Introducing the “Generations” Blog

Welcome to the debut of “Generations,” reflections on teaching and learning in the “great tradition” of liberal education.

Classicist Gilbert Highet once wrote that the story of liberal education in the West is 3,000 years long and 10,000 miles wide. At its best, liberal learning is not narrow or provincial. While it indeed embraces many generations and spans a large geography, it also honors the particulars of family, neighbors, and places, tangled up in the messy, risky, and wonderful experience of teachers and students as they confront the perennial challenges of heart and mind.

This blog accompanies my “Great Beginnings” online courses for students, teachers, and parents. We have just begun reading through my anthology, The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to be an Educated Human Being (ISI Books, 2007). But I hope anyone interested in the history of liberal education will find these musings instructive and encouraging. One of the great needs over the summer months for teachers is to spend time remembering why they love to teach, and for students to remember why they love to learn.

This past Monday and Tuesday, I talked with the online participants about the first nine chapters of the Book of Proverbs. Before coming in my next post to what we learned together, I’d like to map out some of the themes that have held the tradition together over the centuries. I begin and proceed on the conviction that this tradition is not an imaginary projection onto the past of a construct useful merely to justify a pet way we want to teach in the present. The tradition that emerges from the pages of these authors never achieved perfect agreement. It would not have been nor continue to be a living tradition if it had. It would be a formula masquerading as wisdom. Nevertheless, without uniformity, the tradition sustained over centuries did achieve a remarkable coherence. Shared assumptions, goals, fears, and ends helped bind its defenders into a shared pursuit: the truly educated human being. These authors participated in a real conversation, each generation reaching back into the past and pulling the wisdom found there into the present and handing it on to the future as a precious legacy. Think of the process as a crochet hook that takes hold of the strand of yarn and brings it forward, creating a chain as it goes along.

What unifies the tradition?

All of these threads will re-emerge in my discussions over the weeks and months ahead, but a brief introduction will help us in that task.

First, the tradition understands that education requires the student to bring to the experience certain character traits. We tend to think of character as a desired outcome of education, and it is. The tradition never separates the head from the heart. But it’s easy to miss the strong tendency of the tradition—obvious in hindsight—to remind the student (and the teacher) that only certain kinds of people get to know certain kinds of things. There are indispensable prerequisites to education. I’ve never hit on quite the right phrase to capture these prerequisites as a whole. Maybe they are best described as dispositions of heart and mind.

The student must bring to education an attitude of humility, gratitude, and love of wisdom. They must have the humility to know that they do not know, to know that they are not finished products at the beginning. They must have gratitude to recognize that self-sacrificial teachers, parents, and sponsors have made this education possible. They have a debt, and they must be led to recognize and affirm it, not in some heavy-handed way but shown it by example. The whole classroom must vibrate with thankfulness. Joined to humility and gratitude must come trust (between student and teacher, student and student—a trust that must be earned and guarded) along with courage, discernment, delight, and attentiveness.

Of course, all of these traits must be cultivated over time. We never finish the job.  They are required even more of the teacher than of the student.

Prepared with these prerequisites, the tradition of liberal learning pursues wisdom, virtue, and eloquence. Don’t wait for an accrediting agency to require these as “measurable outcomes.” They can’t be quantified. They can’t be turned into data. Think of these three goals as the legs of a stool. All three must be present. All three depend on each other. If one fails, all fail. Eloquence, so important to the oratorical tradition in liberal education as we will see, ought to be understood broadly to mean clarity of expression, whether in speech or the written word. But we ought not to let an emphasis on the written word lead us to neglect spoken rhetorical eloquence.

Sitting firmly on this three-legged stool, the tradition fears an education (so-called) dominated by the inordinate (disordered) love of power, wealth, and fame. These things are at best distractions, at worst corruptions. Dangerous power seeks domination over other human beings. It seeks to manipulate others. Wealth proper used provides many of the means necessary to education, especially adequate sustenance to make possible the historically rare opportunity of diverting the labor of young people away from the family’s daily survival to the privilege of liberal learning. Fame feeds the student’s desire for celebrity at the expense of true reputation. It lures students to imagine that an education ought to bring them personal glory.

Finally, the tradition, especially in its Jewish and Christian instantiations, directs education ultimately toward the love of God and love of neighbor. That goal could not be more evident in Solomon’s advice to his son. And to that we turn next.

Join me on this journey into the past, present, and future.