(calm music) - [Announcer] The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership presents "The Civic Discourse Project: Civics, Patriotism, and America's Prospects."

This week... - Education and liberal education in particular has the power and the tendency to transform people's lives.

- [Announcer] "The Civic Discourse Project" is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

And now, Roosevelt Montas, a senior lecturer at Columbia University's Center for American Studies and the director of the Freedom and Citizenship Program at Columbia University speaks on "How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation."

- I am here to talk about themes that I develop in my book, a book I published in late 2021 titled "Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation."

That book is part memoir, part discussion of some important books and figures in the history of Western thought, and part a critique of the state of liberal education in American colleges and universities.

But the real subject of that book is liberal education, and that is also my real subject tonight.

I hope that you will bear with me in my treatment of the subject of liberal education as I undertake some fairly personal reflections on how a liberal education has played out in my own life.

This is a subject of perennial importance, liberal education.

Ever since people have been conscious of their freedom, they have wondered about what kind of education is most appropriate for people who are free.

Freedom, it turns out, involves not just the absence of constraints, but the activity of self-governance.

And self-governance at either the individual or the collective level is a tricky thing.

It's not a straightforward task at all.

It in fact requires a very particular kind of cultivation, a kind of tending that is concerned less with the transmission of facts than with cultivating specific qualities in an individual.

We bundle together institutions we call colleges and universities, a kind of education that is concerned with the transmission of information and skills, and also a kind of education that is concerned with the cultivation of free individuals.

This bundling together of those two kinds of education has led to a kind of conceptual confusion about the premises and aims of liberal education.

The general debility of liberal education in our institutions of higher learning is in part the result of this conflation.

Even though, as I have said, liberal education is a topic of enduring and persistence importance, the current moment makes the issue especially urgent.

Our political culture is faltering and it is fracturing precisely along the lines that liberal education is meant to address.

At the same time, colleges and universities are walking away from liberal education, diluting it, shunting it to the sides.

The moral deformation in our politics is of a piece with the university's neglect of its mission to educate students with a view to what it means to live a life of freedom.

To speak about liberal education, one has to speak of freedom.

This is one of the reasons that I prefer the term liberal education to some of its cousins, like the humanities or classical education or even civic education.

The word liberal, despite its unfortunate association with one of the sides of our fierce political divide, keeps the issue of human freedom front and center.

You'll probably know that the idea of liberal education goes back to the ancient slave democracy of Athens.

There, liberal education was conceived as that education that was appropriate for free citizens.

That is, people who are not slaves.

People whose status as citizens of a democracy involve them in the tasks of collective self-governance.

Tasks like holding political office, formulating and deliberating on the adoption of laws, sitting on juries, serving in the common defense of the city, et cetera.

These tasks of self-governance involve a whole range of knowledge and skills, some of them quite concrete and specific, but some of them having to do with qualities of character, with broad mindedness, intellectual curiosity, tolerance for difference, courage, capacity to subordinate narrow self-interest for the benefit of the whole, et cetera.

To this day, democracies depend on a citizenry capable of discharging the civic duties for which a liberal education prepared Athenian citizens.

Indeed, the possibility of democracy hinges on the success or failure of liberal education and of its being not just an education for the elite, but an education for the demos, for the people at large.

So to talk about liberal education is necessarily to talk about freedom and to talk about self-governance.

And when self-governance refers not just to freedom at the individual level, but to freedom at the collective level, then we're necessarily talking about citizenship.

And in this sense, liberal education is synonymous with civic education.

American higher education has excelled at its knowledge producing function, and this undergirds American preeminence in science, technology, and innovation.

But American higher education has fallen short in its citizen producing function.

It has excelled at technical education, but falling short at liberal education.

This is the portion of the social problem that we in higher education own.

When I applied to college, I had no idea what a liberal education was.

I had the fortune of ending up at the one major research university that has a required great books liberal arts curriculum.

Required of all of its students, regardless of their major, it's called the core curriculum and takes up most of the first two years of study at Columbia College.

The way in which that intellectual experience expanded and transformed my inner life drives much of what I do to this day.

My 2021 books, "Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation," as that title suggests, it's a reflection on the role that liberal education has played in my life.

But its deeper concern, it's about the imperative today for colleges and universities to take seriously their mission of educating students liberally, especially those students who come from what we call marginalized communities, people who have not had the resources, opportunities, and privileges that most people who attend college have had.

By the time I started writing the book, I had spent 10 years as director of Columbia University's Center for the Core Curriculum.

Even though I always recognized that the value of liberal education is rooted in a subjective and personal experience, throughout my time as Director of the Columbia Core Curriculum, I avoided making the case for liberal education with reference to my own life story.

Like many immigrants, I harbor a profound distaste for the stereotypes associated with the immigrant story.

You know, the cardboard cutouts featuring the rise from poverty and marginality through hard work and education.

It's not that these things aren't true about me, but that I have refused to turn those aspects of my life into an identity.

I did not want my case for liberal education to be about my story.

Yet the experience of liberal education is inescapably personal, subjective, specific.

So I knew that I could only write a book about liberal education in the first person and with my entire self in it.

So the case I make for liberal education in the book synthesizes insights I had developed over the course of my academic career with an honest examination of my inner and outer life and how it has been shaped by my liberal education.

And when I speak about how a liberal education can illuminate a life, how it can give people unique tools to navigate their inner and outer worlds, and empower them to transform their reality, I speak from personal experience.

Education and liberal education in particular has the power and the tendency to transform people's lives.

But the way in which liberal education transforms people is quite distinctive.

For one thing, it plays out in as many forms as there are individuals in the world, so that liberal education cannot have a predetermined outcome, which is why it cannot be used for ideological indoctrination.

Everyone who does it knows that liberal education is a poor instrument for passing on pre-established truths, for taking students from where they are to a preconceived ideological destination.

Now, the kind of transformation liberal education promotes is something that is spawned from within yourself, not something that is given to you from the outside.

Liberal education doesn't turn you into someone else, but it turns your eyes inward so that you can see more clearly who you actually are.

That's why the kind of transformation achieved through liberal education is thorough going, it is like walking through a thick fog, it soaks you through and through.

Liberal education doesn't just add more knowledge on top of your previous stock.

Liberal education rearranges everything else that you know.

You don't just end up with more knowledge, you end up with a different configuration of knowledge.

In other words, liberal knowledge alters the internal proportions of your soul.

In liberal learning, there is no separation between what you know and who you are, and that's why it's transformative.

Let me invoke this inner transformation as it began for one of my intellectual and political heroes, Frederick Douglass.

I'm going to read to you a passage from his 1845 autobiography, "Narrative of the Life of an American Slave."

Now, let me set this up for you.

This passage comes when Frederick Douglass is around nine years old.

Frederick was born in a plantation in Maryland in the eastern shore, backwoods, really out of the way of everything.

And when he is about nine, his master, Thomas Auld, sends Frederick to live with his brother Hugh Auld in Baltimore.

So little Douglass takes, is sent on a boat, on a sloop to Baltimore to join this family where there's another little boy and the idea is that Frederick is going to serve as a household slave and as a companion to the little boy.

This incident I'm going to read takes place just shortly after Douglass arrives in Baltimore.

"Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld," and let me make one other comment about this passage I'm gonna read.

This passage contains the N word, that derogatory slur.

It's in the mouth of the slave master, and it is used as an insult just the way that it's used today.

I'm not going to pronounce the word, I'm gonna replace the word with slavery.

And that's simply because that word has taken on such a high voltage in our culture that many people just find it indecent and offensive just to say it.

There are other words like that in the English language that people find indecent to be said aloud in polite company.

So I'm going to replace that slur with the word slave.

I guarantee that you'll know where that word is because your American ear is trained to recognize it.

So, "Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters.

Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read.

To use his own words, further, he said, 'If you give a slave an inch, he will take an ell.

A slave should know nothing but to obey his master, to do as he is told to do.

Learning would spoil the best slave in the world.

Now,' said he, 'if you teach that slave,' speaking of myself, 'how to read, there would be no keeping him.

It would forever unfit him to be a slave.

He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.

As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm.

It would make him discontented and unhappy.'"

Douglass continues, "These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence a new train of thought.

It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain.

I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty, to wit, the white man's power to enslave the Black man."

Let me make a little comment there.

Little Douglass, at nine years old, he's grown up in the plantation surrounded by other Black slaves.

He knows them intimately.

He knows they're not weaker, they're not dumber, they're not in any way inferior to the whites that he knows intimately too in the house.

He sees them up close.

He knows they're not smarter.

He knows they're not stronger.

He knows they're not in any way superior to the Blacks, yet what he said is, is that all the Black people are enslaved and all the white people are free, and the white people enslaved the Black people, and he can't figure out why this is or how this is.

But hearing his enslaver issue the prohibition and name the consequences of learning to read, Douglass says, I get back to the quote, "From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

It was just what I wanted, and I got it at a time when I least expected it.

Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the merest accident, I had gained from my master.

Though conscious of the difficulty of learning to read without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read."

And boy, did he learn how to read and write and made his name as a newspaper editor and orator, and one of the most important political writers in American history.

Now, you might say today, there's no more slavery.

Slavery is a thing of the past, outlawed by the 13th amendments to the Constitution.

While it's true that there is no longer in the US chattel slavery where you and your children are literally owned by someone else 24/7 and forever, but there are other forms of subjugation, coercion, and domination that pervade modern life and which have much in common with slavery.

Liberal education, the kind of education into which Douglass saw a window in his acquisition of literacy is today also aimed at charting a path from existing forms of slavery to freedom.

At transforming you in such a way that you are forever unfit to be a slave.

I submit to you that the maximal possibilities for human freedom come from the optimal organization, from the more or less successful integration of our inner lives.

Enabling this integration is the most profound way in which liberal education is liberating.

(calm music) - Do you think there's different types of freedom?

Is it possible to be in a position where you would consider yourself a wage slave, but you can still be free because of the education you've received or give yourself?

Was Frederick Douglass free in some ways before he was freed physically?

- Yeah, great, thank you.

That's an excellent question.

There's a famous episode in Douglass.

Douglass, after he learns this, he proceeds through a program of self-education.

He learns to read in part by getting lessons from other children that he plays with, white children that go to school.

He gets them to teach him some, give him some sort of tutoring.

He buys lessons from them.

He, at around age 11 or 12, walks into a bookstore and buys a book, buys a book called "The Colombian Orator," which is a common textbook in 19th century education that's a compendium of speeches about kind of freedom and patriotism.

He buys this book.

This book is, as I said, common, a common textbook.

He must have heard, he must have understood that this is the book that kids were studying in school, so he goes and buys it.

I can just imagine, right?

The book seller, here comes this little 11 or 12-year-old Black boy who's a slave with 50 cents or whatever it is, and he wants to buy "The Colombian Orator."

Douglass teaches himself to read.

He reads everything.

He hears, you know, he hears people, slave holders, raging against abolition and abolitionists.

And he's doesn't know what that is, but he wants to find out.

He goes, looks in the dictionary, abolition, and the definition the dictionary gives him for abolition is the act of abolishing.

He's like, great, thanks.

But eventually he figures out what it is.

He reads.

He gets sent back to the eastern shore, and there he starts teaching his fellow slaves to read.

He gets busted for doing that.

Eventually hatches a plan of escape where he literally writes out passes for himself and for a group of slaves, and they're going to have a plan.

They hatch it, they plan it, they schedule it, and one of them gets cold feet and spills the beans.

So the plan is broken up, and Douglass is sent to a slave breaker.

A slave breaker was somebody who specialized in psychological and physical torture to the extent of breaking the will of slaves who showed any inkling of desire to leave.

And Douglass says, "I went there and it worked.

This man, Covey was his name, broke my will, dehumanized me, brutalized it.

I was more like a beast.

I was more like a brute than I was like a human."

And there came one day where Douglass got sick, couldn't do work, and Covey tried to beat him.

And Douglass, a kind of almost animal resistance emerges, and Douglass fights the slave holder, fights him to a draw.

Douglass does not beat him.

All he does is he fights defensively.

He prevents him from beating Douglass.

He draws blood.

In the middle of the fight, the fight lasts like an hour or more, in the middle of the fight, the slave owner tries to get some of the other slaves to come and help him, and they refuse.

Douglass says, you know, that day there was a general uprising.

And Douglass said that that was the last time that he was beaten.

Douglass said, "After that time, I realized that I would never be whipped again.

I would be killed, maybe.

I might be killed, but I will not going to get whipped."

And he talks about that standing up to Covey and asserting, he uses sort of gendered language, his manhood.

He said that from that moment, he began to be free.

He said, "From that moment, I could be a slave externally, but I could never be a slave internally anymore."

So sorry for the long story, but you asked specifically, and Douglass does give that specific answer that he attained a kind of inner liberation.

The relationship of master and slave requires the recognition of the slave, the acceptance and recognition.

It is the slave's recognition of the condition that establishes the dynamic.

If the slave does not recognize the condition, does not accept and recognize the master as master, you can't have the master.

So it's a mutually constitutive relationship.

Now, turning that to the contemporary moment, wage slavery is the norm in our society in some form that is we live in a capitalist society.

There isn't a leisure property class that lives without labor, as opposed to kind of the laboring class.

We live in the reign of the middle class, where obviously there are exceptions, but the brunt of our society, of our culture, of our capitalist economy is that people will work for a living.

People will work to generate their income.

So in some sense, there is this kind of wage slavery.

We all, nearly all of us sell our labor in one way or another.

And to that extent, it is wage slavery.

But then there are differences there.

That is, there is a kind of labor, and some of us here, especially, I think those of us in academia have a privilege where we labor in a way that is remarkably, remarkably free.

We have a contract with our institutions where we perform certain duties and get a certain salary, but there's a tremendous amount of autonomy.

That's one profession that is just uniquely privileged in our society.

There are others that recognizes our freedom, but there are different degrees, and then there's the kind of wage slavery where you're asked to compromise and shelve your moral autonomy and to do work in which you do not have a say, do not have a right, do not have a moral standing.

You just do what you are told to do or your command.

And some of these are very high paying.

Some of these are very high paying jobs.

That form I think is as dehumanizing as any form of wage slavery, regardless of how much it pays.

So I do think that liberal education today somehow unfits you for that kind of morally compromised, dignity compromising type of wage slavery, that it equips you both with the flexibility and the tools to create sustainable modes of living, but that it also makes you averse to subjecting yourself to that kind of life.

One other thing I wanna say about this is that there are forms of like very manual and physical and demanding sort of productive labor that are not wage slavery if they express your sort of dignity, your creativity, your humanity.

When you are not alienated, and this is a Marxist concept, when you are not alienated from the labor.

That is, two people can be doing the same exact job.

One of them is alienated for the labor, that labor is mortifying, that labor is external, that labor is coercive, and sort of does it under coercion.

And someone else can be doing that same labor as an expression of something that they love doing, that they feel an ownership with, that they don't feel oppressed by.

And it can be the same labor.

So, and that has to do with just being an internal disposition, but also the conditions under which you do it, who owns what's being done, for example.

I think that liberal education today equips you and equips our students to find ways of living, of making a living that are not enslaving.

All right, thank you so much for your attention.

(audience applauds) - [Announcer] "The Civic Discourse Project" is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

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