A liberating education

I spent 24 years on the campus of Hendrix College, a small, independent liberal-arts college in Arkansas. In every one of those years, I taught a course designed to introduce first-year students to the processes of liberal education through close discussion of classic texts.

Once, as I was leaving a basketball game, one of my students came running up to me shouting, "I've got it! I've got it." What she had got, it turned out, was an understanding of an important argument in Plato's "The Republic." She told me, in an excited voice, that she had grasped a thought expressed almost two-and-half millennia ago.

I was thrilled. This is a teacher's real payoff, rivaled only by the student, run into years after graduation, who says, "Hey, I was thinking just the other day about when you said ... " At moments like these, the notion that learning is good for its own sake is vividly validated.

And yet, at colleges and universities across this country, we hope for more. We hope for a further purpose that serves the good not merely of the individual but of the society we share. We hope to carry forward the well-being of American democracy.

American democracy is about majority rule. For that reason, fair and accurate election processes are essential. But as the Bill of Rights shows, American democracy is also about the protection of people's rights against interference by majority opinion. And unless balloting simply tests the relative prevalence of unreflective prejudices, American democracy must also be about the public search for good reasons to make electoral choices. That's why liberal education is important.

Liberal education involves three dimensions. The common phrase "broad liberal education" denotes the fact that the liberally educated person commands a wide range of facts. But facts are inert and irrelevant unless they matter somehow. The sense for which facts matter and how they matter, we call "values." The development of this sense is the second dimension of liberal education.

Finally, the ability to assemble facts that matter into reasoning processes that suggest the better and right things to do is deliberation. The cultivation of this body of skills — making, understanding, and critiquing arguments — is the third dimension of liberal education. Liberal education is the acquisition of the knowledge necessary to deliberate about things that matter, the development of the capacity to see what does matter, and the honing of skills of reasoning about those things.

It is easy to see how liberal education, understood in this way, contributes to the health of a democracy. Voters are asked to choose among candidates and policies that appeal to different facts in support of different attitudes and conclusions. Are the purported facts true? Do they matter? Are there other, countervailing facts? What conclusions do they support?

The choices posed in a democratic culture raise these issues constantly. So nothing could be of more value to a voter than the ability to tell what is so and not so, what is relevant to what, and how to hear and understand patterns of persuasion. The world is full of people who want to shape our beliefs in ways that will favor them. In light of that fact, the skills afforded by liberal education appear as simple self-defense.

The three dimensions — knowledge, values and critical thinking — can be detected in the aims of every college or university that seeks to equip its graduates for citizenship in a participatory democracy. Of course, none of them is free of contention. What do educated people need to know? What, after all, does matter? And how should we best teach and learn the skills of critical thinking? That these questions do not have settled answers is sometimes portrayed as a problem. Unless we know what people need to learn about what, and how they ought to think about it, how can we build a curriculum? How can we teach?

Now, admittedly, there are some basics. Everyone eligible to vote in a democracy should be able to calculate and to understand basic quantitative information. For example, an educated person ought to know what a standard deviation is, though not necessarily how to get one out of the data. Everyone ought to have basic historical and geographical literacy. According to published reports, most Americans of an age appropriate for military service can't find Iraq on a map. Everyone ought to be able to tell when a simple argument is bogus and when facts adduced to support a position leave room for doubt or alternative interpretations.

Of course, there are other ways, besides formal education, of acquiring facts and the ability to handle them with skill. Admittedly, too, there are ways of avoiding these accomplishments even after 16 years of schooling. But, in general, the best way to gain them is to take responsibility for your own education, as a student, in a college or university that understands itself as providing that opportunity in a carefully designed curriculum.

Beyond the basics, the designs will vary, as they should. Diversity lies at the heart of the American experience, and the fact of contention about what people ought to know to be good citizens is an example of the democratic process at work. It is a good thing to have different curricula available and to have choices available for how one seeks education.

That statement leads us to the heart of the matter. Diversity is good. Choice is good. Still — and this is the deepest point about the link between democracy and liberal education — democracy cannot be a celebration of the sheer fact of difference. It is not enough to acknowledge differences. We owe each other more than that. We owe each other mutual help in shaping better and better beliefs about things that matter.

This may amount to assisting each other in seeing what can be seen from one cultural perspective but is invisible from another. It may amount to assisting each other in understanding the difference between a research-based, self-correcting discipline and a dogma based on sheer authority. It may amount to the soul-searching process of attempting to explain how we see things to someone who deeply disagrees with us about the weight of certain facts and of hearing them out, too.

When it loses the spirit of cooperative enterprise, democracy becomes a matter of spending money on techniques of specious persuasion. Forsaking the search for the right thing to think and do, it becomes simply the pursuit of power by other means. There is nothing about liberal education that inoculates us against this constant tendency. But common commitment to the ideals of liberal education — the idea that facts are important, the idea that some things matter, and the idea that we need to examine critically what others claim and what we ourselves offer for acceptance — is the best strategy for evading it.

When my former student, Jessica, ran up to me after the basketball game, she had gotten the hang of the argument in Plato that seeks to establish why rulers would have to deceive the population they rule and why they would have to deceive even themselves. She understood Plato's contention that political stability is possible only if people believe that the ultimate sanction of government is divine, not merely human. In getting the hang of that argument, she also understood what was terribly dangerous about it.

There is the joy of understanding, and then there is the earnest competence the understanding provides. She got them both, and her having them is one little contribution of liberal education to the well-being of democracy in America.

John Churchill is secretary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the national honor society of the liberal arts and sciences, founded on Dec. 5, 1776.