The Role of Schooling in a Democracy
by
Thomas R. McCambridge
May 11, 1996
Presented to the bi-annual meeting of the
California Association for Philosophy of Education
Stanford, California

INTRODUCTION: The thesis of this paper is simple: liberal education is the proper model for all schooling. This
conclusion proceeds from the following logic:
a. freedom is an essential and necessary element of human nature (or, servitude is antithetical to human nature)
b. schooling, the public and social form of child rearing, should encourage that which is natural, freedom (or,
schooling should discourage that which is unnatural, servitude)
c. therefore, liberal education, which is encouraging of freedom, should be chosen (or, schooling for utility, which is
preparation for servitude, should be avoided)

Liberal education is not only the model of schooling most congruent with human nature, but it also provides the only
justification for democracy, and the only valid informing principles for democracy’s two great components, individualism and communitarianism.

Only education can prepare the individual for life in a democracy. Only an understanding of, and a submission to,
certain universal principles regarding the nature of being human, the good life, and the good society, can allow for the authentic individualism and communitarianism necessary to sustain the democratic experiment.

Only liberal education can encourage a genuine individualism and a responsible communitarianism, because only liberal education includes a study of the many varied, subtle, and complex questions regarding what it means to be an individual and what relationship an individual properly has to the community. Without such a study, preferably in one’s youth, individualism can slip into emotivism, subjectivism, hedonism, and mere self-interest; and, on the other extreme, devotion to the community can easily become a mindless conformity to the security of the collective. The goal in a democratic society must necessarily be to avoid both.

TOWARD A DEFINITION OF LIBERAL EDUCATION: No historically grounded, fairly unshakable,
and commonly understood definition of liberal education exists in either popular or academic discourse. The sad fact is that the term is little understood, badly used, and respected almost not at all. Those on the political and economic right have appropriated the term and try to use it as an intellectual bludgeon in order to further their political and economic agenda. Those on the left reject the term as inevitably the tool of the hegemonic oppressors, an accusation which --- if seen only in the context of contemporary culture wars --- is essentially correct.

But I want to argue that liberal education is not and cannot by definition be the tool of any oppressive regime, and
that the term must be liberated from its capture by the elitist right; and that the left, to the extent that it is genuinely interested in promoting a proper individuality (liberation) and a genuine commitment (communitarianism), must necessarily support the means and the ends of liberal education.

Notions of liberal education inevitably rest on the assumption that there is such a thing as an inherent nature of man; that is, an essential humanness common to all people, everywhere, at all times. It is also assumed that such a nature is discoverable and definable, and that an understanding of it can lead to proper definitions of the good life and the good society. As JacquesMaritain put it,

The job of education is....to shape a particular child belonging to a given nation, a given social environment, a
given historical age. Yet before being a child of the twentieth century, an American-born or European-born
child, a gifted or retarded child, this child is a child of man....nothing is more important for each of us, or more
difficult, than to become a man. Thus the chief task of education is above all to shape man, or to guide the
evolving dynamism through which man forms himself as a man.[1]

If such assumptions are accepted, the argument for liberal education will make sense, and arguments for any of the
various utilitarianisms will be patently inhumane. On the other hand, if such assumptions are rejected, the argument for liberal education will not hold up, and the various utilitarianisms can legitimately compete with one another for public support.

To put it another way, either Maritain is correct when he contends that there is such a thing as “man,” something which precedes nationality, social environment, or influence of a given historical age; or his opponents are right when they contend for some version of existentialism, dependent on will, depth psychology, culture, race, or gender.

There have always been twin purposes to liberal education: the first is to discover the way the world really is; the
second is to become fully human by conforming to that reality. This is what C.S. Lewis refers to as “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”[2]

I have made this point so baldly and so briefly here, not to pretend that the argument has been made and the
controversy settled, but to make clear what the stakes are when entering into a discussion of liberal education. As I have said previously, the term liberal education is not one which can be used to mean “just what I choose it to mean --- neither more nor less.” For a discussion of liberal education to be fruitful, the term must be used to mean what it always meant --- a study of what it means to be human, as part of the process of becoming human. Liberal education, despite the changes in its content and methods over the centuries, has always been grounded in Aristotelian essentialist foundationalism. Liberal education, properly understood, demands a telos. For if there is a telos, education becomes a process, not of invention, but of discovery; becoming human becomes a process, not of self-invention, but of conformity to one’s nature. On such a view, history is the retelling of the story of humankind, not the making up of stories; aesthetics is the acknowledging of the beautiful, not mere opinion; and law is the codification of morality, not a substitute for it. On such a view, not all is politics, and not all politics ispower.

Without doubt, these are peculiar ideas given the intellectual climate of the West in the late 20th Century, where the
intellectual consensus is not essence, but existence; not humanity, but culture, race, or gender; not universal principles to be discovered, but social construction of knowledge; not education for becoming human, but schooling for some utility --- financial security, economic competitiveness, cultural aspiration, improving the world.

LIBERAL EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY, PART ONE: While it is true that liberal education
depends on a telos for its validity, the two great apologists for a telos to which we should conform are Plato and Aristotle, and neither is a believer in democracy. Both contended, each in his own way, that some kind of meritocracy should rule. And it is primarily out of the ideas of Plato and Aristotle that we can derive an argument for liberal education as the proper approach to schooling. Are, then, liberal education and democracy antithetical? As we will see, that is exactly what the reformers of schooling in 1918 argued as they produced the Cardinal Principles for Secondary Education. Is liberal education necessarily elitist and, therefore, anti-democratic? If there is a telos, some essential human nature, some reality that lies behind appearance,
then some will perceive and understand that telos more accurately and more fully than others. Should these not rule, by virtueof their greater wisdom? Or, to come at it the other way, if democratic political theory requires egalitarianism, does thedemocratic experiment then require something like philosophical pragmatism, which has to do not with the essential nature of things, or conformity to that essential nature, but with how things work out in practice? If democracy does require something like philosophical pragmatism, then what came to be known as Progressive

Education would also seem to be inevitable. The very fact that there are various strands of progressive education that are in conflict with one another supports the contention that it is the outgrowth of philosophical pragmatism: there is to be public debate over the desired outcomes, but “outcomes” is the goal. Apparently, then, liberal education depends on the existence of and conformity to a telos and is, therefore, elitist.

Democracy depends on public debate, majority rule, and public evaluation of effects; democracy is, to use the term broadly, egalitarian and so, by definition, anti-elitist. Schooling in a democracy must not be elitist and, so, must not be grounded in liberal education. Is this radical opposition valid, or is there a way to harmonize the essentialist foundations of liberal education and the egalitarian positions of democratic political theory? That is the question to keep in mind as we proceed.

LIBERAL EDUCATION AS ITS OWN JUSTIFICATION: 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. 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 mostremarkable 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 tomake 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.

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 adeep understanding of human imperfection.

And, ultimately, the basic insight is that we have free will, and that the obligation of making moral choices is terrifying,
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
twenty-three hundred 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 lifeof 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 orpredictable 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 thathave 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, 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.

How is it possible 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 ofpower. And only schooling for education can teach us the importance of “choosing life”.

LIBERAL EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY, PART TWO: 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 tensionbetween these two powerful innate desires leads to an inevitable dissatisfaction with existing social and political forms. 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 1836 than it would be for one of us in 1996; 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. 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 withthe 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.

THE NECESSITY OF AUTHORITY IN A DEMOCRACY: 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.

LIBERAL EDUCATION AS THE SOURCE OF AUTHORITY IN A DEMOCRACY: Neither religion
nor philosophy nor politics can provide the authority that we need, since each, for its own reasons, is suspect. I 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 should 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, , fear, 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.

CONCLUSION: 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.





[1] Jacques Maritain, Education at the Crossroads (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1943), 1.
[2] C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man: How Education Develops Man’s Sense of Morality (New York, Macmillan, 1947), 27.