St. Johns College President Christopher Nelson  recently gave an address about the value of a liberal arts education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

If you have ever asked me why I went to St. Johns, what I think is so great about the liberal arts, or why I think that [...]]]>

St. Johns College President Christopher Nelson  recently gave an address about the value of a liberal arts education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

If you have ever asked me why I went to St. Johns, what I think is so great about the liberal arts, or why I think that education is the only way to create real change, here is your answer:

Our nation’s foundation rests upon the principle of the intellectual freedom of each of its citizens; its political, economic, moral and spiritual freedoms are all derived from this intellectual freedom, and its political, economic, moral and spiritual strength depends upon it.  We are a nation built upon a respect for the individual and a trust that our citizens are capable of self-government.

For the sake of our country, we therefore need our citizens to have an education in our democratic traditions and foundations, as well as in the arts needed to question and examine those very foundations so that we may keep them vibrant and alive for us against attack or atrophy.  There is a real tension between these two goods.  The traditions, customs and laws of the nation are at times at odds with the very things that encourage the autonomy of the individual citizen who might question them.  This tension is healthy in a free republic.

A college education that will strengthen this tension will serve this nation well because it will help us educate independent and self-sufficient citizens who will be fit for the freedom they enjoy in our country.  Providing the access and opportunity to as many as possible to undertake such an education will serve that public interest.

If we prize the individual in our society and value the ways an individual may become self-sufficient, we also ought to support the many and various means our colleges employ to help their students become independent and strong.  In the end, the independence of our citizenry will strengthen our nation.  Education in the arts of freedom and self-sufficiency make the promise of America possible[...]

We are sometimes asked whether we aren’t elitist.  One former dean’s answer to that was, “We are small, but we are about as exclusive as a pick-up baseball game.  If you have a glove, want to play and make an effort, you belong.”  It’s a particularly good image because it suggests something that is very all-American.  We are a model of an American institution in at least two respects:

◊ First, democratic participation is our primary mode in the classroom.  Our students are responsible for participating in their classes, all of them in the same way.  They must all read the books, and then they must learn to listen to the authors, listen to their classmates’ contributions, and listen to themselves speaking.  They have equal responsibilities, equal rights and equal opportunities to learn according to their abilities, their desire and their preparedness for class.

◊ Second, all of our students read, and read critically, the principal documents that define our American democracy: the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the great speeches of Washington and Lincoln, and certain key Supreme Court decisions.

Read the full speech here.

{I love my college.}

Free government permits them to do it.

Liberal education enables them to do it.”

Stringfellow Barr, Co-founder of St. John’s College Great Books program, 1941

In Andrew’s post on Jacob Klein, he briefly quotes Scott Buchanan’s essay [...]]]> “Tyrants forbid citizens to do their duty as free men.

Free government permits them to do it.

Liberal education enables them to do it.”

Stringfellow Barr, Co-founder of St. John’s College Great Books program, 1941

In Andrew’s post on Jacob Klein, he briefly quotes Scott Buchanan’s essay entitled “The Last Don Rag.” Drawing on the St. Johns tradition of don rags, a discussion with your tutors (professors) regarding a specific text or idea, the essay (speech) is a serious of questions. I have yet to find a more compelling call for the role of education as it relates to a free society:

“Have you recognized that you are and always have been your own teacher? Amidst all the noise and furor about education in this country at present, I have yet to hear this question raised. But it is basic. Liberal education has as its end the free mind, and the free mind knows that he knows nothing, and then goes on to add: I know what it is that I don’t know. My question then is: Do you know what you don’t know and therefore what you should know? If your answer is affirmative and humble, then you are your own teacher, you are making your own assignment, and you will be your own best critic. You will not need externally imposed courses, nor marks, nor diplomas, nor a nod from you boss….in business or politics.”

“Under the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, have you persuaded yourself that there are knowledges and truths beyond your grasp, things that you simply cannot learn? Have you allowed adverse evidence to pile up and force you to conclude that you are not mathematical, not linguistic, not poetic, not scientific, not philosophical? If you have allowed this to happen you have arbitrarily imposed limits on your intellectual freedom, and you have smothered the fires from which all other freedom arise. Most of us have done this and come short of what that threadbare slogan, human dignity, really means… We are willing to become cripples in our minds and fractions of men in our lives.”

When Tom Palmer, eminent libertarian and St. Johns alumnus, asked me to take some of his students on a tour of Annapolis these quotes were on the short list of stops. The Barr quote at the top of this page and most of the second Buchanan quote are listed on the wall of one of the college’s buildings.

Liberty and the liberal arts are intricately tied. But why? What is it that “St. John’s stands for” that without which ”this country is not worth defending against the Nazis.”

A true education creates a free mind, a mind that is constantly searching, evaluating, and learning in the most honest and authentic way. We commonly believe that if a child can recite the correct answer when queried, that he has, obviously, has a knowledge of it. The problem lies in the fact that you cannot impart knowledge, you can only model the process of acquiring it and encourage an honest examination that leads to understanding. Free society requires those who promote it to model free thinking. It asks us to be critical of our beliefs and our actions. If we are to have a free society we must be self governed and a liberal arts education fosters the ability to do this.

During WWII the Navy considered seizing the campus of St. John’s via eminent domain in order to expand the Naval Academy. The fledgling New Program based on the great [...]]]> We recently came across the following anecdote about Jacob Klein, an eminent liberal artist and once dean of St. John’s College, at this blog:

During WWII the Navy considered seizing the campus of St. John’s via eminent domain in order to expand the Naval Academy. The fledgling New Program based on the great books of western tradition had just recently found a home there, on a campus whose oldest building was constructed before the Revolution, and with funding precarious, any move would probably kill this controversial endeavor outright.

A small delegation headed by Jascha Klein was sent to Washington to try to dissuade the government from seizing the campus. They entered the office of the Secretary of the Navy, who brusquely told them, “You have exactly one minute to tell me why I shouldn’t use your buildings to help the Academy in war time.”

Jascha Klein silently took out his pipe and began filling it with tobacco. He lit the pipe and checked to see if it was drawing well. Then, after 55 seconds had passed, this renowned scholar who had fled Hitler stood up and went to the door.

Turning, he said, “Because without what St. John’s stands for, this country is not worth defending against the Nazis.”

The Navy built the addition across the Severn River instead.

Of course, you cannot help but admire the magnanimity of Klein in this story: his capacity to be cool under fire, to think first, to have the courage to speak truth to power. These are clearly goals of the liberal artist and Klein’s skills in this matter were almost certainly whetted in the school of Socratic dialogue.  (Incidentally, it is probably a good rule of dialogue that there be roughly 55 seconds of quiet contemplation for every 5 seconds of speaking.)

This anecdote illustrates, or at least pertains to, the two elements this blog contends are essential for unleashing the human potential.  The first is liberty in which there is freedom for a competition of ideas, freedom to grow and discover, and freedom to search for the truth.  The second is a firm commitment to the search for an understanding of what is good and true.

Liberty

One of the main issues at stake in this story is the government seeking to seize the property of the college to further its own war-making purposes.

Property is the means of undertaking action.  Articles of property are the means of production, which individuals employ to pursue their goals. Respecting property is, therefore, tolerance.  If individuals’ property can be taken arbitrarily by government, the freedom to plan and to act on the part of those individuals no longer exists.  All goals, plans and actions become subsidiary to the ideas, plans and wishes of the state.  There is no room for diversity of aims, no room for experimentation or objection to state activity.

In his work Liberalism, Ludwig von Mises, one of the greatest advocates of human liberty, described the role of private property thusly:

Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will. It allows other forces to arise side by side with and in opposition to political power. It thus becomes the basis of all those activities that are free from violent interference on the part of the state. It is the soil in which the seeds of freedom are nurtured and in which the autonomy of the individual and ultimately all intellectual and material progress are rooted.

Mises also recognizes that there is a strong tendency on the part of those “who control the governmental apparatus of compulsion and coercion” to “impose oppressive restraints on private property…and to refuse to respect or recognize any free sphere outside or beyond the dominion of the state.”

We cannot hope that those in charge of the government apparatus will voluntarily permit us spheres of activity free and separate from the goals of the state.  Those in government must be restrained by a general public opinion that freedom is important, in other words, that individuals’ decision-making power over their own property—the means of pursuing their own goals—ought to be respected and remain free of the arbitrary interference of government.  This is the meaning of tolerance.  Only under this condition can social discovery and experimentation, alternate social arrangements and objectives “arise side by side with and in opposition to political power.”

(Of course, the very definition of fascism, including Nazism, is that all activities become subservient to the belligerent activities of the state.  On this issue see Mussolini’s own definition and Sheldon Richmond’s.)

How wonderful that St. John’s was able to avoid the social homogenization and destruction caused by belligerent government.

Commitment to the search for truth

One of the reasons it is so easy to be enamored with the Klein story above is that it leaves open to interpretation what St. John’s is all about.  If you like, it says “fill in what you like about St. John’s here.”  This was probably wise on the part of Jacob Klein.  Insofar as the story is true, it would mean that the Secretary of the Navy could fill in his own meaning, do his own thinking and research about why St. John’s and the kind of activity that goes on there is valuable.  The Secretary was clearly not in a receptive place and it would be almost impossible to have said anything significant about the liberal arts without creating a controversy that would have been insurmountable in only a minute.  But Klein’s comment was ideal to turn the Secretary’s “smug ease” into a “need to know,” which is the essential characteristic of Socratic teaching. (See the chapter “The Nature of Socratic Learning” in Peter Abbs’ The Educational Imperative.)

We cannot know definitively what Klein believed “St. John’s stands for” (although, his several lectures and essays make some excellent statements about St. John’s and the liberal arts).  Different people have different ideas about what makes St. John’s valuable.  All the parties in an organization cannot have exactly the same ends, but just as in market exchange where diverse goals are coordinated and mutually advanced by exchange, dialogical exchange is complementary and mutually supportive of many diverse understandings and objectives.  This, in fact, is what I believe makes St. John’s valuable.

In my opinion, there are two basic things St. John’s implicitly “stands for.”

Firstly, St. John’s commitment to dialogical inquiry requires a commitment to peaceful sharing of diverse understanding and the humility to realize that we have something to learn from others who are different from ourselves.  Secondly, St. John’s stands for the faith that “knowledge is possible, that truth is attainable, and that it is always [our] business to seek it” (Buchanan).

Freedom is necessary to find out the good and to do it.  Freedom is necessary for learning and action, but it is not sufficient.  Also needed is the genuine desire to search out truth and what is good.

Jacob Klein’s works and anecdotes about him like this one are inspirational to me.  When I read them, I cannot help but want to emulate him.  I admire his penetrating understanding, the clarity of his thought and writing, his assiduity in the liberal arts, and his erudition.  Klein’s example compels me to want to be better, to not settle for a poor and partial understanding but to constantly search for greater understanding and self-mastery.  I speak earnestly when I say that Jacob Klein is one of my all time heroes.

The ultimate goal of education is to kindle a love of knowing and to nurture the ability to inquire.  The vision of a Liberal Arts Education, as I understand it, is to support the student’s development of independent judgment, clarity of thought and the habit of inquiry. 

My own love of the liberal arts began when I was in high school. Prior to that time, I found reading slow, difficult and unrewarding.  I couldn’t imagine why anyone would spend time doing it for fun.  In my sophomore year of high school, however, a dear family friend began to encourage me to learn how to read.  He gave me a book on economic theory and political philosophy written by six college students called The Incredible Bread Machine.  The book (despite what one might expect) was short, clever, and fun. More importantly, it introduced me to a world of ideas, ideas that were interesting to me because they helped me understand the world around me.  This book, and the literature I was introduced to through it, satisfied a deep craving for meaning and knowing, which I wasn’t aware I had. I became alive to ideas.  My deep interest in economics spread into other fields such as history, philosophy of science, ethics, mathematics, logic. I started to be aware of things I had never noticed before and became eager to understand more and more.  My desire to find things out, in turn, made me invested in thinking well and in developing the necessary intellectual skills I would need to engage with the world of ideas. 

“Everyone, by nature, desires to know.”  Teenagers in particular crave the exploration of meaning.  A student’s desire to understand and find out is a powerful force for his or her development, if it can be unleashed.  Unfortunately “traditional” models of education devalue the exploration of meaning and dissuade students from asking genuine questions.  Instead, these models force students to incorporate other peoples’ conclusions into their own thinking by means of mere belief and memorization. Without genuinely engaging students in inquiry about the problems, questions, methods and reasoning that lead to these conclusions, students have no ownership of the particular information or of the greater “conversation” about these ideas. 

This predominant mode of teaching and schooling is the outgrowth of a false epistemology: that knowledge is handed down by experts, who learn it from other experts, whose knowledge ultimately arises from an unknown source to which the student cannot hope to have direct access.  This theory of learning hangs over the edge of a chasm separating belief and understanding, thought and judgment.

This epistemology makes students believe they are impotent, that they are incapable of coming to know through their own efforts and reason. In this context, students implicitly conclude that they must do the exact opposite of what is actually needed. Instead of being active questioners, they believe that they must suppress their questions in order to faithfully incorporate the ideas of those who will “teach” them. Not only does this way of teaching discourage criticism of authority, but it does not supply the students any basis from which to exercise reasonable criticism.  This disenfranchises them from the process of inquiry and from the responsibility of having to find and make the meaning of their lives. 

The alternative to this false epistemology is that students are valuable participants in a collaborative search for truth and that they have the primary responsibility to make and discover the meaning of their lives.  When students engage the great ideas in the context of a community of genuine learners, they realize that learning is valuable and that they have the capacity to make meaningful contributions to human knowledge and progress. Once students are thus enthused, they are more likely to demand clear thinking of themselves and each other and are more receptive to the acquisition of the needed intellectual habits and skills. 

Robert Maynard Hutchins, the founder of the great books program at the University of Chicago, expressed the idea that every human being is a liberal artist by inescapable necessity.  We cannot avoid using theories of knowledge to judge and incorporate ideas into our own understanding.  The only issue remains, therefore, whether we will be good liberal artists or poor ones, whether our ability to inquire, reason and judge has been exercised and developed, or whether we are at the mercy of other people’s understanding. 

The ‘absorbent mind’ welcomes everything, puts hope in everything…adopts any religion, and the prejudices and the habits of its countrymen, incarnating all in itself. That is the child! ~Maria Montessori

Nature says copy your parents…whatever your interests are, the child gets tremendously interested in them [...]]]> Good habits formed at youth make all the difference. ~Aristotle

The ‘absorbent mind’ welcomes everything, puts hope in everything…adopts any religion, and the prejudices and the habits of its countrymen, incarnating all in itself. That is the child! ~Maria Montessori

Nature says copy your parents…whatever your interests are, the child gets tremendously interested in them too. ~Margaret Homfray, below video, 08:50

As I was researching Montessori principles, I came across some wonderful full-length lectures, by a plain speaking Montessorian named Margaret Homfray. This one on preparing children to read is particularly good.

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4642441267249144773&ei=LTecSd-WDJy4qAO35vHCDA&q=Margaret+Homfray+1]

If our goal is to educate children to become free thinking adults then we need think about how to they develop the habits of thought. We have to be aware of the role each of us has in fostering the habits of dialogue. If we never speak to children like they are thinking beings, if we never model sophisticated language and thought for them, children will never become comfortable thinking about sophisticated ideas.  Then, how can they enjoy the wonderfully complex ideas that we value?

When was the last time you had a conversation with a child? Asked them an open-ended question? It is amazing. They are so eager to talk to you, eager to tell you what they are thinking, what they like, what they don’t, what they have done with their day. Children see adults talking to one another all the time, and when you make the smallest effort to engage them, they tell you all about themselves. Each of us making these small efforts are what create the culture we strive for.

And you don’t have to wait until you have your own child to begin fostering a culture of dialogue. Try it with the next child you are standing with in the grodery store line, or on the bus.  Let me know what you learn.