Christian Higher Education & The University
Summary:
Starting definition:
University, noun Dictionary.com. WordNet 2.1. Princeton University: institution of higher learning created to educate for
life
The author reviews the original intention of higher education as described by classical educators. Cardinal John Henry Newman held that a good liberal education culminates in the acquisition of religious truth. John Stuart Mill believed that historical knowledge is an essential component of a liberal education, and that it must be acquired in order to progress to higher stages of understanding and moral discernment. Classical educators believed that all higher education had a moral component.
By Peter Berkowitz, Front Page Magazine, January 10, 2007
An auto repair-shop in which mechanics and owners could not distinguish a wreck from a finely tuned car would soon go out of business. A hospital where doctors, nurses, and administrators were unable to recognize a healthy human being would present a grave menace to the public health. A ship whose captain and crew lacked navigation skills and were ignorant of their destination would spell doom for the cargo and passengers entrusted to their care.
Yet at universities and colleges throughout the land, parents and students pay large sums of money for - and federal and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support - liberal education, despite administrators and faculty lacking a coherent idea about what constitutes an educated human being. To be sure, American higher education, or rather a part of it, is today the envy of the world, producing and maintaining research scientists of the highest caliber. But liberal education is another matter. Indeed, many professors in the humanities and social sciences proudly promulgate in their scholarship and courses doctrines that mock the very idea of a standard or measure defining an educated person and so legitimate the compassless curriculum over which they preside. In these circumstances, why should we not conclude that universities are betraying their mission?
To be sure, universities and colleges put out plenty of glossy pamphlets containing high-minded statements touting the benefits of higher education. Aimed at prospective students, parents, and wealthy alumni, these publications celebrate a commitment to fostering diversity, developing an ethic of community service, and enhancing appreciation of cultures around the world. University publications also proclaim that graduates will have gained skills for success in an increasingly complex and globalized marketplace. Seldom, however, do institutions of higher education boast about how the curriculum cultivates the mind and refines judgment. This is not because universities are shy about the hard work they have put into curriculum design or because they have made a calculated decision to lure students and alumni dollars by focusing on the sexier side of the benefits conferred by higher education. It's because university curricula explicitly and effectively aimed at producing an educated person rarely exist. 1
Universities do provide a sort of structure for undergraduate education. Indeed, it can take years for advisors to master the intricacies of general curriculum requirements on the one hand and specific criteria established by individual departments and proliferating special majors and concentrations on the other. The Byzantine welter of required courses, bypass options, and substitutions that students confront may seem like an arbitrary and ramshackle construction. In large measure it is. At the same time, our compassless curriculum gives expression to a dominant intellectual opinion. And it reflects the gulf between the requirements of liberal education and the express interests of parents, donors, professors, and students.
The dominant opinion proclaims that no shared set of ideas, no common body of knowledge, and no baseline set of values or virtues marking an educated human being exist. To be sure, the overwhelming majority of all American colleges adopt a general distribution requirement. 2 Usually this means that students must take a course or two of their choosing in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, with perhaps a dollop of fine arts thrown in for good measure. And all students must choose a major. Although departments of mathematics, engineering, and the natural sciences maintain a sense of sequence and rigor, students in the social sciences and humanities typically are required to take a smattering of courses in their major, which usually involves a choice of introductory classes and a potpourri of more specialized classes, topped off perhaps with a thesis on a topic of the student's choice. But this veneer of structure provides students only the most superficial guidance. Or rather, it sends students a loud and clear message: The experts themselves have no knowledge worth passing along concerning the core knowledge and defining qualities of an educated person.
Take two political science majors at almost any elite college or university: It is quite possible for them to graduate without ever having read the same book or studied the same materials. One student may meet his general distribution requirements by taking classes in geophysics and physiological psychology, the sociology of the urban poor and introduction to economics, and the American novel and Japanese history while concentrating on international relations inside political science and writing a thesis on the dilemmas of transnational governance. Another political science major may fulfill the university distribution requirements by studying biology and astronomy, the sociology of the American West and abnormal psychology, the feminist novel and history of American film while concentrating in comparative politics and writing a thesis on the challenge of integrating autonomous peoples in Canada and Australia. Both students will have learned much of interest but little in common. Yet the little in common they learn may be of lasting significance. For both will absorb the implicit teaching of the university curriculum, which is that there is nothing in particular that an educated person need know.
The interests of the different groups involved in producing, purchasing, and consuming higher education also create obstacles to reforming the contemporary curriculum. University education is a peculiar good. Generally speaking, and particularly at elite universities, those who receive the service, the students, do not pay for it. Instead, the cost of undergraduate education is borne by parents, wealthy donors, and taxpayers through exemptions and government grants for faculty research support. At America's finest private universities, parents pay about $50,000 a year to put their children through college, or approximately $200,000 for a bachelor's degree. For that hefty price tag, parents understandably want a credential that enables their sons and daughters to land good jobs and gain entrance to valuable social networks. But what of the character and quality of their children's education? No less an observer of the American scene than Tom Wolfe recalls an unplanned opening remark he made in 1988 to a group of graduating Harvard seniors:
You know, I come from a town, New York City, where families are rated according to whether or not their children get into Harvard. But I have never met a single parent - not one - who has ever shown the slightest curiosity about what happens to them once they get here or what they may have become by the time they graduate. 3
Distant and dispersed, parents can monitor their children's academic performance, which is measurable by grades, but even if they were concerned they would be in a weak position to evaluate, much less influence, course content and curriculum structure. Besides, professors and administrators are the experts.
At most elite universities, student tuition rarely covers more than two-thirds of the full cost of education. Much of the other third comes from alumni through new gifts and investment earning on endowment or old gifts. Alumni establish chairs, fund buildings, and sponsor university-wide programs and initiatives. As with parents, alumni interests do not necessarily coincide with the requirements of a liberal education. Having made their mark in the world, alumni look at the university suffused with warm remembrances of their carefree college days. They may donate out of a commitment to basic research and liberal education. They may also donate for a variety of other reasons: to give back to the institution that helped launch their adult lives, to reconnect with their youth, and, not always least, to provide a dramatic demonstration to fellow alumni of their worldly success. Universities aggressively encourage alumni to give large sums of money but frown upon their playing a role in overseeing how the money is spent - for professors and administrators are the experts.
The capacity of alumni who seek to ensure that their donations are spent in accordance with their intentions, particularly if their intention is to promote liberal education, is extremely limited. For example, in 1995 Yale University was forced to return a 1991 gift of $20,000,000. Donor Lee Bass wanted to support the creation of a program for undergraduate study in Western civilization. One would have thought that such an undertaking would fit easily with Yale's mission. But during the four years that Yale held the Bass money, the faculty could not come to agreement about the benefits of such a program or how to implement it. Many members of the faculty regarded a program on Western civilization to be so narrowly conceived or political in character as to infringe on their right and responsibility to make curriculum decisions on academic grounds. In addition, faculty complained loudly to the administration about a request made by the donor, late in the controversy, to have a voice in the approval of university decisions about how to fill professorships created by his gift. For they are the experts.
This brings us to the impediment posed by professors to the reform of the contemporary curriculum. In fact, whereas parents' and donors' interests may fail to coincide with the requirements of a liberal education, professors' interests increasingly diverge from those requirements. Because advancement in today's academy is closely tied to scholarly achievement and publication record, it is in professors' interests to teach narrowly focused and highly specialized courses. Here, professors assign scholarship that underpins their own approach, examine cutting-edge contributions to the field, and perhaps review work that is critical of their way of doing things. Such courses can be a valuable ingredient in an undergraduate education. But generally and for the most part these courses, which often represent a substantial portion of departmental offerings, serve to advance professors' research programs and to train professional scholars, though few undergraduates will go on to be professors.
Finally, one must consider students' interests. On the one hand, often just having left their parents' home but not yet having become responsible for supporting themselves, students are as fresh and open to learning as they will ever be. On the other hand, like their parents, they are, with reason, credential conscious, keenly interested in launching their careers and gaining access by means of their college degree to the right people and the right networks. And they present a classic case in which expressed preferences or interests and actual interests are likely to differ. This is because the capacity to make an informed decision about the structure and value of a liberal education itself depends on a liberal education, or on a knowledge of the subjects - history, literature, philosophy, natural science, ethics and politics broadly understood, and religion - that have for at least 150 years been thought to stand at its center. Many are the students at fine American colleges and universities who have remarked wistfully in the days before graduation that only now, as they prepare to depart, do they feel capable of choosing wisely and cobbling together for themselves out of the hodgepodge of university offerings a coherent slate of classes. But even those days may be passing, as universities increasingly fail to give students more than a dim intimation that a liberal education has a distinctive shape and a coherent and cumulative content. 4
Of course, if parents, alumni, professors, and students are happy, why worry? So what if universities, for lack of a standard, are unable to say whether their graduates are well-educated? A college degree remains a hot commodity, a ticket of entry to valuable social networks, a signal to employers that graduates have achieved a certain proficiency in manipulating concepts, performing computations, and getting along with peers. If universities continue to offer parents a good return on investment, donors a pleasant place to practice philanthropy, professors good research opportunities, and students a convivial four years in which to get ready for their careers, why not leave well enough alone? And supposing that some harm is inflicted on students through exposure to foolish ideas and sloppy intellectual habits, the fact is that undergraduate education lasts only four short years. How seriously in that brief time can university education injure students? In any case, once they leave campus, graduates will encounter the everyday world of work, spouses, mortgages, and children. Won't their new responsibilities, by focusing their minds and disciplining their habits, overcome any lingering bad effects of their educations?
This way of thinking about the university is common and dangerously complacent. We would not be content to learn that our auto repair shops cause no permanent damage to our cars, our hospitals are not systematically making patients sicker, and our captains and crews are not sinking their ships. So why should we be content to conclude that our universities do no lasting harm to the country's young men and women?
In fact, universities can cause lasting harm. In many cases, the mental habits that students form and the ideas they absorb in college consolidate the framework through which as adults they interpret experience, assign weight to competing claims and values, and judge matters to be true or false and fair or inequitable. A university that fails to teach students sound mental habits and to acquaint them with enduring ideas handicaps its graduates for both public and private life.
Moreover, properly conceived, a liberal education provides invaluable benefits for students and the nation. For most students, it offers the last chance, perhaps until retirement, to read widely and deeply, to acquire knowledge of the opinions and events that formed them and the nation in which they live, and to study other peoples and cultures. And the nation benefits as well, because a liberal democracy presupposes an informed citizenry capable of distinguishing the public interest from private interest, evaluating consequences, and discerning the claims of justice and the opportunities for - and limits to - realizing it in politics. Indeed, a sprawling liberal democracy whose citizens practice different religions and no religion at all, in which individuals have family heritages that can be traced to every continent, and in which the nation's foreign affairs are increasingly bound up with local politics in countries around the world is particularly dependent on citizens' acquiring a liberal education.
In no small measure, the value of a liberal education comes from a distinctive quality of mind and character that it encourages: the ability to explore moral and political questions from a variety of angles. This involves putting oneself in another's shoes, distinguishing the essential from the contingent, imagining the contingent as other than it is, and reasoning rigorously without losing sight either of what is or what ought to be.
John Stuart Mill was convinced that cultivation of the virtue that in On Liberty he called "many-sidedness" 5is at the heart of a liberal education. Mill defends this conviction most fully and forcefully in a little known but remarkable work, originally entitled "Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews on February 1st 1867 6. Mill was 60, and the delivery of a formal address on liberal education was an obligation that came with his election by students to the post of honorary Lord Rector of the University, which he held from 1865 to 1868 (during which time he also served as an independent member of Parliament). Although he never taught at or even attended a university, Mill was among the best-educated men then alive, perhaps England's premier public intellectual, and certainly its leading student of modern liberty. At the same time, he was intimately familiar with commerce and foreign affairs, thanks to the more than 30 years he had spent working in the office of the British East India Company. So he was well suited to take up the challenge of exploring the contribution that a liberal education, well understood, can make to the many dimensions of life in a free society.
Yet it is not Mill's "Inaugural Address" but Cardinal John Henry Newman's 7 The Idea of a University that has come to be regarded as the classic statement on the aims and benefits of a liberal education. A collection of lectures delivered to Irish Catholic laymen in Dublin between 1852 and 1858, The Idea of a University certainly deserves the high regard in which it is held. Still, its preeminence is surprising. Newman's contention that liberal education culminates in the acquisition of religious truth rests on assumptions about knowledge and faith very different from those on which most university education in America today rests. This does not undermine the value of Newman's analysis, least of all from the perspective of a liberal education. But it does suggest that Mill's short essay, which both rests on assumptions about knowledge and faith shared by most university education today and challenges the contemporary university curriculum, has a distinctive contribution to make.
Like Newman's mid-nineteenth-century discourses, Mill's essay from the same period requires some translation, some separating of educational principle from particular conclusions about the appropriate content of the university curriculum. For example, Mill suggests that "the leading facts of ancient and modern history" should not be taught at universities because if students have not mastered the facts by the time they get to college, then it's too late for them to learn. For an age such as our own, in which universities do not expect, much less require, students to acquire even a rudimentary knowledge of history, Mill's judgment will sound absurdly harsh. Yet his underlying point, that historical knowledge is an essential component of a liberal education and that it must be acquired in order to progress to later and higher stages of understanding, does not depend on contingent features of a Victorian English sensibility. Rather, it reflects a compelling opinion about the enduring structure and abiding imperatives of a liberal education.
In the opening lines of his address, Mill calls attention to the vastness of his topic and the need to combine learning and freshness of mind in exploring it. Indeed, among the chief benefits that flow from studying Mill's address on liberal education is the lesson he provides throughout in combining goods often thought to be mutually exclusive. By stressing at the outset the wisdom of custom along with the need for creativity and insisting on the riches of what has been said about education in past ages and also the challenge of carrying the conversation forward into the future, Mill highlights the dependence of liberal education on both conserving and progressing. As the serious study of education encourages a liberal mind, so too does it require one:
For, of all many-sided subjects, it is the one which has the greatest number of sides. Not only does it include whatever we do for ourselves, and whatever is done for us by others, for the express purpose of bringing us somewhat nearer to the perfection of our nature; it does more: in its largest acceptation, it comprehends even the indirect effects produced on character and on the human faculties, by things of which the direct purposes are quite different; by laws, by forms of government, by the industrial arts, by modes of social life; nay even by physical facts not dependent on human will; by climate, soil, and local position. Whatever helps to shape the human being; to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not, is part of his education. 6
While it does not nearly cover the whole of education, the university's mission, which is to provide a liberal education, is essential to preparing students to understand the other constitutive elements of education, or the variety of material, moral, and political forces that form the mind, shape character, and direct judgment.
Liberal education concerns "the culture which each generation purposely gives to those who are to be its successors, in order to qualify them for at least keeping up, and if possible for raising, the level of improvement which has been attained." Professional education is something different. The professions belong under the superintendence of the university, but they are not part of, and must not be allowed to displace, "education properly so-called," or that cultivation of the mind and transmission of knowledge on which further progress depends. Mill does not mean to denigrate the professions or to deny that there is a vital moral dimension to the practice of law, medicine, and business. The question is the most effective manner in which higher education can contribute to making professionals moral: "Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians." In other words, the cultivation that they bring to professional schools from their liberal education goes a long way to determining whether professionals practice their trade sensibly and decently.
Nor should a university, Mill argues, be concerned with elementary instruction. Students ought to acquire the basics before arriving so that universities can concentrate on providing students with a "comprehensive and connected view" of the fields of human knowledge, "the crown and consummation of a liberal education." Yet he acknowledges that universities must adjust to realities. When, as in mid-nineteenth-century Scotland, high schools fail to perform their part, universities have no choice but to play a remedial role. At the same time, universities must sometimes break with tradition, as those in Scotland led the way in doing by incorporating in their curricula the study of natural science and the systematic study of morality. In deciding what to include in the curriculum and how to establish priorities, universities should focus on their role in "human cultivation at large," or the making of an educated person. It is to this task that Mill devotes the remainder of his address.
The content of the higher education curriculum was hotly debated in Mill's time, and the liberal education he championed represented a serious correction of traditional university education. The controversy was over whether general education should be classical and literary or scientific. This was a continuation of the early modern quarrel over whether the university should focus on the ancients or the moderns, immortalized in Jonathan Swift's A Full and True Account of the Battle Fought Last Friday, between the Ancient and the Modern Books in St. James's Library(1704). In Mill's view, the quarrel had a clear and compelling solution: Teach both.
But wasn't study of classical languages a tedious and consuming undertaking? Mill was acutely aware of the sterile manner in which universities taught Greek and Latin, concentrating on rote memorization, mechanical translation, and mindless verse composition. At the same time, having learned both languages before he was ten, he insisted that the teaching of the classics at the university level could be made considerably more efficient, creating room to study the natural sciences, and considerably more educational by concentrating on the content of classical writings. Of course, dividing the curriculum between literary studies and science meant that students would be unable to specialize in either. But from Mill's point of view, this was a salutary consequence. He regarded specialization, the learning of more and more about a single subject, as a potential enemy of liberal education. If practiced prematurely, it dwarfs individual minds and threatens human progress. In contrast, liberal education aims to teach students a subject's "leading truths" and "great features." Such knowledge does not make students masters of a field or discipline, but it does enable them to recognize the masters and form intelligent judgments about expert opinion. It also fits them for study of "government and civil society," which Mill considers "the most complicated of all subjects accessible to the human mind."
Mill would confine literary study at the university to classical languages and literatures. This is not because he doubted that knowledge of foreign languages and literatures in general was valuable. Indeed, he observed a half-century before Wittgenstein that such knowledge is intrinsically valuable because it prevents the confusion of words with objects and facts and enables us to understand other peoples by understanding the terms through which they interpret the world. But a university must establish priorities. Although students should know modern languages, they learn them best, Mill insists, out of school through a few months living abroad among native speakers. Accordingly, liberal education should concentrate on the languages and literature of the ancients, of the Greeks and Romans, because of both their farness and their nearness. On the one hand, the circumstances and sensibility of classical authors differ the most profoundly from ours (without being, Mill stipulates, like those of Asia, "so totally dissimilar, that the labor of a life is required to enable us to understand them"). On the other hand, their writings are rich in the wisdom of the common life of humanity. The classics both challenge our moral and political assumptions and provide models of human excellence. Particularly the writings of Plato and Aristotle represent "the perfection of good sense." Moreover, the complex logical structure of the grammar of classic languages disciplines the mind. And classical authors do not embroider. In their writings, "every word is what it should be and where it should be." Yet to rely entirely on the classics, he is keen to point out, is to miss an important dimension of humanity.They lack that appreciation, which characterizes modern poetry, of the mind as "brooding and self-conscious." Nevertheless, Mill concludes that like the learning of modern foreign languages, so too the study of modern literature can and should be undertaken outside the university.
As with classical languages and literatures, Mill gives the natural
sciences a place of honor in a liberal education, both because of
their content and because of the intellectual discipline they
foster. While it is not to be expected that many will achieve
mastery of the laws to which the physical world is subject,
students should acquire the basics that will enable them to
distinguish those who are competent to provide the public advice
on scientific and technological matters. In addition, science
provides "a training and disciplining process, to fit the
intellect for the proper work of a human being." This is because
"the processes by which truth is attained, reasoning and
observation, have been carried to their greatest known perfection
in the physical sciences." Mill would not scant the study either
of empirical science or mathematics and logic. He would also
include in the curriculum an introduction to what he regarded as
a young and imperfect science, physiology, because of its
usefulness in making decisions about public sanitary measures and
personal hygiene and because its subject, the physical nature of
man, sheds more light on social and political life than any of
the other physical sciences. He would also include psychology,
which overlaps with physiology and explores the laws of human
nature. The great philosophical controversies to which psychology
gives rise, Mill maintains, in no way disqualify it as a subject
fit for study at the university. To the contrary: "it is a part
of liberal education to know that such controversies exist, and,
in a general way, what has been said on both sides of them."
The literary and scientific studies that form the foundation of a
liberal education should culminate in "that which it is the chief
of all the ends of intellectual education to qualify us for - the
exercise of thought on the great interests of mankind as moral
and social beings - ethics and politics, in the largest sense."
These great subjects have "a direct bearing on the duties of
citizenship." Students should begin with the close and familiar,
the major civil and political institutions of their own country,
and then move outward in their studies to the civil and political
institutions of other countries. Then they should learn about the
laws of social life, particularly political economy, which deals
with "the sources and conditions of wealth and material
prosperity for aggregate bodies of human beings"; jurisprudence,
or the philosophical, moral, and institutional foundations of
law; and the law of nations, which "is not properly law, but a
part of ethics: a set of moral rules, accepted as authoritative
by civilized states." The principal readings on ethics and
politics should be drawn from both contemporary authorities and
what today we would call the great books, but only "on condition
that these great thinkers are not read passively, as masters to
be followed, but actively, as supplying materials and incentives
to thought." Here too, Mill stresses, liberal education can only
provide an introduction. But the well-crafted introduction to
ethics and politics in the largest sense confers a benefit "of
the highest value by awakening an interest in the subjects, by
conquering the first difficulties, and inuring the mind to the
kind of exertion which the studies require, by implanting a
desire to make further progress, and directing the student to the
best tracks and the best helps."
The "inevitable limitations of what schools and universities can do" comes into focus in considering the place of morality and religion in the university curriculum. It is not the place of schools in general and universities in particular, Mill holds, to provide the principal instruction in these matters:
It is the home, the family, which gives us the moral or religious education we really receive: and this is completed, and modified, sometimes for the better, often for the worse, by society, and the opinions and feelings with which we are there surrounded. The moral or religious influence which a university can exercise, consists less in any express teaching, than in the pervading tone of the place. 6
The tone is set by the manner and spirit in which professors discharge their duty to seek truth and transmit knowledge:
Whatever [the university] teaches, it should teach as penetrated by a sense of duty; it should present all knowledge as chiefly a means to worthiness of life, given for the double purpose of making each of us practically useful to his fellow-creatures, and of elevating the character of the species itself; exalting and dignifying our nature. 6
Professors teach by example, but the most important example they set involves the integrity they bring to learning and thinking. In teaching the history of morals and religion, professors must resist the powerful temptation to proselytize for their favorite moral and religious - or immoral and irreligious - doctrines:
There should be, and there is in most universities, professorial instruction in moral philosophy; but I could wish that this instruction were of a somewhat different type from what is ordinarily met with. I could wish that it were more expository, less polemical, and above all less dogmatic. The learner should be made acquainted with the principal systems of moral philosophy which have existed and been practically operative among mankind, and should hear what there is to be said for each: the Aristotelian, the Epicurean, the Stoic, the Judaic, the Christian in the various modes of its interpretation, which differ almost as much from one another as the teachings of those earlier schools. He should be made familiar with the different standards of right and wrong which have been taken as the basis of ethics: general utility, natural justice, natural rights, a moral sense, principles of practical reason, and the rest. Among all these, it is not so much the teacher's business to take a side, and fight stoutly for some one against the rest, as it is to direct them all towards the establishment and preservation of the rules of conduct most advantageous to mankind. 6
But then liberal education requires professors both to maintain an open and flexible mind and to favor the great liberal and Enlightenment aspiration to articulate universal principles of right conduct. Does it not thereby take the side of the moderns against the ancients, of reason against faith, of liberalism and Enlightenment against romantic and conservative critics? And is this not a contradiction or an invitation to hypocrisy?
In fact, tensions inherent in liberal education do present a stiff challenge for educators. A liberal education reflects and reinforces a modern, liberal, and enlightened sensibility, and it does serve democracy based on equality in freedom. Faculty, Mill suggests, should be self-aware and candid about these presuppositions of the education they provide. At the same time, liberal education as he conceives it is particularly well-equipped to resist the descent into didactic or dogmatic education provided that it heeds its own imperatives to appreciate what modernity owes tradition, the knowledge of diversity and common humanity acquired through study of the classics, and the dependence of freedom on studying the history of rival and incompatible teachings on ethics, politics, and religion.
Although professors must never compel their students to embrace one or another side in the great historical debates about how human beings should organize their private and public lives, they cannot help but make judgments about truth and falsity in teaching the history of moral and religious ideas:
There is not one of these systems which has not its good side; not one from which there is not something to be learnt by the votaries of the others; not one which is not suggested by a keen, though it may not always be a clear, perception of some important truths, which are the prop of the system, and the neglect or undervaluing of which in other systems is their characteristic infirmity. A system which may be as a whole erroneous, is still valuable, until it has forced upon mankind a sufficient attention to the portion of truth which suggested it. The ethical teacher does his part best, when he points out how each system may be strengthened even on its own basis, by taking into more complete account the truths which other systems have realized more fully and made more prominent. I do not mean that he should encourage an essentially skeptical eclecticism. 6
But the encouraging of a "skeptical eclecticism" is more of a danger inherent in liberal education than Mill allows. Passing from the examination of one system of morals and religion embraced by its proponents as the whole truth to another and then on to another and another can be disorienting. Professors must be able to place ideas in context without reducing them to their context, which requires knowledge of both and a sense of proportion. Indifference, hastiness, or haughtiness - to name a few of the vices to which professors may be prone - at the head of a class on the history of morality and religion risks engendering in students a moral relativism that treats all ideas as equally valid or a nihilism that holds all claims about justice and the human good to be equally false. Thus does the abuse of liberal education produce the opposite of a liberal spirit.
Liberal education requires professors to make evaluative judgments in the classroom because they are essential to the teaching of the great systems of ideas about how human beings should organize their private and public lives. However, these judgments must be put in the service of forming students capable of fashioning their own judgments:
While placing every system in the best aspect it admits of, and endeavoring to draw from all of them the most salutary consequences compatible with their nature, I would by no means debar him from enforcing by his best arguments his own preference for some one of the number. They cannot be all true: though those which are false as theories may contain particular truths, indispensable to the completeness of the true theory. But on this subject, even more than on any of those I have previously mentioned, it is not the teacher's business to impose his own judgment, but to inform and discipline that of his pupil. 6
While a liberal education unavoidably reflects the needs and ethos of a liberal society, the needs and ethos of liberal society call for an education that is essentially Socratic in character. But a Socratic education, in its classical form, requires a Socrates for a teacher and students of surpassing gifts. The liberal education that deserves public support in a liberal democracy represents a democratization of Socratic education insofar as it is made widely available. But it also preserves an aristocratic root, remaining dependent to a high degree on virtue, or the qualities of mind and character that teachers and students bring to it.
Liberal education is the civic education, or education for citizenship, proper to liberal democracy because it aims to form a human being fit for freedom:
The proper business of a University is . . . not to tell us from authority what we ought to believe, and make us accept the belief as a duty, but to give us information and training, and help us to form our own belief in a manner worthy of intelligent beings, who seek for truth at all hazards, and demand to know all the difficulties, in order that they may be better qualified to find, or recognize, the most satisfactory mode of resolving them. 6
By remaining aloof from narrow partisan politics, liberal education makes a critical political contribution, doing its large but limited part to form citizens capable of both conserving and improving a free society.
But liberal education aims at more than civic education, in part because in a free society citizenship is not the only, or in many cases the highest, sphere in which individuals reasonably hope to flourish. Liberal education also prepares students for, though it does not provide, what Mill calls aesthetic education, or "the culture which comes through poetry and art, and may be described as the education of the feelings, and the cultivation of the beautiful." Indeed, at the end of his address, Mill exhorts the students of St. Andrews to appreciate the deepest and most enduring benefits of a liberal education:
Now is your opportunity for gaining a degree of insight into subjects larger and far more ennobling than the minutiae of a business or a profession, and for acquiring a facility of using your minds on all that concerns the higher interests of man, which you will carry with you into the occupations of active life, and which will prevent even the short intervals of time which that may leave you, from being altogether lost for noble purposes. Having once conquered the first difficulties, the only ones of which the irksomeness surpasses the interest; having turned the point beyond which what was once a task becomes a pleasure; in even the busiest after-life, the higher powers of your mind will make progress imperceptibly, by the spontaneous exercise of your thoughts and by the lessons you will know how to learn from daily experience. So, at least, it will be if in your early studies you have fixed your eyes upon the ultimate end from which those studies take their chief value - that of making you more effective combatants in the great fight which never ceases to rage between Good and Evil, and more equal to coping with the ever new problems which the changing course of human nature and human society present to be resolved.6
The highest justification of liberal education is that by forming free and well-furnished minds it prepares students to fashion for themselves a good life.