“Why do I need to know this?” remains a common question I encounter in the classes I teach. I first heard it, predictably, in the junior high classroom, but continue to hear it in the college classroom. Somewhere between seventh grade and college, students seem to have missed that there is reason behind many of the general requirements of high school and college curriculum. And perhaps it is because teachers, the ones who should know, have missed the same thing. Perhaps the good of a liberal education is so taken for granted that we forget what good it’s aiming for. That is a tragedy because the good that liberal education seeks after is nothing short of the moral formation of the individual for the proper exercise of liberty in a free society. This tightly intertwined relationship between liberal education and a free society is powerfully illustrated in the words of the Declaration of Independence. In the Declaration’s articulation of self-evident truths, Thomas Jefferson demonstrates that liberal education provides the philosophical justification and ethical framework at the core of an American free society.
What do we mean by “liberal education”?
The Association of American Colleges and Universities defines liberal education as
a philosophy of education that empowers individuals with broad knowledge and transferable skills, and a strong sense of values, ethics, and civic engagement.
Strip away the adjectives and conjunctions of the run on sentence so common to complex definitions, and you could restate the definition as “a philosophy of education that aims to provide individuals with knowledge, skills, morality, and purpose.” I strip the definition down to first describe liberal education as a holistic approach to the individual person. It seeks to shape the mind (knowledge), body (skills), and soul (morality) towards a specific end (purpose). Further discussion, that lies beyond the scope of this essay, could be had as to the type of knowledge, skills, morals and purposes, but this essay considers the fundamental nature of one object – liberal education – in relationship to another object – the free society. Of even greater critical import to the philosophy of liberal education is the audience: the individual, a single human person as the focus. Liberal education is, fundamentally, concerned with the intentional shaping and development of individuals. But to what end? Here, the AACU’s definition implies an end but only as an afterthought: “a strong sense of.. civic engagement.” Knowledge and skills take precedence and are at least generally classified with adjectives like “broad” and “transferable.” But civic engagement, along with values and ethics are things only to develop a “sense” of. A “strong sense” to be sure, but what kind of sense and for what purpose?
Without a specified end or purpose, a telos, liberal education is merely one methodology among many, an employment program of sorts. Yet, civic engagement is that purpose, that telos, which requires more than a mere “sense” of it. Citizenship of the highest order is to be understood as the aim of liberal education. Indeed, the earliest liberal education curriculums, outlined by Aristotle in his Politics and Plato in his Republic present curriculum for the purpose of developing citizens to ensure the endurance and safety of the polis.
In short, liberal education’s telos is the shaping of virtuous citizens for the flourishing of a free society. Fundamentally, it is moral formation of the individual for the good of the community.
Free society: probably not what you think it is
What, then, is a free society? Put another way, what kind of free society should liberal education aim for? If it’s aim is to empower individuals, then perhaps a free society is merely understood to be a place where each is free to pursue his own aims. But this too is inadequate for where, then, would be the need for a community of learning?
From the earliest iterations of liberal education to now, the academy or university has been the center of learning and its biggest advocate in the Western world. There is a tension here between liberal education’s point of focus, the individual, and its purpose, the good of the free society, and it is a tension that is best explored and debated in a community. A “free society” must be understood to be just that – a society: a grouping together of individuals to form a corporate whole. That society has an identity and purpose greater than that of the individual, and the individual’s education is to equip him for pursuing the good of that society, namely, it’s continued freedom and flourishing. Does that mean protecting the society from external threats, or internal discord? This is where it is necessary to contextualize a “free society” to a particular place. In this case, the example to consider is America.
The American free society
How does America understand itself as a free society? What telos does it seek to pursue? No better guide could exist than it’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
In the opening paragraph of the Declaration, Jefferson (and his editors) seek to define the telos of a free society, one built on self-evident truth: human equality and natural rights. The free society that is to be declared in the ensuing paragraphs of this document finds its philosophical justification in the liberal education tradition. Though the Greco-Roman thought of liberal education’s earliest iteration would not have considered human equality as “self-evident,” its idea of citizenship and the shaping of a class of persons to maintain and defend the polis provides a sufficient condition for equality. The necessary condition for human equality comes from the second major strain of Western thought: Judeo-Christian theology.
Human beings as created in the image of a monotheistic God cannot be anything but fundamentally equal. And if fundamentally equal, then equally called to that high citizenship to maintain and defend the polis, or nation. The great triumph of the Enlightenment, so beautifully captured in the writings of Locke is the fusing of these two strands of Western philosophy: the fundamental equality of humanity, and the shared purpose of community to establish the liberal understanding of a free society that Jefferson fully realizes in the immortal line: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Equality and natural rights are self-evident to Jefferson and the Founders because of the philosophical endowment of liberal education through the centuries that preceded them. It is not a stretch to say that liberal education with its purposes rooted in the maintenance of a free society, and its membership extended to all equally is at the root of the American system. More than this, however, the content of liberal education provides the ethical framework for defining and understanding those self-evident truths, particularly when it comes to discussing natural rights.
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” are articulated specifically in a non-exhaustive list of natural rights. Because of the brief nature of the Declaration, Jefferson does not elaborate, or seek to justify his selection, but he’s unswerving in defining tyranny as the destruction of these rights by any government. A question naturally arises, how are these rights for the individual maintained in a community of individuals? Life is easy enough, one would think, we don’t kill our neighbor, or endanger him in any way. But what of liberty, or the pursuit of happiness? Can one make any claim on the time, energy, or property of another individual, which would in some manner limit his liberty and delay his pursuit of happiness? How can one tell the difference between tyranny and the responsibility to community? Herein lies the great value of liberal education undertaken for the good of the community: the ethical framework.
Rediscovering the American virtues
The liberal ethical project finds an early iteration in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which as the first part to the Politics serves as a guide for defining the very thing Jefferson alludes to in his triumvirate of essential rights: The pursuit of the good, or happy life. For Aristotle, it is the life of virtue that is to be pursued and developed by the members of the polis, and he undertakes to define these virtues. More important that Aristotle’s list of virtues, however, is his concept of virtue itself: the good middle between twin vices of “too much” and “too little”. Virtue is the golden mean, the balance within an individual, which maintains a balance within society at large.
Recognizing a good as being something of a fixed amount that is not to be pursued to excess sets a limit on one’s liberty. For liberty without ethics is merely license, the vice that occurs when too much of a good thing is consumed. Jefferson certainly has such a classical idea of virtue in mind when he slightly changes the tripartite phase from its more Lockean “life, liberty and property,” to a more classical “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This edit not only illumines the liberal education of Jefferson and his command of the classical canon, but it also demonstrates the Declaration of Independence to be a document in conversation with the classical tradition through its incorporation of ideas from across the canon of Western thought and its synthesis of those ideas into a unified whole. The Declaration is not merely a recasting of Lockean thought done by some ideological fanboy. Rather, it is a document that owes its central idea to the ethical framework of a liberal education that is found in the pages of the classical canon of Western thought. That ethical framework not only places necessary limits on the exercise of individual liberty, but it also points the way to defining our pursuit of happiness.
Given its classical roots, happiness, in the Declaration’s Jeffersonian cast, is more than mere positive emotion and experience. It is something deeper that encompasses the deep satisfaction of knowing one is pursuing the good in a worthy, virtuous manner. This is a much more directed and purposeful understanding of happiness. It has an aim and end point in mind. The liberal education tradition provides both the space and the community in which a conversation is developed to more fully discover and define the good and the nature of its pursuit. The subjects covered in a traditional liberal education instruct the individual in the different domains of knowledge, their interactions, and the unique shades of light those domains throw upon the good and the pursuit of it. It is an educational tradition, much like the liberal philosophical tradition it fosters, that is both structured and flexible. Structured in that it provides mental models and logical rules to train the mind in thinking in an organized way. Flexible in that it allows for the specificity of the good and its pursuit to be developed and refined as the body of knowledge grows, hence its need for a learning community – the University – that is both a part of the free society, yet separated enough to allow time and space for thought and discourse.
Educating for virtue first
Taken together, the central thesis of the Declaration of Independence is a testimony to the necessarily tight relationship between liberal education and a free society. It is not merely an education designed for the empowerment of the individual to some undefined end. For Jefferson and the Founders, a liberal education, embodied in the study of the twin pillars of Western thought, Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian, provided the canon of knowledge that was both philosophical justification and ethical framing of the self-evident truths and natural rights that a free society is to be built upon. The American project is, in no small part, the consequence of liberal education. To answer the question of the nature of a relationship between liberal education and a free society, one need only consider the epitaph on Jefferson’s tombstone:
Here was buried Thomas Jefferson Author of the Declaration of American Independence Of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia.
Jefferson understood that a free society is birthed from the womb of Wisdom, and that Wisdom is to be found enshrined in places of learning that hold to a classically understood philosophy of liberal education. To that end he employed his life, fortune and sacred honor. The generations that follow would be wise to imitate such an example.