Russell Kirk Would Have Been A Great Headmaster

by Robert M. Woods

Russell Kirk

With all the noise of recent months in the media about getting rid of Liberal Arts at certain colleges and universities in place of more "practical," or as the ancients would have classified it, "technical training for slaves," there comes a time to respond. But we begin with a defense of the barbarian position for a moment. Much of what passes in the name of Liberal Arts should be banished as it was never worthy of study. While one may enjoy the longest running animated series in television history, it really is not worthy of deep attention and three hours university credit. Or one may be obsessed with the most recent academic fad and desire to get a major in it through the "Liberal Arts Dept." I fear to mention one as tomorrow it will likely be different. Actually, it will likely be different in fifteen minutes.

If one is considering the value of a Liberal Arts education on the high school or college level, it would be most helpful to articulate exactly what a liberal arts education really is or should be. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Among the very fine explanations of what a Liberal Arts education is and should be, Russell Kirk's The Conservative Purpose of a Liberal Education is to be considered. In truth, if adhered to, this little essay may go a long way in helping us avoid the way of Babel Technical Institute.

The Truth of Beauty: Educating the Moral Imagination

by Benjamin G. Lockerd, Jr.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

(Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”)

These famous lines of Keats have charmed and delighted readers for nearly two centuries, but skeptics have scoffed at his claim, especially as beauty is well known to be wholly subjective, a value found only “in the eye of the beholder.” Even those of us who are inclined to agree with the poet’s bold statement have been known to wonder whether this is really all we need to know. Surely we must add at least two other categories to the formula, for philosophers have long considered three subjects of contemplation to be paramount: the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. These topics give rise to the three prime branches of philosophy: metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. All three of these are considered by many people today purely relativistic concepts, and one of the goals of the Catholic educator must be to contradict the prevailing relativism, which is practically taken for granted even by many Catholic students, since, as T. S. Eliot says, secularism today “holds all the most valuable advertising space.”

In my experience, these students are more likely to grant me metaphysical claims than claims about morality and beauty. If I say that the universe is not merely atoms and void, not merely matter, they tend to agree. It becomes more contentious if I say that there are universal moral truths. If I give as an example the claim that it is always wrong to enslave another person, they will readily agree, but if I say it is wrong (on essentially the same principle) to use human embryos for scientific research, I will have an argument with some. If I say that it is also wrong (still largely for the same reason) to bring about the conception of a human being in a laboratory in order to help an infertile couple have a child, I may meet with incredulity or even be denounced as a heartless disbeliever in the sanctity of motherhood.

Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education

by Stratford Caldecott

The sequel to Beauty for Truth's Sake has been published by Angelico Press. Called Beauty in the Word, it completes the retrieval of the seven liberal arts begun in the earlier book by examining the first three, the "Trivium", which Dorothy L. Sayers made the basis of Classical Education in her famous essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning." But this book tries to go further than Sayers.

New opportunities for school reform, and the creation of Academy schools and Free schools comparable to American Charter schools, encourage radical thinking about education. We need a philosophy that can guide us as we found these new schools, or enrich and improve existing schools, or attempt to design a curriculum for teaching our children at home. The curriculum has become fragmented and incoherent because we have lost any sense of how all knowledge fits together. What kind of education would enable a child to progress in the rational understanding of the world without losing a sense of the whole, or a sense of the sacred? We must make an effort to overcome in ourselves false ideas inculcated by the education that we ourselves received, before we can understand the elements that would make a better education possible for our children.

A Modest Proposal: A Freshman Year of Studies

Painting by Jef Murray

by Bradley J. Birzer, co-editor

Almost half of a decade ago, I applied for an interesting position--to be the first head of a new liberal arts program at a Catholic college in New England. The college is old and venerable, but it’s gone through the typical changes toward the worse experienced by most small religious colleges in the last four decades.

In the last several years, however, the college has acquired a sharp new president and provost, and the school is turning around in every good way. Should it continue on this path, it will be a leading liberal arts college once again.

Inspired by Liberty & Virtue: The Education of the Founders of the American Republic (video)

by E. Christian Kopff

This presentation was the keynote address given to the Free Enterprise Institute's Founders' Day Breakfast, November 2011. A slightly revised text version of this address can be found here.

The Real Business of Liberal Learning

by Mark A. Kalthoff

Just what is the business of a liberal arts college?  Is it to make well-rounded young adults, to equip the next generation with job skills demanded by a work-a-day world, or perhaps to train up Constitution-toting citizens in the ways of republican civic-mindedness?  Or is it something even more ambitions – making saints or saving the world?   On the other hand, might it be much simpler and a bit more crass?  Perhaps the aim of the college should be a fun-packed four years in residence at an activity-laden day-care center for pre-mature adults?  And yet, perhaps the business of a college properly considered is something else altogether.

This essay explores a number of issues related to the real business of liberal learning.  First, it considers the business and definition of a college as an institution devoted to the liberal arts.  It proffers an ideal of what liberal arts learning has been and ought still to be.  Along the way it highlights potential risks and possibilities.  There are things that can prevent the attainment of liberal learning’s benefits, among them, sloth (evagatio mentis or “uneasy restlessness of mind”) or alternatively, treating the liberal arts as a means not an end in themselves.  Further, there are things that liberal education can do (make gentleman) and there are things a liberal education cannot do (make saints).  One ought not ask of liberal education what it cannot give.  Neither ought one treat liberal learning in a way that renders it impotent and unable to confer its natural blessings.

Entering a Troubled World

by Robert Blackstock
(Hillsdale Academy Commencement 2011)

You have studied the very best things, have done so with discipline and with rigor, and you have accomplished much. My sincere congratulations to each of you.

I’m honored to have been asked to address you today, but I must tell you that framing this message has been difficult. You enter a troubled world. And not only that, you enter a part of the world that is especially vexed: American higher education. So, to what subject and purpose shall these remarks be addressed? Shall we discuss the challenges you will face in college this fall, and the opportunities that await you; or should this time be spent looking to the broader national malaise that has overtaken us?

Quote of the Day: Education is the Kindling of a Flame

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.-Socrates

Testing for (PC) Truth

by John Willson

Idiot, n.  A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.  The Idiot’s activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but ‘pervades and regulates the whole.’  He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable.  He sets the fashion of opinion and taste, dictates the limitation of speech and circumscribes conduct with a deadline. --Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

According to Richard Perez-Pena in the New York Times (All the PC News That We Can Print), colleges and universities are on the verge of having to fess up in public about whether they teach anything or not.  Ever since John Dewey’s “Teacher’s College” at Columbia got control of the vocabulary, idiots (see Ambrose Bierce’s definition, above) have set educational policy on an increasing number of levels, primarily through government mandates.  One mechanism of idiot control has been standardized “testing,” apparently now oozing its way into the ratings of institutions of higher learning.

Why Mortimer Adler Would Have Been the Best Academic Dean Ever

by Robert M. Woods

Mortimer Adler

If he were still alive on this earth, and if he were looking for an opening, any College or Classical Christian School looking for a first rate academic leader would be foolish not to at least interview Mortimer Adler.

 
In the modern world, with the modern academy having been taken over by the business model, one can only hope that somewhere there are Adler-like leaders being groomed. In an essay entitled, Liberal Schooling in the 20th Century released in 1960, Mortimer Adler lays out some of the most wonderful ideas and plans for higher education you will read anywhere in the modern world. What Adler said for the 20th century is as true and relevant for the 21st century.

The True Purpose of a University

"What the university of today tends to forget is that man has other hungers which the lower animals do not possess and that, if he is not taught how to satisfy those hungers too, he remains individually distrait, socially dangerous, and disruptive, no matter how well he has learned to sate and does sate his lesser appetites. The true business of a university is to see to it that men and women learn to give primary consideration to how to feed the extra-animal hungers. These human hungers are three: the hunger for meaning, the hunger for love, the hunger for creative craftsmanship. By feeding these hungers—or trying his best to do so—man can arrive at life of a sort that makes sense in spite of the frustration which ends every human career, in spite of death which comes surely, swiftly.”—Bernard Iddings Bell, Crisis in Education (1949), 154-155.

Reinvigorating Culture

by Russell Kirk

Anyone who pushes the buttons of a television set nowadays [written in 1994, Ed.] may be tempted to reflect that genuine culture came to an end during the latter half of the twentieth century. The television set is an immense accomplishment of reason and imagination: the victory of technology. But the gross images produced by television are symptoms and causes of our civilization’s decadence: the defeat of humane culture.

The contrast between the success of technology and the failure of social institutions is yet more striking when we look at any large American city. Some time ago I spent a day in Detroit, once styled “the arsenal of democracy,” latterly known as “America’s murder capital.” I have known Detroit ever since I was a small boy, and have observed the stages of the city’s decay over the decades. Except for some financial and political activity, and a little surviving commerce, about the foot of Woodward Avenue near the river, old Detroit is a dangerous wreck. The length of Woodward Avenue, up to Eight Mile Road and beyond, one drives through grim desolation: Beirut in the midst of its troubles might have seemed more cheerful. One passes through Detroit’s “cultural center,” the Institute of Arts on one side of the avenue, the Public Library on the other. Immediately north or south of those splendid buildings, immediately east or west, extends the grimy reality of a broken and dying city. “Culture” has become something locked into an archaic museum.

The War of the Three Humanisms: Irving Babbitt and the Recovery of Classical Learning

by Robert C. Koons

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

—T. S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock

Irving Babbitt

Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) is not much remembered today, except perhaps through Sinclair Lewis's snarky naming of the eponymous villain of the satire of mid-American manners and mores, Babbitt, after the Harvard professor whose anti-Progressive views Lewis denounced in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In fact, Irving Babbitt was far from the hidebound and fearful philistine Arthur Babbitt in Lewis's novel. For forty years a professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard, Babbitt was the teacher and friend of T. S. Eliot and, with Paul Elmer More, the proponent of a cultural and intellectual movement, the New Humanism, that held center-stage in American intellectual life in mid-century. His first book, with the misleadingly modest title, Literature and the American College,¹ is one of the ten most important and influential cultural critiques written by an American in the last century, comparable to Richard Weaver's Ideas have Consequences or Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind.² In addition, Babbitt's book is the most profound reflection on the nature of higher learning written in the last one hundred years, comparable to Newman's The Idea of a University,³ or, indeed, Quintillian's On the Education of the Orator or Isocrates' Antidosis.

Classical Greek Philosophy and American Democratic Thought

Dr. E. Christian Kopff on "Classical Greek Philosophy and American Democratic Thought."

Concerning Charles Murray's "Real Education"

by Christopher B. Nelson

I confess to having approached Mr. Murray's book with a little ambivalence. I imagined that I might be one of those educational romantics he described and wondered whether a certain kind of educational romanticism might provide, not an unkindly lie, but a noble spur to a better life for our nation's young. But this book strikes me as both provocative and compelling in its description of the ills of, and cures for, our so-called educational system. I say "so-called," because we do not have a single educational system in this country, though the threats and attempts to create one are certainly out there and are devoutly to be resisted. Mr. Murray and I agree on this.

I am neither a statistician nor a social scientist, and see little I can contribute to the findings Mr. Murray makes in his early chapters. I'm pretty much an amateur at diagnostics. But I am a citizen of this great country, and thought I might approach the question of education from a perspective I imagine to be important in all public policy discussions: What kind of education is necessary to preserve our liberal democracy? How should we educate our citizens to be fit for the freedom they ought to enjoy in our democratic republic?

Humane Learning in the Age of the Computer

by Russell Kirk

Permit me to offer you some desultory reflections concerning the effect of the electronic computer upon the reason and the imagination. We are told by many voices that the computer will work a revolution in learning. So it may; but that accomplishment would not be salutary.

The primary end of the higher learning, in all lands and all times, has been what John Henry Newman called the training of the intellect to form a philosophical habit of mind. University and college were founded to develop right reason and imagination, for the sake of the person and the sake of the republic. The higher education, by its nature, is concerned with abstractions — rather difficult abstractions, both in the sciences and in humane studies. Most people, in any age, are not fond of abstractions. Therefore, in this democratic time, higher education stands in danger everywhere from levelling pressures.

Means and Ends: Education in a Secular Age

by Cleanth Brooks

The serious writer of today lives in a very much secularized world, a world of measurable objects, a world of space and time considerations, a world that must be studied not only rationally, but scientifically. Now, this situation did not suddenly come about in the middle of the seventeenth century. It has been developing since that time, and I think if we wanted to be very careful we could push it far back of the seventeenth century. But many people agree that a very important part of the process becomes evident in the seventeenth century.

An important man in this process is the French mathematician and philosopher, René Descartes (1596–1650). Descartes distinguished, you will remember, the mind from matter, and thus split the world into two different realms. On one side there was the realm of mental activity, the world of ideas, fancies, and all kinds of subjective things. And outside of the human head was the world of objects and things. God alone, Descartes thought, knew how to relate the two worlds, the world of time and space and the world of mental activity. And Descartes, it ought to be said, certainly had no intention of removing God from the process (he was a Christian), or of attacking a religion. Nevertheless, the dualism that Descartes set up worked steadily through the decades to clear the path for a more careful study of the world of things. It cleared the highway for the marvelous development of the so-called hard sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology. They have grown magnificently, particularly in our own twentieth century.

The Neglected Muse: Why Music Is an Essential Liberal Art

by Peter Kalkavage

Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul.–Plato

Music transcends the classroom, the concert stage, and professional recordings. It pervades life. Mankind has long used music in all sorts of ways, to celebrate, to lament, to dance, to pray, to soothe or arouse, to woo, to infuse courage and terrify an enemy, to commemorate, to unite a community. Even the most primitive societies are keenly aware of the power of music, and various myths from cultures throughout the world confer on music and musicians a lofty, even divine significance. In some myths, notably in Plato's dialogue Timaeus, the world springs from the composing power of a musician-god.

That music is a vibrant part of life is especially clear in the case of the young. Most young people cherish their favorite music as their most intimate friend and their absolute refuge from care and stress. When we get older, music is inevitably bound up with nostalgia. We older folk have only to hear a song from our youth in order to be magically transported, as if by a familiar scent, to a former time, place, self, or love. Music does not merely sound: It casts a spell and conjures worlds. Music is no mere addendum to human life, no historical accident that might just as well have never been, but an essential part of who we are as human beings.

The Things of Friends Are Common

by Christopher B. Nelson

Welcome to the Class of 2013 [this is a Convocation Address delivered in 2009 at St. John’s College, Ed.] and to your families. To the rest of our college community, welcome back. Welcome, friends all! I came to a rather startling realization over the summer as I was preparing to greet our newcomers: that I had returned to this college to take the position I now hold in the year in which most of our incoming freshmen were born. The years have passed quickly, it seems to me now, and my appreciation for the community of learning I joined back then has grown, as my friendships within the community have deepened. I think I became a wee bit sentimental as I ruminated upon my first year as a student at St. John’s more than 40 years ago. My Greek has gone rusty, but as with most all of memory, the things learned first are remembered best, and I have kept with me over the years two Greek sentences I recall reading in my first days at the college. Xαλεπά τα kαλά and Κοίνά τά τών φίλων.

The first can be roughly translated as “Beautiful things are difficult” or “Noble things are difficult.” The second can be translated as “The things of friends are common” or “What friends have, they have in common.” Back in the days of my youth we used a different Greek grammar book, so this last week I took a peek at the Mollin and Williamson Introduction to Ancient Greek that you will be working with in your first semester of the Greek Tutorial. And there they were, the same two sentences, buried in an early lesson on the attributive and predicate position of the definite article, and I rediscovered something I once must have known about the two sentences I had carried with me all these years: that they are both nominal sentences with the article τά in the predicate position, making it possible to write intelligible, whole sentences without the use of a verb. (Grammar is a handy tool, don’t you think?) Well, I was pretty sure that I had not committed these sentences to memory for the substantive-making power of the article τά. It’s more likely that I remembered them because they were both quite short, and perhaps because they appeared to carry a mystery and a whiff of truth in them that I might untangle for myself if only I worked on them long enough. I felt justified in this interpretation when I read in this new text that “nominal sentences are best suited to the impersonal and timeless character of maxims or folk-sayings.” (Mollin and Williamson at 31)

Greek to Us: The Death of Classical Education and Its Consequences

by E. Christian Kopff

In 1999 the A&E cable network broadcast a list of “The 100 Most Influential People of the Past 1000 Years,” selected by a “Blue Ribbon Panel.” Some of the names on the bottom half of the list were rather silly: Princess Diana, the Beatles, Elvis Presley (who was ranked just ahead of Joan of Arc), but the top ten names represent a consensus on what has mattered most to us over the last 500 years.

Here they are in reverse order:
10. Galileo                                  5. William Shakespeare
9. Copernicus                             4. Charles Darwin
8. Einstein                                   3. Martin Luther
7. Karl Marx                                2. Isaac Newton
6. Christopher Columbus           1. Johann Gutenberg

This small group includes a poet, a theologian, a social philosopher, an inventor, a discoverer and five scientists. (Similar lists also privilege science.) The list includes atheists and believers, Catholics, Protestants and Jews. They are all Europeans and all men. The A&E narrative emphasized their curiosity and creativity. I noticed another trait they shared. They all studied Latin. They all had a classical education.