Madcap Editorial
“What is liberal education?”
Ask the question “what is liberal education?” to students attending the university today, and one will find very few students who could answer this question with any sort of accuracy. One will hear such things as, ” liberal education is a well rounded education,” or, “I don’t really know, I’m going to school to have a career.” This, without a doubt, is a serious situation for our culture and our country. We have descended so far down the path of gross reductionism and specialization, that the meaning and purpose of liberal education has become lost in the fog of the information age.
The purpose of a liberal education, to quote Strauss would be to,“provide a ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant.” Another way of putting “mass democracy” would be to say mass culture. To further quote Strauss:
“…it demands from us the complete break with the noise, the rush, the thoughtlessness, the cheapness of the Vanity Fair of the intellectuals as well as of their enemies. It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or the least popular opinions. Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for vulgarity; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.”
Liberal education today works to achieve the direct opposite of this. Today’s liberal education seeks to create mass democracy by placing diversity above excellence, while at the same time reducing studies to the empirical world. Speculative sciences are out the door. Today’s liberalism seeks to create the city of pigs that others have endlessly labored to rise above.
Though not often spoken in the halls of academia, democracy has an inherent problem. If the masses that elect representatives suffer from intellectual drift, decline and destruction soon follow. True liberal education provides the antidote to this potential problem. If the general population is composed of a significant number of people who have cultivated their minds and soul, they will elect as representatives cultivated individuals. Liberalism in its current condition, has reduced existence to solely the material realm, thus helping to bring about the collapse of society.
A quote from the introduction to the great books by Encyclopedia Britannica written in 1954;
“We believe that the reduction of the citizen to an object of propaganda, private and public, is one of the greatest dangers to democracy. A prevalent notion is that the great mass of the people cannot understand and cannot form an independent judgment upon the matter; they cannot be educated, in the since of developing their intellectual powers, but they can be bamboozled. The reiteration of slogans, the distortion of the news, the great storm of propaganda [Darwinism] that beats upon the citizen twenty-four hours a day all his life long mean either that democracy must fall a prey to the loudest and most persistent propagandists or that the people must save themselves by strengthen their minds so that they can appraise the issues for themselves.”
Al Gore comes to mind with his loud global whining drum. Barack Obama comes to mind as well. He looks good, speaks well, therefore he’s our man. Whether he is qualified for the job is irrelevant. Also, the speculations of Darwin being put forth as scientific fact is part of the liberal bamboozlement. With the dawn of cable TV and the internet, the drums have grown to a deafening volume since 1954. What can a person do about this?
If the purpose of a liberal education is to create a mass aristocracy, how is this achieved? How does someone cultivate their minds and soul? I agree with Strauss when he says that one should continually have intercourse with the great minds. This poses a problem because few, if any teachers could be considered great minds. I also agree with Strauss when he points out that one is extremely lucky if only one great mind is alive in one’s time. Sure, we have many professors that work in philosophy departments, but are they truly lovers of philosophy? As well, we have no shortage of professors working in history departments, but are they truly historians? No, by and large, as in all professions, greatness is a rarity. (Let us also not forget the impact on education Calvin has had with the idea of Sola Scriptura.)
It is for these reasons one must look to the great books, written by the truly great minds, who have left us with their wisdom through their writing. Until recent times, one was not considered to be educated until he was well acquainted with the masterpieces of Western man. Oh, how far we have strayed from this! We have intentionally silenced all those voices that call from the past, and in silencing these voices, we have silenced all the wisdom that could be used to help man in the present.
The Great Books of the Western World can be purchased through the Encyclopedia Britannica. If you are seeking more than a job, if you want to cultivate the mind that God gave us, I highly recommend getting a set of these books. I also recommend that you spend the rest of your life reading them. Read them with your children as early as eight years old. By the time they hit the university, they will be far more educated than the average biology professor, and therefore will not succumb to the insanity that is taught there. No matter what they choose to do, they will be more successful because of this. The answer to the problems created by post-modern liberalism (and religious fundamentalism) is classical liberalism. This is the true meaning of liberalism; to cultivate ones mind rather than corrupting it.
From all this, we can conclude that today’s institutions of higher learning are far more technical schools, designed to provide someone with a job in one field of specialization or another, rather than places where one is encouraged to cultivate those things that bring out the best within human nature. The goal of producing mass aristocracy has been replaced with propagating mass democracy, a city of pigs where diversity is valued over excellence through personal achievement and accountability. Today’s universities are places of indoctrination into a shallow worldview, where history and philosophy have been reduced to inconveniences that stand in the way of what is called “progress.”
I have noticed a rampantly dominant theme coming from the secularist; that God is dead and unworthy of real thought. This is a clear sign of decadence in our society. Aristotle said that man is a political animal, if not; he is either a god or a beast. There are no issues as real as God and man. To discard these topics is to discard what it is to be human.
This is precisely the outcome of modern liberalism; de-humanization. Hitler de-humanized the mentally and physically ill because they were an inconvenience. Liberals in our time have de-humanized the unborn for being an inconvenience. Abortion has become the holy sacrament of the new religion known as liberalism. With its embrace of scientific naturalism liberalism has de-humanized man, casting him down to equality with dolphins, great horned owls, and forest moss.
Only a true liberal education for the common man can save us. A true liberal education is indeed possible, but one needs to take responsibility and time to educate yourself, and our children.
