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Liberal Education and the Western Tradition
In his second Baccalaureate Address, the President issued a strong defense of the study of Western Civilization. “The great works of the Western tradition are ideal materials for developing the reader’s capacity to think rigorously and independently,” he said. Developing that ability, argued the President, is “the principal object of liberal education.”
Summer 1995
by Richard Levin ’74PhD
As we celebrate your commencement let us reflect upon what it is that you have accomplished here at Yale. I speak at a time when the value of your accomplishments is questioned by many of our citizens. One widely-held concern is that after four years of college, you, as graduates, aren’t prepared to do anything useful. Although this claim would seem to be refuted by the abundant evidence that the rate of return to a college education increased dramatically during the 1980s, many commentators seem to feel that a narrower, more technical education would better prepare you for careers in a globally competitive environment.
A second concern, perhaps less widely held but even more fervently expressed, is that you have been encouraged by your teachers to reject the cultural heritage of Western Civilization, to shun the great books of the West in the name of multiculturalism, and to accept “politically correct” orthodoxies. This concern is voiced frequently on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, and in letters to university presidents. I hasten to add that the dangers of politicizing the curriculum and relaxing standards of critical judgment have also been described by many thoughtful commentators within the academy.
The two themes I have identified—skepticism about the practical utility of a college education and fear that universities might undermine prevailing values—are recurrent ones in American history. Tocqueville was among the first to observe closely the distinctively American skepticism about the value of knowledge for its own sake. A century later Richard Hofstadter traced the roots of our national ambivalence about learning to the evangelicalism of the Great Awakening, through subsequent religious revivals, Jacksonian democracy, and recurrent outbursts of populism.
Let me address directly these two characteristically American fears about our universities by answering the following two sets of questions. First, what is the case for education divorced from immediate practical ends? Or, in other words, how can a liberal education be justified today? Second, what is the proper role of Western Civilization in the curriculum?
As defined by Cardinal Newman in his classic work, The Idea of a University, education is “liberal” when it is an end in itself, independent of practical consequences, directed to no specific purpose other than the free exercise of the mind. Liberal education cultivates the intellect and expands the capacity to reason and to empathize. Its object is not to convey any particular content, but to develop certain qualities of mind—the ability to think critically and independently, to liberate oneself from prejudice, superstition, and dogma.
Although the purpose of a liberal education is to develop habits of mind and not to acquire specific or “useful” knowledge, even Cardinal Newman recognized that liberal education could be defended on utilitarian grounds because it produces citizens who can make a genuine contribution to society. Though his words put the case exquisitely, his exclusive use of masculine pronouns serves to highlight how substantially Western institutions, such as universities, can change.
“Training of the intellect,” Newman observes, “which is best for the individual himself, best enables him to discharge his duties to society. If a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society.” Newman continues: “It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility.”
Is this case as compelling today as it was one hundred and fifty years ago when Newman advanced it? I think it is. Of course, one might argue that in the Age of Information a properly educated person needs only to master a specific and substantial body of information. But I would disagree. Indeed, the hallmark of the Age of Information is the astonishing ease with which one can acquire the information one needs when one needs it. The capacity to make fruitful use of vast quantities of information is what we really wanted you to acquire. And that is precisely the object of a liberal education, to develop the capacity to reason rigorously, to sift through information and extract what is useful and, to use Newman’s words, “to discard what is irrelevant.” Yale does not wish to produce for the twenty-first century businessmen and women who know nothing more than the technical tools of accounting, finance, and marketing, nor politicians who know nothing more than the tools of effective communication through the media. We wish you, the leaders of the next century, to have the ability to think independently and creatively, and, moreover, we wish you to have formed that ability in the course of reflecting on questions broader than those involved in mastering the technologies of your respective callings.
This brings us to the question: what should be the content of a curriculum designed to provide a liberal education? Surely you need acquaintance with certain fundamental modes of organizing experience: mathematics, empirical science, historical, philosophical, and literary interpretation. This is the basis for the distribution requirements that Yale imposed on you. But let me remind you that the subjects now broadly considered to be essential have not always enjoyed this status. For example, unlike our 18th century forbears, we consider the literatures of living languages, such as English, to be appropriate, indeed essential, objects of study.
Few, if any, on the faculty at Yale and its sister institutions doubt that the great works of Western Civilization warrant a central place in the undergraduate curriculum. The great works of Western philosophy and political theory provide the intellectual foundation, and the subtlest critiques, of the institutions that organize the economy and society in which we live: representative government, the rule of law, individual rights, free markets. This fact alone suffices to make the Western tradition an essential subject of study. But it is also true that we, and I mean “we” to be inclusive of all literate human beings, understand and realize ourselves more completely as persons if we read and confront the great works of Western literature. None of us is Oedipus or Hamlet or Emma Woodhouse or Anna Karenina, but their existence enriches ours, posing for us in human terms the most profound questions of morality and aesthetics, providing representations in terms of which we define ourselves.
Now it is true that some scholars and teachers explore the darker side of Western history— the institution of slavery, the subordination of women, the conquest and destruction of native cultures, and environmental degradation. These are, after all, features of our history, and they need to be confronted and understood. But this is not to say that the lenses of race, gender, and colonialism are the only ones through which Western experience is or should be seen nowadays, and I think you would agree that they are certainly not the exclusive, nor the prevailing, perspective from which the West has been regarded in the bulk of your courses. Instead, I expect that most of your courses on Shakespeare or Wordsworth, Plato, or Kant, wrestled with the question: what is the author trying to tell us about human experience?
Oddly, many of those who fear that you are being indoctrinated by the “politically correct” have a terribly naïve understanding of what it means to study Western Civilization. They believe that studying Western culture is akin to taking an oral vaccine: by ingesting the great works of the Western tradition and “appreciating” them, one absorbs the values located therein and resists infection by foreign ideas.
But if you reflect on the past four years, I think you would agree that the great works of Western Civilization, taken as a whole, don’t present a unified system of values. You have learned that they converse with one another. Aristotle responds to Plato as Virgil responds to Homer as Milton responds to Virgil. Indeed, as Harold Bloom argues, a common feature of the canonical works is what he calls their strangeness, their profound originality. Each focuses on the human condition through a different and unique lens.
Nor are these works, taken individually, didactic. They don’t contain a doctrine, a codification of values, a set of precepts about how one should live—like The Little Red Book of Chairman Mao. We don’t look to them for practical advice. We don’t come away from a reading of Oedipus Rex determined to ask for identification the next time we find it necessary to slay a stranger we encounter on the road. As Socrates observed, virtue is not a craft. One can’t learn how to live the good life from an instruction manual; it requires active engagement, thinking for oneself about one’s situation.
Why then are the Great Books great? I think you know. They are great precisely because they challenge us to think for ourselves. They wrestle with the deepest and most difficult questions concerning human experience and moral behavior, and they are so rich in their characterization of that experience and behavior that they are open to profound differences in interpretation. They challenge us, students and faculty alike, to reinterpret them so that they become part of our own view of humanity and the world. And this, of course, is exactly why the study of Western Civilization deserves a central role in the curriculum. Unlike works that are less enduring or more limited in scope, and because they are so challenging and problematic, the great works of the Western tradition are ideal materials for developing the reader’s capacity to think rigorously and independently. And the development of this capacity is, as a long line of educators descended from Cardinal Newman have claimed, the principal object of liberal education.
At the core of America’s ambivalence about the mission of its universities is an apparent contradiction in expectations. Americans expect universities to preserve the cultural heritage, to pass it on to the next generation, and to educate the young to assume responsible positions of leadership. Thus, the public expects universities to perform the work of socialization. But it also expects universities to be oases of free inquiry and free expression, safe harbors wherein the young can test their ideas, experiment, and explore. How can America be confident that, given the luxury of freedom to question everything, the young will emerge as responsible citizens, respectful of tradition, comfortable with the prevailing values of the larger society?
Thomas Jefferson’s answer was simple: in a regime of unfettered inquiry guided by reason, truth emerges. Thus, we should accept the conclusions of free and autonomous individuals of good will. Of course, we run the risk that received values and beliefs will be rejected. But educators can minimize the risk of unwise decisions by strengthening each individual’s capacity to reason and by protecting free inquiry and open debate.
Perhaps Jefferson’s answer seems a little too simple today. Perhaps we are a little more skeptical than our Enlightenment forbears. But is there a serious alternative? Ultimately, the reason we believe in the mission of our universities is no different from the reason we believe in democracy. The fear that students will abuse their freedom by rejecting what is best in the culture they inherit is really no different from the fear that voters will abuse their freedom by electing the incompetent, the demagogue, or the tyrant. Can we really trust the people’s judgment? Here, too, the answer is that having faith in the judgment of free, autonomous individuals is better than the alternative, which is certain tyranny.
Women and men of the Class of 1995, I close by asking once again: what have you accomplished here at Yale? It is my profound hope and my confident expectation that Jefferson’s aspirations have been realized: That you have developed your reasoning faculties, enlarged your minds, and formed habits of reflection and action that render you examples of virtue to others, and of happiness within yourselves.  |
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