Author’s Note: This article originally appeared in my weekly Top of Mind newsletter, which goes out to subscribers every Thursday. Sign up to receive it directly in your inbox.
If someone were to ask me why the liberal arts matter, I would point them to Aaron Alexander Zubia’s “Education for Virtue and Liberty.”
Drawing on George Turnbull’s 1742 treatise Observations upon Liberal Education, Zubia, an assistant professor at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, makes a countercultural claim: education is for “instruction in right living.” Turnbull, a Scottish philosopher who helped shape early American thought, understood that education is more than the transmission of information. It is about forming judgment and about teaching students how to live, and how to live right.
This idea is, indeed, counter to the culture of the modern university. And though Zubia doesn’t touch on politics, I can’t help but mention that both political parties have helped make it so.
The left’s contribution to this abandonment is well documented on the pages of Minding the Campus. The humanities have been converted into vehicles for leftist activism. Inquiry has been chilled by fear, and truth-seeking has been subordinated to whatever ideological fad happens to dominate the moment. The product of this kind of education was on full display last month when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took the stage at the Munich Security Conference, unable to articulate basic American interests.
However, the right, rather than seek to reform institutions so that we might not get more AOCs, has sought a utilitarian answer that sees the liberally educated generalist as a luxury. Linda McMahon’s vision of American education, for example, begins and ends with workforce alignment. She is pushing postsecondary institutions toward apprenticeships, dual-credit pipelines, and industry partnerships. Of course, schools should prepare students to make a living. But a smoother handoff to an employer is not the whole of it.
A utilitarian education may equip a person with skills, but it does not teach him, as Zubia’s essay reminds us, to “know no master but reason.”
Zubia, drawing again from Turnbull, argues that a person who has not learned to reason cannot govern himself and will be ruled by impulse, easily swayed by others, and carried along by whatever stirs him in the moment. This is why Minding the Campus and the National Association of Scholars have been pressing the need for robust liberal arts programs for years. And it’s why we’re going to keep pressing the issue.
The purpose of education is not merely to inform, but to form. Without that, whatever else our institutions produce, they will not produce free men.
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