Understanding a liberal education

Let us get to the heart of the problem, or at least its most notable symptoms. I showed the poem I wrote last week about the disgusting and at times nauseating drive for money, these base bourgeois obsessions that motivate most of the campus, to someone next to me in the dining hall. After she read it I asked her what she thought.

"It is long, and I am an engineer, it gets too hard after the first five lines." Earlier in the day some other people who read it were impressed that the words at the end of the lines rhymed. How is it that after two viewpoints, each of which I attempted to obliquely assault a large part of this campus, and one of which I underhandedly insulted the entire economics department, go unnoticed? Perhaps this is the question that shall lead us to a better understanding of what an education is, and who we are ourselves.

If we first submit the premise that the purpose of an education is not to make money, for, if it is, then an education would be merely vocational training; then what are we left with?

First, education is for the self: it is to deepen an individual, to make him more interesting, to allow him to understand his world, and more importantly, himself. The crucial question thus becomes: in the short time period of four years, what subjects truly teach an individual about himself and his world? He cannot take everything, priorities must exist. There must be subjects that are deemed higher _ more important than others.

As a wise professor remarked to me once: why do we not have a course in alpine skiing or advanced sexual techniques? Precisely because those subjects are not deemed important, that is not what makes a human truly educated. By taking this first preemptory step, by making this first judgment, we have already concluded that one subject can be higher than another; therefore, the next logical application is: what subjects are highest?

Yet you must be careful not to fall into this particularly modern disease, this chronic and sophistic relativism, which posits that one value is not higher than another, that one subject cannot be deemed more important than another. "Everyone has their own individual tastes," you are fond of saying, "and who are you to tell them what is more important? Each person discovers his education in his own way"

Yet if students already understand what is important, then what is the point of coming to college-you might as well just go to the library and educate yourself, or go to Brown, where I hear they like sophistic students.

"But we need help reading the books," you say, "we need to be taught complicated notions that would be hard for us to understand by ourselves." Well what else do you not know? Perhaps you need more help than you think? If you already admit that you came to college for guidance in your studies, than perhaps you should actually permit the University to guide you.

Liberal education is taught by the greatest minds. They are the inheritors of Socrates, and we are all their pupils. We must be careful not to use the term "great" lightly, for there are none of these great minds alive today. They are in the past, and their teachings are in books.

It is na??ve not to admit that these books are mostly, but not exclusively, in the Western tradition. Yet that hardly matters, they are books rooted in human culture-a singular term that transcends the plural form, cultures. The minute you attempt to divide cultures, you are the one that commits the injustice by denying the universality of human longings and desires, of human potential and possibility.

Today we think our views are superior to those of the past; that we have advanced, perhaps, even to a point beyond the ability to be taught by anyone who lived before the age of automobiles and automatons. To think this is not to be liberally educated. A liberal education demands that the student disregard television talk shows for Tolstoy, malevolent magazines for Moliere, and newspapers for Nietzsche.

Liberal education demands literacy in letters, which means an avid and propitious pursuit of the great books. These great books introduce the student to the problems of man: his longings and his desires, his faults and his faculties. They introduce the pupil to options of nobility and virtue that are spread out like silver in the story of man and the gold in the pages of books; and conversely, to what is vulgar and base. In short, they attempt to give him an understanding of humanity, its awfulness and its excellence. They are the true teachers, and the best ones to do it.

Where are these books found, and who chooses them? This question is easy enough, for the task has already been done for us. Time, the ultimate leveler, reveals who stands its awesome tests and who falls by the wayside.

We moderns like to think our own writers superior, but I would be surprised if any could last fifty years into the next century. The greatest are those that last for thousands, and will continue to last until the great minds are disregarded, shamed as unimportant, and forgotten.

The only other way is for us to lose them is or if they are burned in 451 degrees of heat. Yet our modern way of government makes the latter nearly impossible, but the former is an ever-present danger that liberal education is supposed to combat-perhaps that is what Ray Bradbury truly meant. It is up to those who truly wish to get an education to carry the torch of learning, which is a liberal education in the great books.

I would be wrong not to say that I am truly indebted to Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom for helping me get a preliminary glimpse of what a liberal education is and means.

Matt Holbreich has yet to declare a major.