Can liberal education survive liberal democracy?

Public Interest, Spring, 2002 by Diana Schaub

What Adams perhaps leaves out, with his generational formulation, is that one may perform the urgent duties better for having had what Leo Strauss called "experience in things beautiful." That is not the reason for studying painting, poetry, music, and architecture, but it does suggest that an appreciation of the finer things need not be debilitating or at odds with political survival. The enjoyment of liberty could fortify liberty--if, that is, the enjoyment of liberty were itself liberal rather than slavish. By humanizing man, the liberal arts provide guidance throughout the affairs of life. Adams was a better statesman for his mastery of classical language and literature; Lincoln a more sublime statesman for his love of Shakespeare and Euclid; and Churchill more Churchillean for being steeped in poetry and song. "Lots of Poetry by heart" is the educational prescription of Churchill's memoir, My Early Life. Each had the "experience in things beautiful," and it made them natural aristocrats--not just remembe rers of human greatness but exemplars of it.

If these men could move between the beautiful and the useful and the urgent, perhaps we can too. David Brooks, in a much-cited article in the Atlantic Monthly (April 2001), dubbed today's college student "the organization kid." And he is right: They are career-minded, goal-oriented, accomplishment-driven; when you announce the due date for a paper, out come the leather-bound schedulers and electronic datebooks. These models of efficiency are now, under the compulsion of the time, reawakening to greatness and sacrifice, to history and tragedy. Perhaps this is the moment for further awakenings: If Strauss's definitions of liberal education are correct, then there is a continuum from political greatness to the conversation of great minds and the experience of things beautiful. The day after the attacks, instead of heeding my college's suggestion to turn the classroom into an hour with Oprah, my students and I pressed on with our studies. Sticking to the syllabus, on September 12 we read Pericles's "Funeral Orat ion" and Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" and the next week Thucydides's "Melian Dialogue" and Plato's Apology, finding therein resources for grief and anger transcending any the counseling centers could offer. Instead of a return to normalcy, how about if we respond to the spur of the urgent by overleaping the utilitarian in the direction of the divine?

Freedmen and free men

If you will indulge me one more quotation, I will close. This comes from W. E. B. DuBois, best known as the founder of the NAACP, but also one of America's most lyrical writers about liberal education. Composed in 1903, during a time of disfranchisement and lynchings, the passage describes Atlanta University, a freedmen's college founded in 1865, out of the rubble of civil war:

The hundred hills of Atlanta are not all crowned with factories. On one, toward the west, the setting sun throws three buildings in bold relief against the sky. The beauty of the group lies in its simple unity:--a broad lawn of green rising from the red street with mingled roses and peaches; north and south, two plain and stately halls; boldly graceful, sparingly decorated, and with one low spire. It is a restful group, one never looks for more; it is all here, all intelligible. There I live, and there I hear from day to day the low hum of restful life. In winter's twilight, when the red sun glows, I can see the dark figures pass between the halls to the music of the night-bell. In the morning, when the sun is golden, the clang of the day-bell brings the hurry and laughter of three hundred young hearts from hall and street, and from the busy city below,--children all dark and heavy-haired, to join their clear young voices in the music of the morning sacrifice. In a half-dozen class-rooms they gather then, her e to follow the love-song of Dido, here to listen to the tale of Troy divine; there to wander among the stars, there to wander among men and nations,--and elsewhere other well-worn ways of knowing this queer world. Nothing new, no time-saving devices,--simply old time-glorified methods of delving for Truth, and searching out the hidden beauties of life, and learning the good of living. The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium, and is today laid before the freedmen's sons by Atlanta University. And this course of study will not change; its methods will grow more deft and effectual, its content richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the true college will ever have one goal,--not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.