Richard M. Weaver: Reclaiming Liberal Education

A timeless classic from the ISI vault

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) was one of the leading thinkers of the post–World War II conservative intellectual movement. Best known for his landmark book Ideas Have Consequences, Weaver was a scholar and rhetorician who taught English at the University of Chicago for almost thirty years. Here he offers insights on the meaning and purpose of liberal education—insights even more relevant today than when Weaver first offered them.

The greatest school that ever existed, it has been said, consisted of Socrates standing on a street corner with one or two interlocutors. If this remark strikes the aver­age American as merely a bit of fancy, that is because education here today suffers from an unprecedented amount of aimlessness and confusion. This is not to suggest that edu­cation in the United States, as compared with other countries, fails to command attention and support. In our laws we have endorsed it without qualification, and our provision for it, despite some claims to the contrary, has been on a lavish scale. But we behold a situation in which, as the educational plants become larger and more finely appointed, what goes on in them becomes more diluted, less serious, less effective in training mind and character; and correspondingly what comes out of them becomes less equipped for the rigorous tasks of carrying forward an advanced civilization. . . .

It is an educational breakdown which has occurred. Our failure in these matters traces back to a failure to think hard about the real province of education. Most Americans take a certain satisfaction in regarding them­selves as tough-minded when it comes to successful ways of doing things and positive achievements. But in deciding what is and is not pertinent to educating the individual, far too many of them have been softheads.

An alarming percentage of our citizens, it is to be feared, stop with the word “educa­tion” itself. It is for them a kind of con­juror’s word, which is expected to work miracles by the very utterance. If politics become selfish and shortsighted, the cure that comes to mind is “education.” If ju­venile delinquency is rampant, “education” is expected to provide the remedy. If the cultural level of popular entertainment de­clines, “education” is thought of hopefully as the means of arresting the downward trend. People expect to be saved by a word when they cannot even give content to the word.

[. . .]

The Great Tradition of Liberal Education

For some while now there has been a movement among certain people styling themselves educators to disparage and even do away with the very things that were once considered the reason for and the purpose of all education. There has been a bold and open attempt to deny that man has a nature which is fulfilled only when these higher faculties are brought into play, educated, and used to make life more human in the distinctive sense. Oddly enough, the move­ment has arrogated to itself the name “pro­gressive.” That seems a curious term to ap­ply to something that is retrogressive in ef­fect, since it would drag men back toward the pre-symbolic era. In preempting the ad­jective “progressive” for their brand of educa­tion, these innovators were trying a rhetorical maneuver. They were trying to give the im­pression that their theory of education is the only forward-looking one, and that the traditional ones were inherited from times and places that sat in darkness. Now it is quite true that “progressive” education rep­resents a departure from an ideal that has prevailed ever since the ancient Hebrews, the people of the Bible, thought about religion, and the Greeks envisioned the life of rea­son. This new education is not designed for man as an immortal soul, nor is it designed to help him measure up to any ideal stand­ard.

[. . .]

If there is one single condition necessary to the survival of truth and of values in our civilization, it is that the educational system be left independent enough to espouse these truths and values regardless of the political winds of doctrine of the moment. The fairest promises of a hands-off policy on the part of Federal edu­cational authorities would come to nothing once they were assured of their power and control. If education were allowed to become completely statist affair, there is no assur­ance that the content of even science courses would be kept free from the injection of po­litical ideas. . . . Education’s first loyalty is to the truth, and the educator must be left free to assert, as sometimes he needs to do, unpopu­lar or unappreciated points of view.

[. . .]

Liberal Education Liberates

A liberal education specifically prepares for the achievement of freedom. Of this there is interesting corroboration in the word itself. “Liberal” comes from a Latin term signifying “free,” and historically speaking, liberal education has been designed for the freemen of a state. Its content and method have been designed to develop the mind and the character in making choices between truth and error, between right and wrong. For liberal education introduces one to the principles of things, and it is only with reference to the principles of things, that such judgments are at all possible. The mere facts about a subject, which may come marching in monotonous array, do not speak for themselves. They speak only through an interpreter, as it were, and the interpreter has to be those general ideas derived from an understanding of the nature of language, of logic, and of mathematics, and of ethics and politics. The individual who is trained in these basic disciplines is able to confront any fact with the reality of his freedom to choose. This is the way in which liberal education liberates.

Finally, therefore, we are brought to see that education for individualism is education for goodness. How could it be otherwise? The liberally educated individual is the man who is at home in the world of ideas. And because he has achieved a true selfhood by realizing that he is a creature of free choice, he can select among ideas in the light of the relations he has found to obtain among them. Just as he is not the slave of another man, with his freedom of choice of work taken from him, so he is not the slave of .a political state, shielded by his “superiors” from contact with error and evil. The idea of virtue is assimilated and grows into char­acter through exercise, which means freedom of action in a world in which not all things are good. This truth has never been put more eloquently than by the poet Milton.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the rare, where that im­mortal garland is to be run for, not with­out dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world; we bring im­purity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.

Freedom and goodness finally merge in this conception; the unfreeman cannot be good because virtue is a state of character concerned with choice, and if this latter is taken away, there is simply no way for good­ness to assert itself. The moment we judge the smallest action in terms of right and wrong, we are stepping up to a plane where the good is felt as an imperative, even though it can be disobeyed. When education is seen as culminating in this, we can cease troubling about its failure to accomplish this or that incidental objective. An aware­ness of the order of the goods will take care of many things which are now felt as unresolvable difficulties, and we will have ad­vanced once more as far as Socrates when he made the young Athenians aware that the unexamined life is not worth living.

This essay is excerpted from Weaver’s “Education and the Individual,” which ISI originally published in 1959 and later republished in one of the earliest issues of the Intercollegiate Review. You can read the entire essay here.