A Proposal for the Fulfillment of Catholic
Liberal Education
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VI. WHAT IS LIBERAL EDUCATION
Earlier in this work reference was made to the almost universal
abandonment of genuine liberal education in the American colleges.
It was observed that liberal education, which in the past
was the soul of higher education, has been largely replaced
by professional and technological curricula. What remains
under the name of liberal education is a collection of courses
which purports to acquaint the students with various facets
of "culture" and "learning."
This version of liberal education is fittingly called humanism
because its concern is with the works of man. Man's scientific
and literary accomplishments are thought worthy of falling
within this collection of things to be studied because they
are brilliant human achievements. Humanism, which in the Renaissance
began to preempt all other contenders as the Weltanschauung
of higher education, seems chiefly to have come about as a
justification for education, when men came increasingly to
doubt the power of reason to know reality. The modern doctrine
of academic freedom, in the main accepted by contemporary
schools, officially makes this same skepticism the fundamental
tenet of education. Holding as it does that every dogma (save
itself) is of its nature open to free inquiry, academic freedom
implies that nothing which the human intelligence claims to
know is really known, but only dubitable. This is to say that
absolute skepticism is the abiding condition in education
and that reality everlastingly and in every way eludes man
in his efforts to know it. The fact that contemporary "liberal
arts" are so thoroughly historical and humanistic is
explained in that the value of man's intellectual achievements
is not grounded in the truth of his accumulated wisdom, but
in the fact that wisdom is a human creation, a glorious product
in which to rejoice. Liberal education then is not seen at
bottom as something good for man, but as something
worth studying and preserving for the simple reason that it
is from man.
Against the popular inclination to identify liberal education
as humanistic, is another view of longer standing that urges
itself upon us by its intrinsic merits. That man uses his
leisure to become acquainted with the ideas of the greatest
thinkers in his tradition and to steep himself in an understanding
of the intellectual culture that produced him may be a good
thing, but it appears false that such should be the sole or
even primary intellectual interest that occupies his leisure.
Though one might intend to confine his study to the learned
achievements of men, the very subject he studies will show
the vanity of such a limited end, for these learned achievements,
preserved in what are often called the Great Books, are themselves
efforts to bring the student or reader to some understanding
of reality itself.
One cannot read these cherished Great Books of western civilization
as simply of historical and humanistic interest without betraying
their authors, whose principal purposes, by and large, were
through their writings to speak not historically, but rather
scientifically and philosophically, proposing universal truths,
abstracting from the here and now. Education is recognized
almost universally by these great authors to be not about
ideas, as if they were important simply in themselves, but
about things. The great ideas that humanism regards as outstanding
instances of human creativeness were thought to be worthy
by the minds that produced them, not because they were creative
or novel, but because they were inventive of nature's truth.
Unless this basic orientation to truth be recognized and
retained, education and intelligence quickly become meaningless.
The older position on liberal education and the common sense
conception of knowledge both see the life of the intelligence
defined by reality as its object and justified by truth about
that reality as its end. Philosophy begins in wonder so that
it might end in wisdom. And unless man, even when he first
wonders about reality, apprehends it in some fundamental way,
albeit imperfectly and confusedly, his wonder is meaningless
and his hope to know the truth is vain. In fact man since
time immemorial has had a non-reflective confidence that he
does understand reality from his first experience with it,
and that he is already a knower of the world "out there"
as he begins reflectively to consider its meaning, to clarify
its nature in his understanding, and to pursue its secrets.
Reality is possessed through knowledge by all men in
a general and indistinct but eminently certain way.
That there is a pre-reflexive, common consciousness of reality
is patent in the fact that men are able to communicate with
each other at all. If all men did not in some way form like
ideas of the world "out there," there could be no
meeting of their minds through speech and conversation. At
least the basic ideas of reality must be in men's minds, and
indeed what is first meant by reality would be that
which these primary concepts represent. The assumption of
a common experience and of common conceptions about it belongs
not only to men living in the same era but also to all men
in all ages, as is shown by the very writing and reading of
the aforementioned Great Books. When men come to reflect upon
their knowledge of reality they are already possessors of
it, and their reflective and methodical elaborations of it
do not destroy this possession, unless these efforts in effect
deny the reality and the truth of these common and fundamental
concepts, and unless they fail to build their science upon
them. Such a denial would reject the primary experience that
makes all else meaningful. But the science that establishes
and builds itself faithfully upon common experience constitutes
that wisdom called the perennial philosophy, and it is this
which is the substance of our intellectual patrimony and which
alone makes true liberal education possible.
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