"Liberal Education"
by
Robert Hutchins
No Friendly Voice
As Aristotle remarked, politics is the archetectonic science. This is one way of saying that the political philosophy accepted by a state will determine the kind of education it has. It is also a way of saying that the practical political situation in which a state finds itself has an overwhelming effect on its educational system....Education is a secondary subject.
One difficulty is that we cannot answer any educational question of importance by appealing to the test of experience. The countries of the West appear determined to become industrial, scientific, and democratic. There have never been countries that were industrial, democratic, and scientific before....(so) the experience of earlier societies would be of little use to us in solving the problems of education.
And yet there has always been an education that has been regarded as the best for the best. It has been regarded as the education for those who were to rule the state and for those who had leisure.
What is a good life? What is a good society? What is the nature and destiny of man?....Here we see that education is a secondary subject, depending in this case upon philosophy.
Let us look at the education that has been regarded as the best for the best and ask ourselves whether this is still the education that states the ideal, to what extent it is the best today, and to what extent it may be usefully offered to those who were not regarded as the best when this education was developed.
In the West, this education has gone by the name of liberal education. It has consisted of the liberal arts, the arts of reading, writing, listening, speaking, and figuring, and of the intellectual and artistic tradition that we inherit. It was designed for those who were to rule the commonwealth, and for those who had leisure. It has always been thought that those who could profit by it were a small fraction of the population. It has never been denied, as far as I know, that it was the best education for the best. The question I wish to raise is first, whether it actually was the best education, and second whether it is so today, and for whom.
I cannot prove that this education was the best....I think it enough to show that this education was characteristically human and that it was characteristically western. When I say that it was characteristically human, I am saying once more that education is a dependent subject; for what I mean is, of course, that liberal education conformed to an idea of man that I regard as sound. This is the conception of man as a rational animal, an animal who seeks and attains his highest felicity through the exercise and perfection of his reason. It is impossible to avoid being a liberal artist; for a man cannot choose whether he will be human or not. He can make the choice only between being a good liberal artist or a poor one.
Liberal education was characteristically western, because it assumed that everything was to be discussed. Liberal education aimed at the continuation of the dialogue that was the heart of western civilization. Western civilization is the civilization of the dialogue. It is the civilization of the Logos. Liberal education made the student a participant in the Great Conversation that began with the dawn of history and continues to the present day. Great as other civilizations have been in other respects, no other civilization has been as great as this one in this respect.
Liberal education consists of training in the liberal arts and understanding the leading ideas that have animated mankind. It aims to help the human being learn to think for himself, to develop his highest human powers. As I have said, it has never been denied that this education was the best for the best. It must still be the best for the best unless modern times, industry, science, and democracy have made it irrelevant. The social, political, and economic changes that have occurred have not required that liberal education be abandoned. How could they? It is still necessary to try to be human; in fact it is more necessary, as well as more difficult, than ever.
Liberal education was the education of rulers. It was the education of those who had leisure. Democracy and industry, far from making liberal education irrelevant, make it indispensable and possible for all the people. Democracy makes every man a ruler, for the heart of democracy is universal suffrage. If liberal education is the education that rulers ought to have, and this I say has never been denied, then every ruler, that is every citizen, should have a liberal education. If industry is to give everybody leisure, and if leisure, as history suggest, tends to be degrading and dangerous unless it is intelligently used, then everybody should have the education that fits him to use his leisure intelligently, that is, liberal education. If leisure makes liberal education possible, and if industry is to give everybody leisure, then industry makes liberal education possible for everybody.
When I urge liberal education for all, I am not suggesting that all the people must become great philosophers, historians, scientists, or artists. I am saying that they should know how to read, write, and figure and that they should understand the great philosophers, historians, scientists, and artists. This does not seem to me an unattainable goal.
If it is, unless some better kind of liberal education can be invented than the one that I have described, we shall be forced to abandon universal suffrage; for I do not believe that men can solve the problems raised by their own aggregation unless they learn to think for themselves about the fundamental issues of human life and organized society.
....it will be argued that a program of liberal education for all ignores the most important thing about men, and that is that they are different. I do not ignore it; I deny it. I do not deny that fact of individual differences; I deny that it is the most important fact about men or the one on which an educational system should be erected.
Men are different. They are also the same. And at least in the present state of civilization the respects in which they are the same are more important than those in which they are different.
The liberal arts are the arts of communication. The great productions of the human mind are the common heritage of all mankind. They supply the framework through which we understand one another and without which all factual data and area studies and exchanges of persons among countries are trivial and futile. They are the voices in the Great Conversation that constitutes the civilization of the dialogue.
Now, if ever, we need an education that is designed to bring out our common humanity rather than to indulge our individuality....In a modern, industrial, scientific democracy every man has the responsibility of a ruler and every man has the leisure to make the most of himself. What the modern, industrial, scientific democracy requires is wisdom. The aim of liberal education is wisdom. Every man has the duty and every man must have the chance to become as wise as he can.
We are living through one of the greatest revolutionary periods in history.....The real goal is justice. It is to throw off the yoke of the oppressor, foreign or domestic, and to enable every human being, regardless of the accidents of color, birth, or station, to achieve his highest potentialities.
Our task in North America, where we are proud and prosperous inheritors of the great tradition of the West, is not performed by making this continent the arsenal, or the granary, or the powerhouse of the world. Our task is to preserve and develop the civilization of the Logos for all mankind.