2022-06-22_What_is_a_Liberal

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00:00:14.720 | classical education that odd and antiquated custom

00:00:20.080 | setting generations of bewildered youth to suffering the

00:00:24.800 | Inky travails of learning greek and latin two languages. They would never speak

00:00:30.240 | Can hardly be defended or even explained without a long look at the nature of liberal education

00:00:37.300 | Nor can we neglect to tap the roots of that distant descendant of humanistic learning the modern humanities

00:00:45.300 | Where we now find classics nestling obscurely in college catalogs

00:00:50.960 | For at the pinnacle of both sat the classical curriculum

00:00:54.740 | But while granting that once upon a time classical learning might have borne some relation to professional skills

00:01:02.320 | Surely we think it has failed to remain useful in an age. No longer requiring the services of

00:01:09.360 | scholastic monks courtiers and imperial civil servants

00:01:14.800 | So does this curriculum remain at all relevant in a world that measures success in stock averages and megabytes?

00:01:22.420 | for as classical scholar gilbert murray once conceded

00:01:26.740 | Even if we neglect merely material things and take as our standard the actual achievements of the greeks in conduct and knowledge

00:01:34.960 | The average clerk who goes to town daily idly glancing at his morning newspaper is probably a better behaved and

00:01:43.260 | infinitely better informed person than the average athenian who sat spellbound at the tragedies of aeschylus

00:01:49.520 | That clerk cannot be too badly off. He gets along

00:01:53.820 | And if education is not to promote material success

00:01:58.700 | What should it do?

00:02:01.340 | Must we lend any legitimacy to an older idea that education exists primarily to form the inner man

00:02:08.620 | As well as to impart those all important skills for making a living

00:02:13.580 | Have we in fact grown out of that ideal?

00:02:16.620 | Or have we fallen so far short of it that we cannot even spy its majestic peaks?

00:02:22.940 | We praise liberal education

00:02:26.140 | zealously

00:02:27.900 | It's a term of marble grandeur

00:02:30.240 | But few of us know what it means

00:02:33.020 | It has become grist for commencement addresses and high-flown commentary expounding the true mission of our schools and universities

00:02:41.180 | Best used by people removed from the rough and tumble of life

00:02:44.460 | As with pornography we cannot define it, but we think we know it when we see it

00:02:50.460 | Liberal education rests comfortably in a haze where it no longer calls us to commit to anything exemplary

00:02:57.680 | hard or heroic

00:03:00.380 | For some liberal education has become synonymous with the humanities

00:03:06.780 | That free-for-all of open curricula where the dazed and confused spend irreplaceable years browsing among

00:03:14.380 | Survey courses taking ant bites out of whatever nuggets randomly lie among the crumbs learning little or nothing in particular

00:03:22.640 | The humanities provide a direction for the directionless a path for the pathless

00:03:29.120 | certifying ignorance in the guise of a knowledge too easily acquired

00:03:35.020 | This wandering listlessness can envelop teachers of the liberal arts as well

00:03:39.660 | The average figure being according to Mark Van Doren too often quote neither lay nor learned

00:03:47.100 | But a bored fellow who mixes prescriptions wherein all tastes are flat or bad

00:03:53.020 | So much knowledge about one thing and another and never the tincture of wisdom

00:03:59.500 | close quote

00:04:01.900 | To others liberal education has become wedded to the propounding of social grievances

00:04:07.040 | Freedom studies we might call them

00:04:09.820 | To others still it marks an expenditure of time and effort largely wasted when a technological world wants technologists

00:04:18.400 | liberal education in short means today whatever we wish it to mean in all our idealistic or

00:04:25.820 | disputatious moods

00:04:27.980 | It is like a loose constitution open to any fanciful interpretation of the moment

00:04:33.180 | But some contemporary thinkers have tried to spy its essence

00:04:37.500 | philosopher Leo Strauss wants to find a liberal education nebulously as one in culture or toward culture

00:04:45.660 | In doing so drawing on the ancient metaphor of agricultural husbandry

00:04:51.580 | Culture means chiefly the cultivation of the mind the taking care and improving of the native faculties of the mind

00:04:59.100 | In accordance with the nature of the mind just as the soil needs cultivators of the soil. So the mind needs teachers

00:05:06.780 | further liberal education

00:05:09.820 | consists in reminding oneself of human excellence of human greatness

00:05:14.780 | and in listening to the conversation among the greatest minds as heard through the channel of great books an idea owing more than a

00:05:22.860 | little to Matthew Arnold's ideal of culture as trumpeting forth the best that has been thought and said

00:05:29.660 | A Bartlett Giamatti a staunch defender of the principles of liberal education as he saw them described it again

00:05:37.820 | Not too clearly as an attitude of the mind toward knowledge the mind explores and creates

00:05:44.940 | Such education occurs when you pursue knowledge because you are motivated to experience and absorb what comes of thinking

00:05:51.500 | Thinking about the traditions of our common heritage in all its forms thinking about new patterns or designs

00:05:58.060 | Whether in philosophic texts or financial markets or chemical combinations

00:06:02.800 | Thinking in order to create new knowledge that others will then explore

00:06:06.640 | Here the new presides

00:06:11.100 | Knowledge is not to be learned so much as created indeed. It exists almost for what it produces

00:06:17.740 | Broad claims like these typify the rhetoric of liberal education and such definitions can be both revealing and helpful

00:06:26.220 | But somehow they smell of formaldehyde. They seem just a bit sterile

00:06:31.580 | We are still daunted and challenged though by Everett Dean Martin's spirited declaration many decades ago

00:06:39.020 | That the best education is the organization of knowledge into human excellence

00:06:43.420 | An education he said is not the mere possession of knowledge, but the ability to reflect upon it and grow in wisdom

00:06:51.500 | Liberal education ought to aim not just at furnishing the mind with serviceable knowledge and information

00:06:57.920 | Nor even at habituating the mind to rational methods

00:07:02.460 | But at leading it to wisdom to a quality of knowledge tempered by experience and imbued with understanding

00:07:09.280 | It should in a word

00:07:12.380 | humanize

00:07:14.520 | unguided by such an aim education loses its true character and finds itself degraded to servile training for the world's

00:07:22.540 | daily drudgeries

00:07:24.540 | Liberal education

00:07:26.200 | Civilizes it transforms us

00:07:28.460 | We are better for having run its course

00:07:32.140 | Nonetheless, these flourishes of eloquence glow within the light of dying embers

00:07:37.500 | The case must be made but hope for the cause has long since waned

00:07:42.780 | We lose an opportunity if we accept defeat too quickly

00:07:46.060 | Not in decades perhaps at a time when our schools have lost the capacity either to kindle a passion for history

00:07:53.260 | Or even to teach it intelligently

00:07:56.380 | Has there been a better time to search out our roots and recover our identity as citizens of the west?

00:08:02.220 | By reasserting an intellectual training that reminds us who we are

00:08:06.700 | Where we came from and the heights to which we have aspired and which we might aspire again

00:08:12.700 | We have a large and many branched family tree to trace

00:08:16.780 | So before we explore the history of a classical education

00:08:20.880 | Let's examine further the meaning and growth of liberal education

00:08:26.720 | And the subsidiary curriculum known as the humanities

00:08:30.420 | Winging a few theoretical flights along the way

00:08:33.920 | Take a classroom example

00:08:37.520 | Imagine we are teachers trying to define liberal education for students

00:08:42.320 | We may do so by shaving off its political barnacles and drilling down to its etymological source

00:08:48.900 | We say that liberal derives from a latin word for freedom

00:08:55.200 | So what makes an education liberal we plead our target in the scope

00:08:59.360 | It's an education that makes us free an education that liberates us

00:09:04.240 | Then we roll in the big guns

00:09:07.120 | Robert hutchins once explained that the liberal arts are the arts of freedom to be free

00:09:13.440 | A man must understand the arts of freedom

00:09:16.080 | much along these lines martin contended that

00:09:20.080 | Education is a spiritual re-evaluation of human life

00:09:24.800 | Its task is to reorient the individual to enable him to take a rich and more significant view of his experiences

00:09:31.700 | Yes education must be liberalizing

00:09:35.780 | But not in the political sense as if it meant half measures, but in its original sense

00:09:42.240 | Meaning the kind of education which sets the mind free from the servitude of the crowd and from vulgar self-interests

00:09:50.700 | Education is simply philosophy at work. It is the search for the good life

00:09:55.660 | Education is itself a way of living

00:09:58.860 | Giamatti addressed the freshman class at yale in 1983 with much the same spirit

00:10:04.860 | I believe a liberal education is the liberty of the free mind to explore itself

00:10:10.700 | He said to draw itself out to connect with other minds and spirits in the quest for truth

00:10:17.500 | Its main goal is to train the whole person to be at once intellectually discerning and humanly flexible

00:10:23.180 | Tough-minded and open-hearted to be responsive to the new and responsible for values that make us civilized

00:10:30.640 | Although later proclamations may lack the older definitions strident vigor they agree

00:10:37.740 | Liberal education we tell our class

00:10:40.620 | fosters a mind that struggles against insularity

00:10:45.340 | It aims to make us better than our untutored natures lead us to be

00:10:49.740 | But usually at this point the discussion so usefully begun breaks down

00:10:55.420 | What do we need liberating from?

00:10:58.460 | Ignorance is the hackneyed answer

00:11:01.820 | But of what exactly are we ignorant?

00:11:04.540 | Here the teacher confronts the often willful confusions of the immature easily suggestible mind

00:11:12.700 | we might strategically avoid Strauss's idea that education should act as a

00:11:17.340 | counterpoison to the corroding effects of mass culture

00:11:20.860 | one thing at a time

00:11:23.500 | But we have raised questions

00:11:25.500 | questions

00:11:26.220 | We hope will set patterns of inquiry and steer the students energies away from slavery to intellectual fashion

00:11:33.180 | and sense impressions to careful self-examination

00:11:37.740 | For whatever else it seeks to do a liberal education seeks not only to instill essential knowledge

00:11:43.740 | But also to prompt the asking of questions

00:11:46.720 | It both provides a content and confers a method

00:11:51.180 | And ideally the search will be for hard and hard-won answers which those students

00:11:57.580 | pupils of life

00:11:59.740 | can use

00:12:01.420 | For such an education is eminently practical

00:12:03.840 | So far we sail the stratosphere

00:12:07.660 | The air is thin and rarified. We have yet to utter those great names of the western tradition

00:12:13.900 | Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Dr. Johnson

00:12:22.860 | Which shine as distant lights

00:12:25.340 | But something is happening

00:12:27.580 | Students learn that maybe answers are possible and that there may be ways of getting at them

00:12:33.180 | Keys available to all who find within themselves the humility to learn and are determined to search beyond sentiment and circumstance

00:12:40.880 | To a common base of truth about human life and history

00:12:44.620 | In this one crucial way will they adjust?

00:12:48.220 | They will become responsible agents

00:12:51.340 | They will tap intellectual depths

00:12:54.060 | They will also learn to use words more responsibly

00:12:57.520 | They will learn how to paw an abstraction

00:13:01.500 | The concept of freedom for example is a stick of dynamite

00:13:05.040 | Books and life both teach that a freedom without discipline may not only be useless

00:13:11.580 | But a hindrance to grasping something true beyond the veil of illusion

00:13:16.000 | they may come to see with Milton that

00:13:19.340 | Liberty hath a double edge fit only to be handled by just and virtuous men

00:13:24.860 | To bad and dissolute it becomes a mischief unwieldy in their own hands

00:13:31.340 | Further the idea of equality

00:13:33.840 | held with catechetical reverence in a democratic society

00:13:38.400 | They begin to view as yet another social and political ideal that

00:13:42.860 | However good has nonetheless been created by minds that came before theirs

00:13:48.060 | minds formed by ethical and intellectual ideals

00:13:52.380 | Themselves handed down from still other minds and they will begin to spot complications

00:13:59.100 | Not everything is democratic in the modern sense of being equally accessible to or achievable by all

00:14:06.700 | They will begin to see what C.S. Lewis meant when he said that equality

00:14:10.480 | Has no place in the world of the mind

00:14:13.420 | Beauty is not democratic

00:14:16.380 | She reveals herself more to the few than to the many more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless

00:14:24.060 | Virtue is not democratic. She is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men

00:14:29.980 | Truth is not democratic. She demands special talents and special industry and those to whom she gives her favors

00:14:37.900 | Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demands for equality

00:14:43.120 | into these higher spheres

00:14:45.820 | ethical

00:14:47.640 | intellectual or aesthetic democracy is death

00:14:52.540 | These words

00:14:53.980 | merely elitist at first sight to the unseeing or electively blind

00:14:59.500 | Point us to a difference between those who view education as a matter of equal attainment

00:15:04.480 | And those who regard it as a result of highly individual and strenuous labor guided by logic

00:15:11.420 | experience and wisdom of former ages

00:15:14.460 | A search for the objective and knowable over the subjective and unknowable an assertion of the common over the eclectic

00:15:22.480 | The first more leveling view would seem the mandatory one today among those who teach and among those who teach the teachers

00:15:29.760 | Tis education forms the common mind wrote Alexander Pope just as the twig is bent the trees inclined

00:15:38.200 | At the heart of liberal education stands the conviction that the well-touted freedom of mind comes only by submission to standards

00:15:47.440 | external to oneself

00:15:50.100 | That the discipline precedes the freedom and that this kind of freedom can only be earned as a reward

00:15:57.160 | Not conferred as a right

00:15:59.600 | openness to new experiences the

00:16:03.200 | Experiential heresy is not sufficient

00:16:06.920 | One needs to know how to respond to experience not simply with an enlightened intellect

00:16:13.740 | But with an enlightened heart

00:16:16.840 | Understanding like this must be achieved. It does not come without effort and it certainly cannot be assumed

00:16:23.240 | If only it were otherwise

00:16:25.740 | The struggle shown here in simple terms is not new it points up age-old

00:16:31.100 | Divergences in the theory of education and indeed radically differing notions of human nature

00:16:36.900 | These lead us into robust philosophical hair-splitting

00:16:42.280 | Philosophy stands on the doorstep bidding us to enter and make choices to make distinctions to discriminate

00:16:49.380 | generations of students have been taught that the very word education means the

00:16:55.080 | bringing out of children their native genius

00:16:58.420 | the word can just as easily sustain the opposite idea of

00:17:02.260 | Building up and even putting in of course any education worthy of the name will do all

00:17:09.160 | But at least the claims served place these ideas on their proper philosophical playing field

00:17:15.600 | Where we can begin to carve out a clear and defensible idea of what education

00:17:20.960 | Liberal or not is supposed to do

00:17:23.700 | For the true liberal ideal despite fulsome praise has found few buyers in the modern marketplace of ideas

00:17:31.160 | John Henry Newman a 19th century cleric and fount of crystalline clarity

00:17:37.720 | Bestowed the seminal statement of the aims of liberal education in his idea of a university

00:17:43.800 | He trusted a religious upbringing to inculcate virtue

00:17:48.440 | Formal education though is a different thing

00:17:51.520 | Perfection of the intellect he wrote is an object as intelligible as a cultivation of virtue

00:17:58.160 | while at the same time it is absolutely distinct from it and

00:18:03.200 | He described with axiomatic sagacity what the liberally educated mind looks like

00:18:09.240 | Instruction is one thing it has little or no effect upon the mind itself

00:18:14.080 | But education is a higher word it implies an action upon our mental nature and the formation of a character

00:18:21.660 | It is something individual and permanent and is commonly spoken of in connection with religion and virtue

00:18:29.000 | For Newman a proper education forms a habit of mind that

00:18:33.760 | Lasts through life of which the attributes are freedom

00:18:37.480 | Equitableness calmness moderation and wisdom all of which add up to what he called the philosophical habit

00:18:45.880 | Knowledge is to be sought for its own sake

00:18:48.840 | Irrespective of immediate and material gain any other attitude to knowledge betrays the servile mind

00:18:57.120 | All inquiry springs from the curious and rationally formed sensibility

00:19:02.000 | The principle of real dignity and knowledge its worth is this germ within it of a scientific or a philosophical process

00:19:09.920 | This is how it comes to be an end in itself. This is why it admits of being called liberal

00:19:16.560 | By this kind of knowledge we come to know the relative disposition of things

00:19:22.280 | Such as the constitution of the human mind that any kind of knowledge if it be really such is its own reward

00:19:29.720 | For only liberal knowledge stands on its own pretensions is independent of sequel

00:19:36.160 | expects no compliment refuses to be informed by any end or

00:19:41.320 | Absorbed into any art in order duly to present itself to our contemplation

00:19:47.880 | liberal education is simply the cultivation of the intellect as such and its object is nothing more or less than

00:19:55.760 | intellectual excellence

00:19:58.000 | The bar is high, but we can reach it with straining effort

00:20:02.300 | Here is a definition as fine as we are likely to find in this or in any other life

00:20:09.040 | Forming intellectual virtue is not the only task that liberal education has sought to perform

00:20:17.440 | along with imparting knowledge and

00:20:19.920 | Inculcating the ways of sound thinking it has also tried to transmit culture in both senses of the word

00:20:26.960 | This task often gets neglected now

00:20:29.800 | Unless its object be to raise the self-esteem of a particular minority and then of course the emphasis lies no longer on a common culture

00:20:37.960 | but on discrete separate ones

00:20:40.840 | Furthermore we have over time quietly adopted a truncated utilitarian notion of education

00:20:47.880 | As serving solely to help students get ahead

00:20:50.280 | So inured have we become to public demands to teach skills for tomorrow as though education has never done anything else

00:20:58.400 | Yet it was also largely to transmit culture that the brands of education we dub liberal and

00:21:05.520 | humanistic evolved

00:21:08.080 | Prior generations believed that citizens should know the meaning of justice for instance

00:21:13.440 | Not only so they might practice it in the streets, but so they might raise their children to practice it as well

00:21:18.880 | Thus perpetuating one more social ideal one both felt and enacted

00:21:24.840 | They also judged human instinct

00:21:27.680 | appetite unchecked by reason to be a perennial danger and

00:21:32.480 | Insufficient mental equipment to take through life

00:21:35.400 | We should certainly teach young people practical skills, but they must also take in our values

00:21:42.960 | ethical

00:21:44.520 | intellectual and aesthetic

00:21:46.520 | As we have already noted no system of education formal or informal can exist value free

00:21:53.920 | Even if children and adolescents were taught only technical know-how

00:21:58.400 | Such teaching would reveal the parts in the play we have assigned them

00:22:02.520 | The Greeks and Romans made sure to teach their offspring not only practical skill for getting along

00:22:08.320 | They made them memorize poetry commemorating the deeds of their mythological and historical heroes

00:22:14.400 | They filled their children's minds with useless

00:22:17.880 | Information by rote with one purpose among others to make them members of a people to make them one

00:22:25.640 | We cannot view classical education a right unless we factor in this element of culture

00:22:31.720 | classics served the role of

00:22:34.520 | To use the denigrated term of the day

00:22:37.920 | cultural gatekeeper a preserver of collective memories

00:22:41.840 | Where do we stand today?

00:22:44.720 | This idea of conserving culture has not been lost on all modern minds nor have all those minds been politically conservative

00:22:53.180 | journalist Walter Lippmann an influential voice for political and social liberalism

00:22:58.520 | spoke to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in

00:23:02.400 | 1940 and described what he believed to be the state of American education

00:23:07.600 | His perceptive words raised to a higher power

00:23:11.480 | Likewise speak to our immensely greater shiftlessness today

00:23:16.260 | There is an enormous vacuum where until a few decades ago

00:23:20.520 | There was the substance of education and with what is that vacuum filled it is filled with the elective

00:23:27.280 | eclectic the specialized the accidental and incidental

00:23:32.000 | improvisations and spontaneous

00:23:34.400 | Curiosities of teachers and students there is no common faith

00:23:38.680 | No common body of principle no common moral and intellectual discipline

00:23:43.680 | Yet the graduates of these modern schools are expected to have a social conscience

00:23:47.960 | They are expected to arrive by discussion at common purposes

00:23:51.480 | When one realizes that they have no common culture

00:23:54.820 | Is it astounding that they have no common purpose that they worship false gods that only in war do they unite?

00:24:01.520 | That in the fierce struggle for existence they are tearing Western society to pieces

00:24:06.000 | Lippmann observed that the modern world had established a system of education where everyone must be educated

00:24:13.480 | Yet where there is nothing in particular that an educated man should know

00:24:17.640 | Whether or not we agree with Lippmann's diagnosis let alone his presuppositions

00:24:24.220 | We can see that he saw a society that had already reached a critical fork in the road

00:24:30.560 | We ought to mark the spotlight on

00:24:32.760 | commonality

00:24:34.820 | The emancipated democracies have renounced the idea that the purpose of education is to transmit Western culture

00:24:41.360 | Thus there is a cultural vacuum and this cultural vacuum was bound to produce in fact has produced

00:24:48.200 | progressive disorder

00:24:50.680 | Lippmann described in effect the deliquescence of liberal education and the liberal intellectual ideal in America

00:24:58.560 | The consequences of which could not be foreseen easily before America's entry into World War two

00:25:04.080 | T.S. Eliot a poet and critic with much to say about education was convinced that any culture worthy of survival must work

00:25:13.820 | unstintingly to preserve itself and resist the modern

00:25:18.080 | Ideologically driven tendency to create bodies of men and women of all classes

00:25:23.560 | detached from tradition

00:25:26.000 | alienated from religion and susceptible to mass

00:25:28.680 | Suggestion in other words a mob

00:25:31.640 | Which is no less a mob if it is well fed well clothed well housed and well disciplined

00:25:38.540 | he addressed the prickly matter in his notes towards the definition of culture a book written in an

00:25:46.480 | uncertain post-war England

00:25:48.880 | He too noted how much the fervor for educational reform

00:25:53.640 | Assumed education to be an instrument for the realization of social ideals

00:25:58.520 | Which are not always the same as cultural ideals

00:26:02.120 | Quoting a leading thinker of the time who said that the ideal most to be served is full democracy

00:26:09.260 | But education Eliot said has even more pressing tasks

00:26:14.000 | Ignored by many would-be reformers were the higher purposes informing the liberal and humanist

00:26:21.160 | Traditions in which Eliot himself had been nurtured and to which he appealed

00:26:25.360 | It would be a pity if we overlooked the possibilities of education as a means of acquiring

00:26:30.760 | Wisdom if we belittled the acquisition of knowledge for the satisfaction of curiosity

00:26:37.000 | Without any further motive than the desire to know and if we lost our respect for learning

00:26:44.440 | Most tellingly and most damning to the scheme of course electives obtaining in American schools and universities

00:26:51.120 | Eliot did not believe students competent to decide for themselves what they needed to learn the lights of tradition and reason must guide them

00:27:00.400 | No one can become really educated he wrote without having pursued some study in which he took no interest

00:27:08.120 | For it is part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude

00:27:14.720 | Eliot advocated a prescribed curriculum out with the cafeteria style of course selection

00:27:22.280 | We should not tailor our courses simply to our ease and ignorance or laziness

00:27:28.200 | But strive to grow into a state of mind, which is the object of a more rigorous

00:27:33.720 | Commonly directed course of study set by minds more mature and wise

00:27:38.760 | This was for Eliot the sanest of conservative tenets the conviction that a debt is owed to the past and that

00:27:47.200 | Conversely the past bestows a legacy on the present by teaching its lessons by a

00:27:52.600 | vicarious and finely sifted experience

00:27:56.000 | All of this of course violates dearly held modern beliefs in our self-sufficiency

00:28:01.480 | As well as the spirit of relativism in which all curricula are now arranged or left

00:28:07.920 | Unarranged on a level plane one course is as good as another all are valid in their own way

00:28:15.040 | Rejecting set curricula though ravages not only the older regime of classical education

00:28:21.600 | Which prescribed heavily but also any traditional form of liberal learning that has taken upon itself the splendid burden of

00:28:30.560 | Pointing up the knowledge most worth knowing

00:28:32.920 | Yet this curricular flea market also poses an aberration in the West

00:28:38.040 | It is we not they who have gone before us who cut a poor and disjointed figure in the eyes of history

00:28:46.160 | Indeed Eliot blamed the disintegration of Western culture on a form of cultural liberalism that

00:28:54.400 | Tends to release energy rather than accumulate it to relax rather than to fortify

00:28:59.600 | It is a movement not so much defined by its end as by its starting point away from rather than towards

00:29:07.120 | something definite

00:29:09.160 | By destroying traditional social habits of the people by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual

00:29:16.880 | constituents by licensing the opinions of the most foolish by substituting instruction for education

00:29:24.340 | by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom the upstart rather than the qualified by

00:29:30.860 | Fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy

00:29:34.980 | Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation the artificial

00:29:40.820 | mechanized or

00:29:42.740 | brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos

00:29:48.100 | Here we have in one dose many of the modern world's ills told with vivid

00:29:53.900 | discomforting simplicity and

00:29:56.580 | This is not to repeat a matter for political partisans only

00:30:00.900 | Many political conservatives today fit the bill four square. We are all liberals of this kind now

00:30:07.560 | Hardly, can we avoid being so this is the air we breathe

00:30:14.580 | The Greeks and Romans yearned for a common culture

00:30:17.940 | Paideia is the Greek word customarily translated to mean

00:30:22.040 | education but

00:30:24.780 | Enculturation better approximates its essence

00:30:27.860 | Paideia was about instilling core values

00:30:31.340 | enunciating standards and setting moral precepts

00:30:35.300 | H.I. Moreau a French historian of ancient education held that Paideia

00:30:41.740 | Signifies culture not in the sense of something active and preparational like education

00:30:47.820 | But of something perfected a mind fully developed the mind of a man who has become truly man

00:30:55.260 | Modern views of education neglecting Paideia scarcely would have been recognizable to the ancients. They would not have deemed them complete

00:31:04.000 | education applied a social glue a common set of ideals and

00:31:09.740 | Expectations the larger culture carried supreme weight with the Greeks and Romans often at the expense of the individual

00:31:16.700 | Paradoxically though they thought the surest path to the healthy society to be a course of instruction that appears to us the most

00:31:25.200 | Individualistic because it is inner directed and speculative

00:31:29.920 | Played to its finest pitch that course seeks to foster contemplation

00:31:35.700 | which is according to Aristotle the highest form of activity because the intellect is the highest part of our nature and the things

00:31:43.340 | Apprehended by it or the highest form of knowledge

00:31:45.460 | The vitality of any culture can be achieved only if there be enough souls to apprehend the beautiful and the good

00:31:54.260 | Cohesion by other means risks Eliot's mob

00:31:58.860 | The object was to educate autonomous men and women

00:32:03.820 | citizens not robots

00:32:05.820 | one historian has said that the history of education has been an interplay between conceptions of freedom and

00:32:13.100 | conceptions of value and

00:32:15.900 | That by these conceptions we place ourselves within our society

00:32:20.260 | Schools and their curricula have always reflected the values of the society they serve

00:32:26.440 | They still do and this should concern us

00:32:30.820 | If a society be rigid and authoritarian

00:32:34.200 | Children are taught obedience if it be

00:32:38.200 | Equalitarian they are taught first of their rights as citizens

00:32:41.760 | secondarily of their civil obligations

00:32:44.580 | likewise a

00:32:47.080 | vocationally minded commercial society will betray its priorities by placing training for jobs above all else

00:32:54.460 | Getting on is the goal

00:32:56.920 | the ancients recognized that a sound culture must strike a balance between

00:33:01.720 | rival claims of authority and liberty

00:33:05.340 | Whenever we talk about education we do well to keep this in mind

00:33:09.140 | Any curriculum presupposes a vision of the good well-run society

00:33:14.500 | Sir, Richard Livingston a profoundly astute observer of cultural requisites wrote

00:33:21.400 | Along with Elliot and Lippmann amid the dislocations of World War two to apprise Britons of the vast challenges

00:33:28.680 | Political and social awaiting them at the end of the war

00:33:32.500 | Much of what he highlighted applied only to the Great Britain of his day

00:33:36.740 | But we can see that most of what he had to say impinges upon us now

00:33:40.920 | We can also see how much Livingston understood Paideia from the inside and could transpose it for modern life

00:33:49.480 | What purposes should education at its most enlightened serve?

00:33:53.340 | Livingston listed three functions to it to teach us to earn a living

00:33:58.920 | To teach us to be good citizens and to help us to understand the meaning of the good life

00:34:04.940 | The first objective he wrote we understand all too well and the second is treated with growing neglect

00:34:12.240 | But the third is almost irretrievably lost

00:34:15.660 | He was right

00:34:18.140 | When we peruse today's jargon laden manifestos that would tell us what we ought to teach and learn

00:34:23.540 | We search in vain for the third criterion

00:34:26.520 | But Livingston realized that

00:34:29.220 | philosophical even

00:34:31.940 | Spiritual formation is not extraneous to the task. It is central

00:34:37.140 | Robert Hutchins wrote that a system that denies the existence of values denies the possibility of education

00:34:44.520 | relativism

00:34:46.400 | Scientism skepticism and anti-intellectualism

00:34:49.280 | The four horsemen of the philosophical apocalypse have produced that chaos in education, which will end in the disintegration of the West

00:34:58.060 | Though this was an outcome that Livingston thought we can counteract

00:35:02.920 | Spiritual matters press upon the secular world just as irresistibly as they do upon the sacred. They just go by different names

00:35:11.020 | Spirituality

00:35:13.960 | embracing the entire personality

00:35:15.960 | cannot be severed from education

00:35:18.180 | As we are about to see the spiritual motive found an a special home in humanism

00:35:24.660 | Which had evolved to meet Livingston's second and third criteria

00:35:28.760 | Humanism seeks to help us understand our rights and duties as citizens

00:35:34.160 | but it also seeks to help us grasp the nature of human existence as it has been celebrated and

00:35:40.480 | implemented through time and perceived through literature philosophy and history

00:35:45.520 | Livingston said that the finest education before it can be judged complete must give everyone or

00:35:54.600 | everyone mentally able an

00:35:57.840 | intellectual attitude to life and a philosophy of life

00:36:01.560 | It must foster a right intellectual attitude

00:36:06.720 | seeking to find the world and life intensely interesting to wish to see them as they are and

00:36:13.160 | To feel that truth in Plato's words is both permanent and beautiful

00:36:18.560 | Not that we mustn't work for a living

00:36:21.760 | The efficiency of a community will depend on its technical and vocational education

00:36:25.920 | Its cohesion and duration largely on its social and political education

00:36:31.360 | But the quality of its civilization depends on something else. It depends on its standards, its sense of values

00:36:38.680 | Its idea of what is first-rate and what is not

00:36:41.960 | Words that swerve further from current dogmas of educational theory would be hard to imagine

00:36:47.960 | We don't speak the same language

00:36:50.600 | Yet any man of learning of the last several centuries would have found himself simpatico with the ideals even while finding them hard to live by

00:36:59.640 | What about the role of moral training in formal education?

00:37:02.600 | It's there in theory as it remains today in secular practice

00:37:07.040 | Though moral concerns now creak with the weakened politically approved language of tolerance and respect for diversity

00:37:14.800 | But even these aims critical as they may be for the building of character still fall short of another

00:37:21.120 | One is apt to think of moral failure Livingston wrote as due to weakness of character

00:37:27.320 | More often it is due to an inadequate ideal

00:37:29.840 | We detect in others and occasionally in ourselves the want of courage of industry of persistence

00:37:36.520 | Which leads to defeat but we do not notice the more subtle and disastrous weakness that our standards are wrong

00:37:43.080 | That we have never learned what is good

00:37:45.160 | Here is the crux of Livingston's critique of modern education

00:37:49.480 | It is leery of seeking out and acknowledging distinctions between good and bad

00:37:56.600 | Better and worse it does not teach the arts of discrimination

00:38:01.560 | We suffer from an atrophy of the judging faculty

00:38:05.320 | The most indispensable viaduct for the journey of life is a store of adequate ideals

00:38:11.320 | And these are acquired in a very simple way by living with the best things in the world

00:38:16.120 | The best pictures the best buildings the best social or political orders the best human beings

00:38:23.160 | The way to acquire a good taste in anything from pictures to architecture from literature to character

00:38:29.720 | From wine to cigars is always the same be familiar with the best specimens of each

00:38:35.240 | We must educate the head and heart alike

00:38:39.120 | The sight of goodness in life or in literature or history gives a standard at a challenge

00:38:45.240 | If anyone has been able to compare the first rate with the second rate

00:38:49.040 | His criticism will not be merely bitter and barren but creative born of a vision perceiving the good

00:38:55.880 | Dominated by it and desiring to bring it to birth

00:38:59.320 | We must train the intellectual and aesthetic judgment without which life for reflective

00:39:06.920 | educated people cannot be deemed whole without which we cannot awaken the mind of a man who has become truly man and

00:39:14.960 | any judgment presupposes a standard a guiding principle external to oneself a

00:39:20.760 | Principle in Robert Frost's words to stay our minds on and be stayed

00:39:27.760 | Common culture common standards those standards show us where we stand on the grid of human experience

00:39:36.200 | Livingston and TS Eliot both stood at a crossroads in the cultural and intellectual history of the West

00:39:43.440 | For theirs was the last generation to receive stout drafts of the old

00:39:47.680 | humanistic rigorous liberal schooling bestowed as a matter of course on those privileged to attend the better schools

00:39:55.080 | they would live to see that tradition dissolve and

00:39:58.240 | With the passing of that tradition a cultural ideal began to lapse as well

00:40:03.440 | here again as we did before we must distinguish in Werner Jaeger's words between culture as an

00:40:11.960 | ecological concept which means the entire way of life or character of a particular nation and

00:40:17.160 | culture as the conscious ideal of human perfection a

00:40:21.880 | Worthy compliment we find in a phrase from Alfred North Whitehead who wrote that moral education is impossible

00:40:29.440 | without the habitual vision of greatness

00:40:32.080 | Both the conscious ideal of human perfection and the habitual vision of greatness speak to those acts and thoughts

00:40:40.520 | betokening the acme of human achievement

00:40:42.520 | Especially those so judged by successive generations of discerning spirits

00:40:47.480 | These are the seeds of humanistic endeavor to climb the heights of human possibility

00:40:53.320 | To reflect on man's will to know and understand himself

00:40:57.800 | Placed as he is in a turbulent world made all the more violent and chaotic by his passions and by his perpetual

00:41:05.800 | Fight to free himself from their fetters

00:41:08.840 | We are on this planet to rise above lower nature

00:41:12.120 | So far so good

00:41:15.160 | But what do we mean by humanism if we crack this nut Greek and Latin in the age of Microsoft might begin to make some sense

00:41:22.920 | Humanism has never enjoyed a sure definition

00:41:28.800 | Nor has its anti religious press earned and unearned done the word any favors

00:41:36.240 | But if classical education is hard to understand without grasping the goals of liberal education

00:41:41.880 | It is absolutely incomprehensible without a firm hold on this idea of humanism

00:41:47.240 | So what is it?

00:41:50.040 | To some it's an optimistic belief in the capacity of human beings to solve those problems uniquely theirs or

00:41:57.000 | as Livingston once wrote

00:42:00.080 | humanism is the belief that man is more important than his environment or his possessions and

00:42:05.960 | That his fundamental business is not to understand physical nature

00:42:10.240 | Though that is one of his problems nor to earn a livelihood though

00:42:15.560 | That is one of his duties

00:42:17.080 | but so to lead his life is to make the best of human nature and above all what is characteristic of

00:42:23.960 | peculiar to and highest in human nature or as the Greeks put it to achieve the arete or

00:42:30.760 | excellence of man

00:42:33.680 | Critics have asserted its profaneness as a philosophy of secular power in defiance of a divine creator

00:42:41.640 | Those especially who espouse certain religious tenets have made humanism in full dress as

00:42:49.000 | secular humanism a term of pure denigration

00:42:53.480 | Both understandings bear traceable roots yet none exhausts the word or the idea

00:42:59.600 | the Fowler's concise Oxford Dictionary sums up the meaning most usefully as a

00:43:05.920 | devotion to human interests a

00:43:08.760 | System concerned with human not divine interests or with the human race not the individual

00:43:16.920 | religion of humanity

00:43:19.920 | literary culture especially that of the humanists who are themselves defined as

00:43:25.400 | students of human nature or human affairs

00:43:28.560 | they are students, especially in the 14th to 16th centuries of

00:43:32.740 | Roman and Greek literature and antiquities

00:43:36.200 | The devotion to human interests endures in the popular mind

00:43:40.640 | However, little that idea can be said to mean certainly as does the idea of humanism constituting a kind of religion

00:43:48.080 | But the emphasis on the human race not the individual

00:43:51.920 | represents the predominant modern view

00:43:54.520 | Conditioned I believe by the more outward-looking

00:43:58.240 | humanitarian impulse

00:44:01.360 | We can look back a couple millennia though and amuse ourselves to see that the confusions

00:44:06.840 | Stretch back all the way to the classical world itself

00:44:11.480 | The 2nd century AD Roman Aulus Gellius himself keen to capture the meaning of the Latin root

00:44:18.260 | humanitas

00:44:20.040 | Noted that common people understood it broadly

00:44:22.560 | while those who spoke pure Latin the educated elite

00:44:27.600 | restricted its meaning

00:44:30.280 | Those who have spoken Latin and have used the language correctly do not give to the word

00:44:35.200 | humanitas the meaning which it is commonly thought to have

00:44:39.600 | Namely what the Greeks call philanthropia

00:44:42.200 | Signifying a kind of friendly spirit and good feeling towards all men without distinction

00:44:49.280 | But they gave to humanitas about the force of the Greek paideia. That is what we call

00:44:56.060 | eruditionem institutionemque in bonas artes or

00:45:00.520 | education and training in the liberal arts

00:45:04.480 | Those who earnestly desire and seek after these are most highly humanized

00:45:08.880 | For the pursuit of that kind of knowledge and the training given by it have been granted to man alone of all the animals

00:45:15.880 | And for that reason it is termed

00:45:18.280 | humanitas

00:45:20.800 | He went on to clarify the related humanior as

00:45:24.000 | Meaning not good-natured and amiable and kindly which was its usual sense

00:45:30.280 | But is applying to someone of some cultivation and education

00:45:35.200 | eruditiori doctorique

00:45:38.440 | Someone that is who has learned not only from books possessing knowledge of letters

00:45:44.280 | But also one who has taken on the cultivation that comes of the contemplative life

00:45:49.480 | Thus wrote modern philosopher and man of letters Irving Babbitt

00:45:55.040 | Humanitas really implies doctrine and discipline and is applicable not to men in general

00:46:01.640 | But only to a select few it is in short

00:46:04.640 | Aristocratic and not democratic in its implication it faces outward but inward first

00:46:11.280 | Humanitas seeks to amend the self before amending the world around

00:46:15.960 | Babbitt's pivotal distinction arose out of the jumble he spotted between

00:46:21.160 | humanism and

00:46:23.960 | Humanitarianism two words that had come to mean and still mean a century later

00:46:28.440 | practically the same thing in the popular mind and

00:46:31.600 | his division illuminates a

00:46:34.240 | person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump faith in its future progress and

00:46:40.040 | Desires to serve the great cause of this progress should not be called a humanist

00:46:45.400 | But a humanitarian and his creed may be designated as

00:46:49.880 | humanitarianism

00:46:52.800 | Peculiar mischief crops up from the muddle the humanitarian lays stress almost solely upon

00:46:58.640 | breadth of knowledge and sympathy the poet Schiller for instance speaks as a

00:47:04.480 | humanitarian and not as a humanist when he would clasp the millions to his bosom and

00:47:11.000 | Bestow a kiss upon the whole world

00:47:13.680 | But the true humanist Babbitt said is more as selective in his caresses

00:47:20.240 | For he like the eminently humanistic Cicero knows that what is wanted is not sympathy alone nor again

00:47:27.680 | discipline and selection alone, but a disciplined and selective sympathy

00:47:32.920 | Sympathy without selection becomes flabby and a selection which is unsympathetic tends to grow disdainful

00:47:40.600 | set over against the humanitarians the

00:47:45.080 | Humanists concern lies in perfecting the individual rather than in schemes for the elevation of mankind as a whole

00:47:52.280 | And although he allows largely for sympathy. He insists that it be disciplined and tempered by judgment

00:47:59.380 | Tellingly when Babbitt contradicted Bruntier who believed he had found the perfectly apt definition of humanism in the Roman poet

00:48:08.000 | Terence's assertion that I consider nothing human alien to me

00:48:13.000 | Babbitt did so because of the entire absence of the idea of selection

00:48:17.160 | for here stands the

00:48:19.920 | Humanitarian busybody with whom we are all so familiar nowadays who goes around with schemes for reforming almost everything

00:48:27.600 | except himself

00:48:30.200 | Selection was both a cultivated ideal and a counterweight to mere sympathy

00:48:36.020 | Here the difference is sealed with wax

00:48:38.760 | humanism selects

00:48:42.400 | humanitarianism doesn't

00:48:44.400 | Liberal education and the humanities then are not synonymous terms

00:48:49.600 | Though the source of their confusion is not hard to spot

00:48:53.040 | The goals of humanism and the goals of any curriculum fairly called liberal have shot at neighboring targets

00:49:01.040 | They aim to broaden

00:49:03.440 | enlighten deepen

00:49:05.520 | Although humanism did not dawn its familiar clothing until the Renaissance

00:49:09.640 | Its ideals took shape 2,000 years before in the hands of the Greeks. They drew the blueprints for right education

00:49:17.040 | The Romans finally codified the system which they dubbed the liberal arts

00:49:22.320 | That legacy has been maintained to this day

00:49:25.400 | Though the muddy accretions of bad teaching and misdirected good intentions have covered over the roots

00:49:31.120 | liberal arts derives directly from artes liberales and

00:49:37.400 | Designates those activities promoting freedom and leisure

00:49:40.560 | But we must add that for Greeks and Romans leisure carried none of our overtones of idleness

00:49:48.600 | leisure referred to those arts even techniques

00:49:53.180 | reckoned conducive to the contemplative or

00:49:56.240 | reflective life to an expansive freedom of mind

00:50:00.800 | Opposed to the artes liberales were the artes serviles the obligatory

00:50:07.040 | backbreaking work performed to earn bread and ale

00:50:10.800 | Artes serviles were necessary for any society

00:50:15.160 | Artes liberales for a higher more varied culture

00:50:19.200 | the venerable seven liberal arts of the trivium grammar rhetoric logic and

00:50:25.520 | quadrivium

00:50:27.360 | astronomy music geometry arithmetic were enshrined in the Middle Ages as those mental arts

00:50:34.000 | promoting leisure

00:50:36.280 | But prior to leisure or the liberal arts came the articulation of the virtues

00:50:42.520 | Moral muscle being not inborn must be firmed up before the good society can be achieved

00:50:49.720 | goodness in the polis

00:50:52.080 | But first goodness in individuals the ancients knew that any society marked by unbridled

00:50:59.120 | appetites competing for control and

00:51:01.640 | Satisfaction would quickly reduce itself to barbarism

00:51:05.400 | the morally sound state was a prerequisite to the fruitful practice of the liberal arts and the liberal arts required a measure of

00:51:14.040 | social tranquility

00:51:16.520 | Now for the sinews the gristle of those liberal and humane ideals

00:51:22.000 | The Greeks and Romans while capable of great superstition

00:51:27.680 | Nonetheless placed great faith in the power of reason and it was the object of the artes liberales to discover truth

00:51:36.040 | Yet they did not live solely in their brains

00:51:39.960 | Plato believed in the fundamental unity of the good all

00:51:45.520 | the virtues amounted to a rate

00:51:47.880 | excellence which signified the best quality appropriate to any act or actor thought or thinker it

00:51:55.120 | Pointed toward the best of anything to its perfection

00:51:58.920 | Conduct should be informed by knowledge of the virtues and evil comes naturally of ignorance

00:52:04.920 | Morality is rational. It can be divine by the instructed mind. It isn't purely subjective. It is discoverable

00:52:14.120 | Evil is a disease a cancer of the mind and soul

00:52:17.520 | healable by philosophy

00:52:20.160 | One healed the soul by leading the mind to knowledge of values which in turn leads to aletheia or truth itself

00:52:27.760 | Nothing short of this would produce the virtuous life for the quality of life could be neither more nor less than the soul made it

00:52:35.880 | How strange said Socrates on the eve of his execution that any citizen of Athens?

00:52:42.160 | The greatest of cities and the most famous for wisdom and power

00:52:45.560 | Would not be ashamed to care for the acquisition of wealth and for reputation and honor

00:52:51.080 | When you neither care nor take thought for wisdom and truth and the perfection of your soul

00:52:55.980 | Socrates claimed his life's mission to be nothing else than urging you young and old

00:53:02.320 | Not to care for your persons or your property more than for the perfection of your souls

00:53:08.120 | The Western mind elevated this mighty philosophical aim into an ideal

00:53:12.960 | The inner takes precedence over the outer the mind and soul compose an inseparable whole and both are fed or

00:53:21.080 | starved together

00:53:23.080 | No option exists to train the mind alone without producing soul deep consequences

00:53:29.840 | But how is the inner to be instructed?

00:53:34.320 | Here was the question posing the greatest challenge to Greek education to Piedia. How best to fit theory to practice?

00:53:41.960 | The Greeks also knew the tension between teaching for skills

00:53:45.640 | training and teaching for cultural and intellectual strength

00:53:50.240 | liberal education

00:53:52.840 | Aristotle on the heels of Plato by a generation admitted that it is not clear whether pupils should practice pursuits that are practically

00:54:00.840 | useful or

00:54:02.440 | morally edifying

00:54:04.360 | Still the Greeks reached an impressive accord on the role of education in promoting virtue

00:54:11.160 | One we see spun out richly in the works of Plato and Aristotle

00:54:15.480 | they came to believe that education ought to change who the learner is an

00:54:20.080 | Operation such as this and an analogy to surgery doesn't come amiss

00:54:25.280 | Must be undertaken with care

00:54:27.960 | but the rewards were great and

00:54:31.640 | indelible

00:54:33.240 | Protagoras had proclaimed man to be the measure of all things and an exploration into man's nature was proclaimed the highest pursuit

00:54:40.960 | We can make along our journey through life

00:54:44.200 | Certainly the most sublime work ever penned on Piedia and the building of common culture is

00:54:50.560 | Plato's Republic said by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau

00:54:55.520 | to be the finest treatise on education ever written and

00:55:01.080 | indeed one cannot talk intelligently about education without having sat at the feet of Socrates and his companions as

00:55:08.640 | They wrestle with ways and means to build the well-run state

00:55:12.600 | We need not detain ourselves with a detailed précis of Plato's thoughts

00:55:18.160 | But we would serve our purposes with a glance at his view of the ideal state for that is what the Republic describes

00:55:25.000 | Not so much a feasible political program

00:55:29.320 | Socrates gave his name to the Socratic method a teaching device seeking as its object to make all knowledge personal

00:55:36.600 | By rigorous questioning to make it more than a nod of lazy assent

00:55:42.320 | The novices thereby led through the bracken of his assumptions and biases to the clear light of knowledge

00:55:49.360 | The teacher holds him responsible for all words and ideas. He utters

00:55:54.440 | Pressing him to define them with greater exactitude. Just what do we mean by justice?

00:55:59.720 | freedom

00:56:01.480 | courage

00:56:02.600 | Virtue are they achievable in this life or are they beyond the grasp of even the most righteous and this method remains a cardinal?

00:56:10.600 | means of testing intellectual metal

00:56:12.680 | the pupil isn't so much taught as guided first to recognize his own ignorance and

00:56:18.800 | Second to spring from this illumination to true knowledge and understanding

00:56:23.960 | Thus does knowledge rise out of ignorance thus can knowledge lead to wisdom

00:56:29.240 | How our human relations structured in this ideal world?

00:56:33.440 | Plato's view of humanity reveals distinctly hierarchical

00:56:37.600 | Scaffolding the Republic of Plato's fancy is composed of three tiers

00:56:43.000 | Living on the bottom are most of us the great mass of people from the poor through prosperous farmers

00:56:50.960 | Artisans and merchants they put food on the tables and keep the wheels of commerce turning

00:56:55.720 | But by dint of their desire merely to make a living untroubled by higher aspirations

00:57:01.400 | They are to exercise no political power over others because they have not been taught to wield power with justice and

00:57:08.520 | magnanimity

00:57:10.800 | next up come the administrators and the military those charged with carrying out the policies set by the rulers on top and

00:57:19.240 | The rulers of course are the philosopher princes who alone possess the knowledge and wisdom to rule

00:57:26.160 | This is not a democratic vision. It is guided by an assumed inequality throughout the populace

00:57:34.040 | It is therefore shamelessly

00:57:36.440 | aristocratic the rule of the best and most able

00:57:40.200 | One abiding difference though from the more familiar and historical sense of aristocracy

00:57:46.560 | Lies in the absence of any belief that the aristocrats

00:57:49.920 | Those who man the upper tiers gain their ascendancy from inherited privilege

00:57:56.240 | Rulers rule only after their characters have been judged meritorious

00:58:03.040 | This idea wrote Jaeger

00:58:05.760 | Plato thought to be a principle in harmony with nature and which is therefore absolutely inevitable in the state of divine perfection

00:58:14.440 | The poor and laboring masses haven't had the education for enlightened rule

00:58:18.960 | Yet more significantly the plutocrats out for nothing beyond lucre are also expressly forbidden power

00:58:26.000 | Souls like these are also unequal to the task of ruling

00:58:30.720 | What curriculum must one complete before he is deemed worthy to rule over others in this theoretical state?

00:58:40.280 | Primary schooling stipulates a course of mathematics literature music and gymnastics

00:58:46.040 | Later students learn logic as adults some set off into the upper reaches of philosophy

00:58:52.480 | Significantly not till they reach their 30s are they fit for leadership

00:58:57.080 | Not till 50 or so will they be asked finally to turn

00:59:01.240 | Upwards the vision of their souls and fix their gaze on that which sheds light on all

00:59:07.320 | For when they have thus beheld the good itself

00:59:10.440 | They shall use it as a pattern for the right ordering of the state and the citizens and themselves

00:59:15.880 | Throughout the remainder of their lives each in his turn devoting the greater part of his time to the study of philosophy

00:59:23.120 | Philosophy is not a fine thing but a necessity

00:59:28.520 | Plato claimed another tripartite split in human nature

00:59:33.720 | One not surprisingly reflecting the three classes of the state

00:59:37.640 | first appetite all

00:59:40.400 | physical and sensual wants including avaricious desires for material gain

00:59:46.480 | then the spirited element which is formed by habit and will and

00:59:53.320 | finally the

00:59:55.200 | philosophic element which can perceive virtues like sympathy and selflessness and

01:00:00.920 | If it's properly formed can apprehend goodness beauty and truth

01:00:06.280 | order of whatever kind is

01:00:09.320 | Hierarchical all this may strike us as fanciful

01:00:13.600 | But the value of these ruminations to us resides in the theory not the applicability

01:00:19.600 | they crystallize

01:00:22.360 | CS Lewis best summarized this model for the modern mind as

01:00:26.920 | The king governs by his executive he wrote so reason and man the

01:00:32.760 | Philosophic element must rule mere appetites by means of the spirited element

01:00:39.280 | the head rules the belly through the chest the seat of

01:00:43.920 | Magnanimity of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments the chest

01:00:51.840 | magnanimity

01:00:53.960 | sentiment these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and

01:01:00.400 | Visceral man it may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man

01:01:07.280 | For by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal

01:01:13.080 | For devotees of this classical Greek view of the human mind and human nature the supreme goal of education was happiness

01:01:22.520 | which was conceived of as health of soul the ultimate good man can hope to attain during his lifetime and

01:01:30.000 | From this health of soul they believed would come eudaimonia

01:01:34.840 | literally the good God within a

01:01:37.520 | Harmonious balance of the whole personality, but once more how to achieve it

01:01:42.900 | early humanistic education began with the cultivation of character

01:01:49.720 | Whatever intellectual feats a man might bring off they were of scant value if he had not first achieved a goodness and

01:01:57.040 | tranquility of soul

01:01:59.920 | Socrates had said that

01:02:01.760 | According as the sons turn out well or the opposite will the whole life of their father's house be affected

01:02:07.260 | depending for better or worse on their character

01:02:10.280 | Character determined the health of the state in this sense the purposes behind education were also political

01:02:18.120 | each man and woman would be of either the rulers or the ruled and

01:02:23.280 | Here the aristocracy must carry its own weight a ruler must be distinguished from a subject by his superior character

01:02:31.240 | Not merely by the accidents of birth and wealth

01:02:34.440 | Therefore his education must differ from theirs. He must care about supra intellectual qualities

01:02:41.720 | Jaeger explained the goal

01:02:45.040 | Distinction between the two kinds of training extends even to food and regimen

01:02:49.880 | The infant prince must learn to ignore physical needs and desires in order to fulfill urgent duties

01:02:56.680 | Must be master of his own hunger and thirst must be used to short sleep late to bed and early to rise

01:03:03.320 | Must not be afraid of hard work must not be lured by the bait of sense

01:03:08.400 | Anyone who cannot do all that is a subject not a ruler

01:03:13.600 | Socrates gives this education in self-control and abstinence the Greek name for training

01:03:19.160 | ascesis

01:03:21.280 | There can be no happiness without this idos this training in self-control

01:03:26.440 | modesty and reverence for that judged worthy of revering

01:03:30.840 | Education began with principles such as these

01:03:34.080 | People must first achieve the good

01:03:36.760 | Individually before going on to serve the larger social good

01:03:41.000 | the healthy society begins with healthy souls and

01:03:44.640 | The healthiest souls are not formed without intellectual and most of all spiritual labor

01:03:51.160 | We approach the heart of the matter

01:03:54.280 | the souls quest for health began with the

01:03:58.280 | inculcation of right habits

01:04:01.120 | Read book three of the Republic. We see that the platonic scheme far from being over

01:04:08.560 | intellectualized approached the task with sobriety the child is to be reared on music and

01:04:15.160 | Gymnastics both corresponding roughly to the training of the mind and body

01:04:20.720 | Many of us now tend to think of music merely as diverting entertainment

01:04:26.240 | But to the Greeks music formed the spirit

01:04:29.880 | Plato believed that the soul needs training in the aesthetic and spiritual good and that music reflects those

01:04:37.760 | microscopic spiritual states with melody harmony and rhythm more readily than any other activity

01:04:44.440 | it will either purify or

01:04:47.120 | corrupt the soul

01:04:49.480 | The rhythms of a life must be orderly and brave

01:04:53.600 | Why?

01:04:55.560 | Because in just this way does good speech and good grace and good rhythm wait upon a good disposition

01:05:02.000 | Not that weakness of head which we euphemistically style goodness of heart

01:05:06.920 | But the truly good and fair disposition of the character in the mind

01:05:10.760 | for in all these there is grace or gracelessness and evil rhythm and

01:05:16.000 | Disharmony are akin to evil speaking and the evil temper, but the opposites are the sober and the good disposition

01:05:24.000 | one speculation holds that

01:05:26.680 | education in music is most sovereign because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and

01:05:35.240 | Take strongest hold upon it imparting grace

01:05:38.400 | so anyone so trained would praise beautiful things and take delight in them and

01:05:43.680 | Receive them into his soul to foster its growth and become himself beautiful and good

01:05:49.000 | The results for the student are indelible

01:05:52.240 | The ugly he would rightly disapprove of and hate while still young and yet unable to apprehend the reason

01:05:59.240 | But when reason came the man thus nurtured would be the first to give her welcome for by this affinity. He would know her

01:06:06.280 | Near the end of his life Plato expounded more broadly upon the theory of right education

01:06:12.180 | when pleasure and love and pain and hatred spring up rightly in the souls of those who are

01:06:17.600 | Unable as yet to grasp a rational account

01:06:20.720 | They will consent thereunto through having been rightly trained in fitting practices

01:06:27.760 | this consent viewed as a whole is

01:06:30.400 | Goodness, the student is rightly trained in respect of pleasures and pains

01:06:36.640 | So as to hate what ought to be hated right from the beginning to the very end and to love what ought to be loved

01:06:44.040 | This isn't just reading and writing and counting. This is paideia

01:06:51.240 | Likewise Aristotle saw the cultivation of virtue first as a matter of encouraging habits of

01:06:57.600 | Learning to like what is worth liking and reason and habit alike have roles to play

01:07:03.120 | He thought of virtue as a mean a midpoint a balance of competing appetites and claims

01:07:09.920 | Which the well-directed mind develops over time

01:07:12.400 | moral virtue is concerned with emotions and actions in which one can have excess or

01:07:19.120 | deficiency or a do mean

01:07:21.120 | for example one can be frightened or bold feel desire or anger or pity and

01:07:27.400 | Experience pleasure and pain in general either too much or too little and in both cases

01:07:33.680 | Wrongly whereas to feel these feelings at the right time on the right occasion

01:07:38.240 | Towards the right people for the right purpose and in the right manner is to feel the best amount of them

01:07:45.040 | Which is the mean amount and best amount is of course the mark of virtue

01:07:49.440 | At the same time Aristotle sensed as do we the muddle of nature and nurture

01:07:56.480 | Can such virtue be inborn?

01:07:59.320 | He had an answer

01:08:01.960 | Some thinkers hold that virtue is a gift of nature

01:08:04.680 | Others think we become good by habit others that we can be taught to be good

01:08:10.160 | Natural endowment is obviously not under our control

01:08:12.920 | It is bestowed on those who are fortunate in the true sense by some divine dispensation

01:08:18.720 | Again theory and teaching are not equally efficacious in all cases

01:08:23.200 | The soil must have been previously tilled if it is to foster the seed and the mind of the pupil must have been prepared by the

01:08:29.840 | cultivation of habits so as to like and dislike a right

01:08:34.040 | For he that lives at the dictates of passion will not hear nor understand the reasoning of one who tries to dissuade him

01:08:41.740 | Passion seems not to be amenable to reason but only to force

01:08:46.720 | Education is often compared to the cultivation of soil in ancient writings as well as in those of the Renaissance as

01:08:55.560 | Plants are cultivated to grow strongly so as to be fruitful or beautiful

01:09:00.620 | So must the human mind be pruned and weeded if it too is to become cultivated

01:09:06.920 | Right habits once planted are not expected to form the soul on their own

01:09:13.060 | Those habits are products of vigilant husbandry

01:09:16.980 | Saying much the same thing in a slightly different way four centuries later

01:09:21.560 | Plutarch wrote of the responsibility of a tutor in this way

01:09:26.680 | Just as nurses mold a child's body with their hands

01:09:30.440 | So tutors by the habits they inculcate

01:09:33.560 | Train the child's character to take a first step as it were on the path to virtue

01:09:39.640 | So the Spartan when he was asked what he affected by his teaching said I make honorable things pleasant to children

01:09:47.400 | the Roman Emperor Vespasian described the best teachers as those who

01:09:52.280 | Train the souls of the young to gentleness and civic virtue

01:09:56.540 | Aristotle said there are two kinds of virtue

01:10:00.480 | intellectual and moral

01:10:03.240 | intellectual virtue is for the most part both produced and increased by instruction and therefore requires experience and time

01:10:11.080 | whereas moral or ethical virtue is the product of habit ethos a

01:10:17.640 | Natural faculty like sight and hearing serves us without our exertion

01:10:22.260 | There's nothing natural though about the virtues they come by effort and must be reinforced by habit

01:10:29.160 | We acquire them by first having actually practiced them just as we do the arts

01:10:34.560 | We learn an art or craft by doing the things that we shall have to do when we have learned it

01:10:39.660 | Men become builders by building houses

01:10:42.680 | harpers by playing the harp

01:10:45.920 | Similarly we become just by doing just acts brave by doing brave acts

01:10:52.480 | Here the political implications become most acute

01:10:56.280 | This truth is attested by the experience of states

01:10:59.640 | Lawgivers make the citizens good by training them in habits of right action

01:11:04.600 | This is the aim of all legislation and if it fails to do this it is a failure

01:11:10.440 | This is what distinguishes a good form of Constitution from a bad one

01:11:15.680 | What was to be the result of all this strenuous philosophical effort?

01:11:19.920 | The wise citizen fit to govern first himself and then and only then to govern others

01:11:25.960 | Precisely in this way does one become free through liberal learning

01:11:30.360 | first by acquiring right habits

01:11:33.520 | second by intellectual strain by learning to apprehend the beautiful and the good with the mind and

01:11:40.080 | The mind then confirms what the soul has already learned

01:11:44.600 | One can become intellectually powerful of course without those right habits, but what good is that?

01:11:51.040 | The object of the ancients was not a programmable

01:11:55.280 | Ratio-sensitive machine it was the cultured man or woman

01:12:00.880 | The Romans taking their cues from the Greeks built on this legacy

01:12:05.080 | While they were a practical people they also came to revere the philosophical bent

01:12:11.560 | But within their milieu orators replaced philosophers as the cultivated ideal

01:12:16.840 | men of speculative ability who yet matched that ability to a high sense of civic duty of

01:12:22.240 | enlightened service to the state

01:12:25.040 | Quintilian was the ultimate authority on creating the perfect orator

01:12:29.680 | the first essential for such a one is that he should be a good man and

01:12:33.600 | Consequently we demand of him not merely the possession of exceptional gifts of speech

01:12:38.400 | But of all the excellences of character as well

01:12:41.000 | For I will not admit that the principles of upright and honorable living should be regarded as the peculiar concern of philosophy

01:12:47.960 | The man who can really play his part as a citizen and is capable of meeting the demands both of public and private business

01:12:54.680 | The man who can guide a state by his councils give it a firm basis by his legislation

01:13:00.080 | And purge its vices by his decisions as a judge is

01:13:04.480 | Assuredly no other than the orator of our quest

01:13:08.080 | Once more we find a tall order for the ideal citizen

01:13:12.840 | And once more we find that skills are not placed above learning and moral rectitude

01:13:18.320 | Character still helps to form the liberal mind the mind that is with the ability to reflect upon its assumptions and sense

01:13:25.840 | Impressions a mind able to make sound judgments

01:13:30.200 | When describing this ideal orator Quintilian says he is compelled to speak of such virtues as courage justice

01:13:37.960 | Self-control in fact scarcely a case comes up in which some one of these virtues is not involved

01:13:44.280 | This ideal orator this renewed paragon of the cultured mind

01:13:49.480 | Was to be placed on par with a philosopher because of his predilection and ability to reflect

01:13:55.400 | To contemplate this Roman synthesis stands in some ways as an even greater

01:14:01.240 | Affirmation of the Hellenic vision than the schemes of the Greeks for life is no longer framed within Plato's ideal garden

01:14:09.080 | Walled off from the world's squalor and chaos the ideal takes on the trappings of a practical program

01:14:15.720 | Philosophy gets brought down to the street

01:14:18.440 | Meanwhile though how fair the purpose of perpetuating culture in the Roman world if

01:14:24.560 | We can answer this we can also answer the question

01:14:27.560 | Why Greece and Rome and then why Greek and Latin?

01:14:33.120 | As the Sun set on the Roman Empire during the long decades of the 5th century AD

01:14:38.080 | The upper classes still possessed the confidence of a matured culture. They knew they had something valuable enough to preserve

01:14:46.320 | Education throughout the vast bulk of the Mediterranean and in the distant northern places ruled under the eagle was

01:14:54.200 | despite unevenness in practice marked by extraordinary uniformity a

01:14:59.480 | Uniformity that had arisen out of the Hellenistic world

01:15:02.800 | The civilizing net was cast widely during the latter years of the Roman Republic and stayed that way for centuries

01:15:09.640 | Throughout the breadth of the Empire even as the world grew more and more unstable politically the educated man was still honored

01:15:17.160 | Just as important he was recognizable

01:15:20.880 | Culture held enough people agreed on what was vital to a thriving civilization

01:15:26.160 | There was still a cultural faith a belief in that intricate web of value and association

01:15:32.800 | Drawing together diverse peoples and making them one

01:15:35.680 | Perhaps the greatest legacy of the Greeks was their belief in the goodness of what they were and what they had to give to the

01:15:42.480 | Rest of the world, but it was the Romans not the Greeks who ensured the survival of that intellectual heritage

01:15:48.840 | Underlying liberal learning and classical education the Romans created much of the intellectual tradition. We appeal to today

01:15:56.400 | Rome too had emerged with a massive confidence in the strength and integrity of that tradition

01:16:02.000 | Inherited from the Greeks and the Greeks had no doubts about their cultural superiority

01:16:07.440 | They could be skeptics, but they were not tormented by self-doubt

01:16:11.680 | Something new had entered the cosmos with them and they knew it

01:16:16.120 | later the Roman world was filled with many clashing nations the unity the Romans achieved out of that diversity is amazing to

01:16:24.000 | ponder as

01:16:25.280 | Maru has observed

01:16:27.160 | Unity could come only from sharing a single ideal a common attitude

01:16:31.360 | Towards the purpose of existence and the various means of attaining it in short from a common civilization or rather culture

01:16:39.120 | Fighting armies alone did not create this unity

01:16:43.560 | Unity was also engendered in those far-flung schools

01:16:47.240 | Early on in their history the Romans had no cultural center of gravity capable of attracting other peoples

01:16:53.400 | They had little to envy they were a rural people living close to the soil and deriving their ideals of virtuous action from it

01:17:02.320 | Although they would eventually dominate the Greek lands politically and militarily they knew of their cultural shortcomings

01:17:10.400 | Centuries passed before Romans could sport their own first-class literature and culture

01:17:15.400 | But even as they did they remained under the long shadows of Hellas

01:17:19.720 | Cicero once asked is there in fact a man among those Greeks who would credit one of the Romans with understanding?

01:17:26.880 | Rome assimilated Greek things the Roman poet Horace would one day famously concede

01:17:34.480 | Captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought civilization to barbarous Latium

01:17:40.560 | The historian Arnold Toynbee wrote without exaggeration that the Romans were Greek cultures

01:17:46.860 | most celebrated converts and most effective disseminators and

01:17:50.840 | This conversion brought with it a profound linkage of the two cultures

01:17:54.880 | All educated people were to be versed in the treasures of both their languages

01:18:00.280 | Whereas the Greeks had learned only Greek the Romans went on to learn both Latin and Greek and the pattern was set

01:18:07.140 | To be a fully educated and culture aided man in the Greco-Roman world

01:18:12.060 | One had to know both tongues

01:18:14.480 | It was not Petrarch in the 14th century who first insisted on a mastery of both Latin and Greek

01:18:20.480 | Cicero did that over a thousand years before

01:18:24.400 | Quintilian later codified this proviso as holy writ promoting this formal bilingualism pragmatically

01:18:31.120 | I

01:18:31.840 | Prefer that a boy should begin learning with Greek because Latin being in general use

01:18:36.840 | Will be picked up by him whether we will or not

01:18:39.640 | While the fact that Latin is derived from Greek is a further reason for his being first instructed in the latter

01:18:45.020 | this linguistic approach to acculturating

01:18:48.880 | Assimilating diverse peoples spread throughout the Roman provinces making the classical world a truly cosmopolitan one

01:18:56.080 | the learning of language leads to literature and

01:18:59.920 | Melding the high literary achievements of both the Greeks and the Romans helped to create a cultural unity

01:19:05.600 | Letters are the beginning of wisdom

01:19:08.400 | So one Greek Maxim had it with letters

01:19:12.220 | Standing for knowledge of language the ability to convey the complexity and subtlety of thought and sense with words

01:19:18.840 | the Hellenistic Age strengthened the consensus that mastery of language defined the highest reaches of cultivation as

01:19:26.060 | Maru has reminded us when we speak of classical education today

01:19:31.300 | We really mean Hellenistic education for it was during the Hellenistic Age

01:19:37.460 | Roughly from the death of Alexander in 322 to the first century BC

01:19:41.940 | That curricula throughout the Mediterranean congealed

01:19:45.500 | The word was in the ascendant the cultivated man was in a real sense the literary man the man of words

01:19:53.140 | It was during this period too that the conscious ideal of human perfection

01:19:58.140 | Made itself felt more widely as a culturally shaping force

01:20:03.420 | One was moved Maru wrote to recreate oneself from unmolded clay and to produce from the childish

01:20:11.100 | Material and from the imperfectly formed creature one is born the man who is fully man whose ideal

01:20:18.580 | proportions one can just perceive

01:20:20.740 | Such became every man's life work that one task worthy of a lifetime's devotion

01:20:26.300 | Living contemporaneously with Plato

01:20:30.460 | Isocrates might well be called the father of rhetorical or

01:20:33.740 | oratorical culture as opposed to philosophical culture

01:20:38.820 | It was Isocrates who had pressed the importance of one cohesive Hellenic culture in a multicultural age

01:20:46.020 | Instructing people of his time that a culture must be built and maintained it does not materialize out of ether

01:20:53.100 | Images of building and tilling were native to his way of thinking for him culture was a matrix of conventions

01:20:59.980 | points of agreement

01:21:01.820 | delicately woven and easily torn apart

01:21:03.980 | Civilization itself emerges from a web of myriad laws written and unwritten

01:21:10.140 | creating unity out of disunity

01:21:13.180 | social cosmos out of chaos

01:21:15.660 | to live as an educated being in any higher culture is to act both as a builder of the house and

01:21:21.660 | as a weeder of the garden

01:21:25.180 | Isocrates thought we must do two things primarily as a people we must consolidate culture and we must educate our rulers

01:21:32.700 | We need rulers armed with a body of knowledge a basis for common discourse and common sentiment

01:21:38.940 | creating again in Maru's words a

01:21:41.700 | common devotion to a single ideal of human perfection from the fact that they had all received the same kind of

01:21:47.900 | upbringing devoted to the same end

01:21:50.020 | We need in a word an elite

01:21:54.060 | Reflexively disparaged today an elite to the Greeks and Romans was not only inevitable in a sound society

01:22:00.460 | But the desirable fruit of the highest thoughts words and deeds

01:22:04.620 | Thoughts words and deeds to which most of us are simply not equal

01:22:08.700 | Again, a high culture reaches upward to the better and best

01:22:12.180 | Distinctions arise. They are sought not derided as signs of intellectual and cultural health

01:22:20.300 | Isocrates carried the day and in a not too fanciful sense set Hellenistic and thus classical education on its way

01:22:28.220 | He stamped the template. It was Isocrates

01:22:32.620 | Significantly who gave traditional Western education its literary tenor

01:22:37.460 | Some wise or clever sophists could teach without writing a word

01:22:42.340 | Their thoughts and spirits be held forever through the prisms of others

01:22:46.320 | after Isocrates though

01:22:49.260 | Intellectual culture became scribal it depended on books written words

01:22:53.860 | Collections of which over time would form an authoritative list of best works

01:22:58.740 | Culture meant books because from books we learn about what is best

01:23:04.140 | William James once wrote epigrammatically that the purpose of education is to help us to know a good man when we see him

01:23:11.500 | Isocrates had some standards of his own

01:23:14.980 | What does the man know? How has that knowledge changed him? And how common is that knowledge to that which is held by other knowledgeable people?

01:23:22.940 | Discovering the books that that man had read would tell us much other expressions of culture fade away

01:23:29.540 | They're fragile

01:23:31.740 | But the artifacts of culture enduring the longest come adorned with words

01:23:35.940 | With those fleeting yet hard missiles of meaning that can keep alive a thought or feeling for millennia

01:23:44.580 | Sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures

01:23:47.060 | We too keep our memories until very recently generations of American schoolchildren were made to memorize the Gettysburg Address

01:23:55.420 | mainly for two reasons

01:23:57.940 | One reason was the potency of the words themselves for the speech is a masterpiece of eloquent brevity. It has literary value

01:24:06.260 | But another reason was the belief that those words

01:24:10.420 | Furnishing the minds of young people would confirm their citizenship serving as a living reminder of what their country stood for

01:24:17.460 | memorizing them made for better citizens

01:24:21.180 | Reflect on the fortunes and accidents which befall men and kings for if you are mindful of the past you will plan better for the future

01:24:29.860 | History keeps the tablets

01:24:32.980 | Tell me what eloquence

01:24:35.220 | Socrates had said could be more righteous or more just than one which praises our ancestors in a manner

01:24:41.340 | worthy of their excellence and of their achievements

01:24:44.460 | This routine wasn't just political. It was cultural it claimed an

01:24:50.380 | Inheritance for even then the idea was not just the free-thinking man

01:24:55.340 | but the truly cultured man one who had earned by knowledge and loyalty a

01:25:00.580 | Place within the ranks of those fit to be citizens and perhaps even a seat among the rulers

01:25:06.380 | Once again, are we reminded that one cannot be born into a culture of the higher kind

01:25:11.580 | Automatically equipped with all its watchwords and prerogatives one grows into it and is formed by it

01:25:19.140 | All of this is the stuff of humanistic culture if we wish to discover the genesis of the West's

01:25:26.100 | Civilizing ideal as well as the origins of classical education. We look more profitably perhaps to

01:25:32.240 | Isocrates than to Plato and Aristotle

01:25:34.700 | For it is Isocrates who represents the original fountainhead of the whole great current of humanist scholarship

01:25:42.760 | He is the source as Werner Jaeger said of this humanistic culture

01:25:47.820 | calling attention to the preserved verbal artifacts of his day as both defining and

01:25:54.860 | informative

01:25:56.020 | He taught all who came after that anyone before he can be called civilized has to read his culture's books

01:26:03.340 | The curriculum of humane schooling began to take shape with Isocrates

01:26:08.300 | the idea of a canon arose for the first time that is a

01:26:13.180 | Body of written works acting as passwords to culture with which all of the educated were expected to be familiar

01:26:21.420 | Ideals became less idiosyncratic and more public for the Greeks and Romans both

01:26:26.820 | Education was essentially an initiation into the Greek way of life

01:26:31.320 | Molding the child and the adolescent in accordance with the national customs and submitting him to a particular style of living

01:26:39.540 | The style that distinguished man from the brutes

01:26:42.800 | Greeks from the barbarians

01:26:45.900 | Theirs became a bookish culture and neither brutes nor barbarians can read

01:26:52.140 | here we see that a key purpose of education is a

01:26:55.680 | fundamentally conservative or

01:26:58.460 | preservative one

01:27:00.980 | education should preserve and transmit the past so that cultural memory is lengthened and

01:27:06.900 | So that descendants will not be left to rediscover human truths already endured and expressed by eloquent forebears

01:27:15.500 | this was the spirit of the Hellenistic age a

01:27:18.220 | Preservative epoch when men's aim everywhere was to keep poetry alive rather than to challenge the great masters

01:27:25.780 | Originality was not prized so much as reverence

01:27:30.580 | Great libraries were established at Rhodes

01:27:33.820 | Antioch and Pergamon the greatest one at the Greek city of Alexandria in Egypt

01:27:38.580 | containing hundreds of thousands of papyri rolls

01:27:43.100 | Philology the science of language was launched at Mytilene

01:27:46.400 | Textual criticism at Ephesus the Alexandrians put in place the rules of Greek

01:27:51.780 | Accentuation that continued to ease our reading of the texts men studied the admired works of the past and strove to imitate them

01:27:59.540 | Here in this period of assimilation the difference between learning for culture and learning for skills is most sharp

01:28:07.460 | It's not that the ancients cared nothing for practical skills or for what we call critical thinking

01:28:13.460 | But anyone systematically exposed to the best that's been thought and said will also analyze it

01:28:20.140 | Cutting his intellectual teeth on the minds that brought it forth

01:28:23.620 | Acquiring culture under this rigid regime though comes by the avenue of literary learning

01:28:30.500 | Universal agreement did not obtain on all vital matters

01:28:36.020 | Isocrates argued with some in the Socratic school over whether virtue can be taught entirely

01:28:40.180 | Plato thought it could

01:28:42.980 | Isocrates did not

01:28:44.820 | Believing a sound judgment to be the proper and realistic aim

01:28:48.380 | The best one could hope to do is to point up the finest examples in the annals of virtuous thoughts and deeds

01:28:53.860 | Later the Roman philosopher Seneca took Isocrates side the teacher cannot instill virtue

01:29:00.740 | He can only prepare the mind for it

01:29:03.500 | Isocrates plan though best perpetuated the memory of culture

01:29:07.660 | It came to be called rhetorical as it aimed to train men who would lead people not by force

01:29:13.540 | but by moral suasion

01:29:15.940 | This was a new aristocracy

01:29:18.380 | The aristoi of the knowing and eloquent the orators set out in turn to train

01:29:25.300 | Logographers writers of speeches it is speech after all that separates man from the beasts by speech

01:29:33.340 | Man is able to reflect and to relate his reflections

01:29:37.380 | The power of words suits him for a life lived sub specie a eternity tis for all time

01:29:45.060 | Knowledge was not for him a matter of Gnostic exclusivity, but the sum of contemplated experience and it was there to be told

01:29:53.660 | One finds Isocrates said that among our public men who are living today

01:29:59.060 | those who give most study to the art of words are the best statesmen who come before you on the rostrum and

01:30:05.220 | Furthermore that among the ancients it was the greatest and the most illustrious orators who brought to the city most of her blessings

01:30:12.300 | the word reigned

01:30:14.980 | The Greeks and Romans not only gave birth to Western civilization

01:30:20.580 | They bequeathed to us their categories of thought and models of action

01:30:25.340 | They bestowed a vocabulary for the inquisitive and just mind they laid the foundations of culture and Jaeger's second fuller sense

01:30:32.980 | the conscious ideal of human perfection by defining more sharply the good life

01:30:38.660 | Worthy of a free man a man unfettered by servile obligations to other masters

01:30:44.380 | One who had been trained to use his mind by ordering his affections and by learning to ask the right questions of the world around him

01:30:51.660 | This man at once independent and civilized became the model of the humanist

01:30:56.540 | liberal education and its rational humanizing ideal

01:31:00.620 | Traces its roots back to the rocky soil of Attica and the straightways of Rome

01:31:05.940 | Man is an ideal forming animal wrote historian WG de Burgh

01:31:12.460 | stirred at every stage of his development by aspirations which transcend the level of his actual attainment and

01:31:19.020 | His civilization at any given epoch comprises also the world of his religious

01:31:24.380 | Moral and economic values his intellectual outlook upon life his personal beliefs as to his function and destiny

01:31:31.740 | His standards of moral goodness and social welfare

01:31:35.260 | It is in the light of such ideals determining our conception of human progress that we distinguish civilization

01:31:42.080 | from barbarism

01:31:44.300 | or at least we used to

01:31:46.660 | Life is unknown and unknowable without

01:31:49.900 | Intellectual depth and despite the changes wrought by centuries the education of the free mind has changed little in form

01:31:57.700 | It has kept its anchorage

01:31:59.940 | Objectives have shifted through time man is the measure of all things in one century God in the next

01:32:06.180 | Yet two elements of this cultural legacy one mental one material have been handed down to us in trust

01:32:14.380 | first the belief that the human mind is capable of apprehending the truth and

01:32:18.940 | Second though much was lost a solid corpus of ancient writing that has ensured the survival of classical learning

01:32:26.860 | It's all there for us to enjoy and pass on this heritage has kept before our eyes the habitual vision of greatness

01:32:34.780 | The beacon shines still though it flickers. We are not especially keen to preserve anything nowadays

01:32:43.300 | Culture is cheap. We're not completely degraded. We can only guess what the ancients might think of us

01:32:49.860 | With our rockets shooting off to moons planets and other pieces of celestial driftwood. We might assume their breathless wonder

01:32:57.700 | but

01:32:59.300 | Wh out and might have been on to something when he wrote that

01:33:02.100 | The bewildered comment of any fifth century Athenian upon our society from Dante's time till our own would surely be

01:33:09.940 | Yes, I can see all the works of a great civilization

01:33:13.860 | But why cannot I meet any civilized persons? I only encounter specialists

01:33:19.940 | artists who know nothing of science

01:33:22.620 | scientists who know nothing of art

01:33:25.220 | philosophers who have no interest in God

01:33:27.700 | Priests who are unconcerned with politics

01:33:30.540 | politicians who only know other politicians

01:33:34.620 | For anyone who knows the Western tradition and the bright lights emanating from it down the centuries

01:33:39.500 | Oudens guess would seem as plausible as any other

01:33:42.420 | Somehow we are no longer large enough or whole enough to embrace so much of the world

01:33:48.660 | Diogenes Laertius writing in the third century AD

01:33:53.060 | celebrated the value of a civilization that exalts the feat of individual cultivation as the highest earthly attainment in

01:34:01.660 | his oft repeated tale of the Magaran philosopher Stilpo

01:34:06.020 | Demetrius

01:34:08.140 | Polyorsites wished to restore Stilpo's fortune after the pillage of Magara and he asked Stilpo to count up what he had lost

01:34:15.420 | Stilpo replied that he lacked nothing that had belonged to him before

01:34:19.980 | For he retained his culture his paideia and he was still clothed with learning and eloquence

01:34:28.020 | To see him through life

01:34:30.700 | Quiet confidence such as that our anxious age seeks in vain. It's an echo from a stronger

01:34:38.220 | clearer bracing age and

01:34:41.180 | it haunts us our

01:34:43.700 | curious view that changing times must always alter or

01:34:47.660 | Overtake hard-won wisdom, of course would have amused a man like Stilpo who saw man's short

01:34:55.260 | sojourn on earth primarily as a time for cultivation

01:34:59.500 | We're here to tend our gardens. He would have looked quizzically upon any epoch

01:35:04.020 | Endlessly reinventing the wheel searching for happiness where better minds and spirits have already discovered. It cannot be found

01:35:11.220 | Stilpo might see in ours an accomplished world

01:35:15.620 | But not a wise one. He might see a comfortable people a smart and ingenious people

01:35:23.100 | but perhaps not a

01:35:26.060 | free people

01:35:29.660 | That reading was taken from

01:35:31.660 | Chapter one of the book called climbing Parnassus a new apology for Greek and Latin by author Tracy Lee Simmons

01:35:39.500 | The book was published in the year 2002 by ISI books

01:35:44.340 | The book itself is dedicated to making the argument as to why students should acquire

01:35:50.740 | The classical languages of Greek and Latin that's less my intent

01:35:55.540 | I'm not seeking to persuade you of that particular position rather to expose you to

01:36:01.340 | Some writers ideas on what is a good education

01:36:07.340 | One of my long-standing

01:36:11.140 | Frustrations with the term is that we don't ever

01:36:14.700 | Acknowledge that it needs to be defined very carefully. It needs to be discussed

01:36:19.500 | People will say oh my child is in a good school

01:36:23.940 | Great what is a good school? What does that mean?

01:36:26.740 | Right, or I want my children to get a good education

01:36:30.100 | agreed, but what is a good education and so by exposing you to some of the history of classical education and

01:36:38.900 | liberal arts education

01:36:40.900 | I'm hoping to inspire in you your own thinking and

01:36:46.300 | Contemplation upon the actual definition of a good education

01:36:50.540 | So that in the days to come as you're making decisions for your own children, you would know how to guide them

01:36:55.380 | Jack Cassie's la temporada de fiesta cien JCPenney tenemos de todo para ti tu familia

01:37:02.060 | Ya se que este sen modo fiesta fuera de casa o en casa

01:37:05.980 | tenemos el estilo que buscas como vestidos para salir de noche o lindos looks para la foto con santa y no olvides las pijamas

01:37:13.820 | coordinadas para lucir en familia tus marcas favoritas te esperan durante toda la temporada

01:37:18.460 | looks increibles a precios impresionantes

01:37:20.980 | JCPenney

01:37:23.340 | celebraciones que valen la pena

01:37:25.340 | (upbeat music)

2022-06-22_What_is_a_Liberal_Education