What Is Liberal Education? By Leo Strauss (1959)
What Is Liberal
Education?
By Leo Strauss; Distinguished Service Professor
Department of Political Science; The University of Chicago
An Address
Delivered at the Tenth Annual Graduation Exercises of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults June 6, 1959
You have
acquired a liberal education. I congratulate you on your achievement. If I were
entitled to do so, I would praise you for your achievement. But I would be
untrue to the obligation which I have undertaken if I did not supplement my
congratulations with a warning. The liberal education which you have acquired
will avert the danger that the warning will be understood as a counsel of
despair.
Liberal education is education in culture or toward culture. The finished
product of a liberal education is a cultured human being. "Culture" (cultura)
means primarily agriculture: the cultivation of the soil and its products,
taking care of the soil, improving the soil in accordance with its nature.
"Culture" means derivatively and today chiefly the cultivation of the
mind, the taking care and improving of the native faculties of the mind in
accordance with the nature of the mind. Just as the soil needs cultivators of
the soil, the mind needs teachers. But teachers are not as easy to come by as
farmers. The teachers themselves are pupils and must be pupils. But there
cannot be an infinite regress: ultimately there must be teachers who are not in
turn pupils. Those teachers who are not in turn pupils are the great minds or, in
order to avoid any ambiguity in a matter of such importance, the greatest
minds. Such men are extremely rare. We are not likely to meet any of them in
any classroom. We are not likely to meet any of them anywhere. It is a piece of
good luck if there is a single one alive in one's time. For all practical
purposes, pupils, of whatever degree of proficiency, have access to the
teachers who are not in turn pupils, to the greatest minds, only through the
great books. Liberal education will then consist in studying with the proper
care the great books which the greatest minds have left behind -- a study in
which the more experienced pupils assist the less experienced pupils, including
the beginners.
This is not an easy task, as would appear if we were to consider the formula
which I have just mentioned. That formula requires a long commentary. Many
lives have been spent and may still be spent in writing such commentaries. For
instance, what is meant by the remark that the great books should be studied "with
the proper care"? At present I mention only one difficulty which is
obvious to everyone among you: the greatest minds do not all tell us the same
things regarding the most important themes; the community of the greatest minds
is rent by discord and even by various kinds of discord. Whatever further
consequences this may entail, it certainly entails the consequence that liberal
education cannot be simply indoctrination. I mention yet another difficulty.
"Liberal education is education in culture." In what culture? Our
answer is: culture in the sense of the Western tradition.
Yet Western culture
is only one among many cultures. By limiting ourselves to Western culture, do
we not condemn liberal education to a kind of parochialism, and is not
parochialism incompatible with the liberalism, the generosity, the
open-mindedness, of liberal education? Our notion of liberal education does not
seem to fit an age which is aware of the fact that there is not the culture of
the human mind but a variety of cultures. Obviously, "culture" if
susceptible of being used in the plural is not quite the same thing as
"culture" which is a singulare tantum, which can be used
only in the singular. "Culture" is now no longer, as people say, an
absolute but has become relative.
It is not easy to say what culture
susceptible of being used in the plural means. As a consequence of this
obscurity people have suggested, explicitly or implicitly, that
"culture" is any pattern of conduct common to any human group. Hence
we do not hesitate to speak of the culture of suburbia or of the cultures of
juvenile gangs both non-delinquent and delinquent. In other words, every human
being outside of lunatic asylums is a cultured human being, for he participates
in a culture. At the frontiers of research there arises the question as to
whether there are not cultures also of inmates of lunatic asylums. If we
contrast the present day usage of "culture" with the original
meaning, it is as if someone would say that the cultivation of a garden may consist
of the garden being littered with empty tin cans and whiskey bottles and used
papers of various descriptions thrown around the garden at random. Having
arrived at this point, we realize that we have lost our way somehow. Let us
then make a fresh start by raising the question: what can liberal education
mean here and now?
Liberal education is literate education of a certain kind: some sort of
education in letters or through letters. There is no need to make a case for
literacy; every voter knows that modern democracy stands or falls by literacy.
In order to understand this need we must reflect on modern democracy. What is
modern democracy?.. read more:
