legitimate democracy, but toxic to a society driven only by the logic of industrial capitalism.
The only practical and congruent method of establishing a truly democratic authority is through liberal education, a common, close reading of the best of the world's examinations of the human condition, in literature, history, and philosophy; in art, music, dance, and movies; in architecture, mathematics, and science.
The experience of liberal education itself is the only real validation we have for the notion of human being as rich, complex, contradictory, inherently meaningful, and requiring the embracing of individual freedom.
This understanding of what is truly human would lead inevitably to the creation of a democratic political system and a system of schooling based on the liberal education model, for only liberal education can a) provide children with the understanding of what it means to be human; b) provide all citizens with a compelling rationale for democracy; and c) provide an understanding of proper individualism and proper communitarianism, both of which are necessary for being human and for creating and maintaining democracy.
The organization of schools in such a system would probably be significantly different from what it currently is. Student populations and class sizes would have to be smaller to facilitate not just classroom discussion but on-going school-wide conversations. School buildings and grounds would have to be designed with aesthetic, not just functional, warehousing, considerations in mind, so that the nature of classroom discussions and the nature of classrooms themselves were not in conceptual conflict, and so that congenial conversation --- as well as normal childhood and adolescent activity --- would be encouraged. And the nature, personality, and activities of school administrators would shift to encourage intellectual activity as well as (possibly rather than) academic accomplishment, and to provide peace for conversation and contemplation rather than order for its own sake. The industrial model of ringing bells to start and stop activities, and the marching in lock-step from one activity to another, would be replaced by something more appropriate to genuine human activity.
The curriculum in such a program would be made up almost entirely of reading, examining, discussing, and writing about ideas concerning what it means to be human, as expressed in a wide variety of expressive media. Philosophy would be at the very heart of the program, but would not preclude or disrespect the disciplines of theology or literature as ways of seeing. Mathematics and science would be learned not by rote but by engaging the scientific and mathematical processes from the beginning. Art and music and dance would be taught not only as pastimes, not only as forms of artistic expression but as forms of human expression. The craft of writing poetry, the formulation of a syllogism, the aspects of the novel, the process of inquiry that drove human scientific investigation, all would be learned, but as part of the process, not as rote learnings separate from context. Disciplines would have their own integrity without being compartmentalized; and inter-disciplinary learning would be a way of life, not a program. And the goal of such a curriculum --- if "goal" is the right word --- would be free and open inquiry, an attempt, as T.H. White once put it, to "learn how the world wags, and what wags it."
Many will see the content of the curriculum as the thorniest question of all, but I see the "how" of teaching and learning as much more important than the "what" of the curriculum. What will be the content of the curriculum is predictably the biggest question here but only because of the nature of the current debate over schooling: Because the current debate is over control of schooling for the furthering of political and economic agendas, the curriculum is seen (probably rightly) as the key to the process of indoctrination, socialization, and training.
But on the liberal education model, the only guiding principle for what is chosen to be read and discussed is that it should be aesthetically superior, developmentally appropriate, and provide insights into the human condition that will provoke a high level of discussion.
But if the works chosen are typically of this kind, it would be possible, maybe even preferable, to read lesser works occasionally, because students should have the opportunity to recognize bad art, sloppy argument, vague language, and propaganda masquerading as truth.
Pedagogy would become almost entirely interactive, in one way and another. Examination and discussion, in the ways appropriate to developmental levels, would be at the heart of almost all classroom activities. Teachers would have to be leaders ("coaches" in Adlerian terms) and, at the same time, co-learners with their students, humble in the face of the perennial questions, admiring in the face of the great attempts at answers, involved in their students' quests.
Teaching, on this model, would require more than ever that teachers be both interested and disinterested, both passionately involved in the process and detached from the results. Teachers would pray, as T.S. Eliot once did, "teach us to care, and not to care."
Clearly, then, teaching would be more and more obviously an art, not a set of techniques, and teacher education would have to reflect the change. Assuming seventeen years of liberal education, the process of teacher education would emphasize more course work, further and deeper understandings of the works to be studied, philosophical examination of the concepts of teaching, developmental psychological understandings, the craft of teaching, and especially the subtle and difficult process of leading class discussions.
As I have implied throughout, the epistemology of liberal education is not just that it holds for intellect and free will, rationality and the ability to use it freely; it also depends, as John Dewey long ago said education should, on experiential learning. We all know personally that experience is virtually necessary to real learning. Liberal education broadens Dewey's understanding of experience to include all the intellectual, emotional, and intuitive experiences available from wide reading, contemplating, and discussing.
Liberal education demonstrates to us that we are meant to be free; that freedom requires courage, responsibility, and the willingness to live with contingency and mystery; and that social, political, and economic institutions --- including all forms of schooling --- should flow from and be congruent with human freedom.
It is my contention that, through the adoption of liberal education as the model for American schooling, with all its necessary implications for school organization, curriculum, methodology, and teacher education, we would be doing the best possible thing for the development of individual persons, the creation and maintenance of genuine communities, and the support and development of democracy itself.
Doing anything less runs the risk of losing all notions of individual freedom and real communal responsibility to the tidal wave of technocratic expertise and the social and political forms that flow from it.