(gentle music) - [Narrator] The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership presents the Civic Discourse Project.

Civics, Patriotism, and America's Prospect.

This week.

- Given this, I want to be clear that what I would like to defend is the liberal arts.

The liberal arts, of course, are the arts that make a man free.

Those are the arts that help us understand what it means to be a good human being and citizen.

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

And now, a panel discussion on liberal arts and civic education, compatible or conflicting?

With Daniel Mahoney, visiting Professor, school of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at ASU.

Catherine Zuckert, Professor of Political Science Emerita at University of Notre Dame.

And Jennifer Frey, Dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa.

- Well thank you very much.

It's a real delight to be here.

I'm going to address the question of the relationship between liberal and civic education.

In a way, some of this has its roots in early modern political philosophy.

Hobbes, you know, everything's power.

The great long chapter in Locke's essay on power, the whole human world is reduced to the emanations of power.

The Romans had these distinctions, potestas, potencia, and all that.

We see the human world as a world of power seeking, and it's very hard to have civic and decent and rational common life when you might say the underpinnings of common sense of moderation of shared human nature are under systematic assault in the intellectual world.

The little writeup on our panel said, "Well, liberal education tends to assault or to be more ambivalent or hostile toward civic life than it used to be."

But I would say this isn't really liberal education.

It's what the late Roger Scruton very suggestively called the culture of repudiation, or sometimes he called it the culture of negation.

And what that meant was that a certain kind of the humanities, certainly literature, comparative literature, some of the social sciences, more and more historians and historiography, they see their job as upending civic gratitude, assaulting our moral and civic inheritance.

And I notice with my students, not here though, not in my class this semester, but a lot of people use the word, a lot of students use the word "deconstructing" as a synonym for interpretation.

You hear at the journalists.

"We're deconstructing this, we're deconstructing."

We're not deconstructing anything.

We're trying to understand something.

And understanding, which is a principle task of liberal education, is very different from these masters of suspicion who want to tear down and show that our civic inheritance, our moral inheritance, our philosophical inheritance is nothing but a justification for domination, exploitation, et cetera.

So in this context, without ignoring the differences between philosophy proper, liberal education, whose orientation cannot be taken exclusively from the here and now, nor I think an authentic civic education's orientation be taken exclusively from the here and now.

But I think in this battle, and I think it is a battle against the forces of negation and repudiation, I think the party of liberal education is aligned with the party of rational, as somebody said, a kind of self-critical patriotism imbued with the spirit of civic and intellectual gratitude.

I think that the one thing most needful maybe that scholars and teachers grounded in the larger Western tradition, the great tradition of Western wisdom is not to renounce legitimate self-criticism, we have to be I think in a Tocquevillian kind of way, friends, but not flatterers of the modern democratic dispensation.

But in the end, I think we're obliged to be defenders of politics, the dignity of the political vocation, which is almost forgotten today.

We're obliged to be partisans of civilization, understood not in a relativistic way, the sheer multiplicity of civilization and cultures, but high civilization against those things that undermine both the life of rational inquiry and a freedom informed by moral and political responsibility.

And I think most of all, we have to act as a counter to the spirit of negation.

One of my favorite quotes these days is from a poem W.H.

Oden published in 1925, "Come fix your eye upon me, I thirst for accusation."

It seems to me we can do better than institutionalizing self-loathing as the centerpiece of education and especially higher education.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) - Like the other members of this panel, I firmly believe that liberal education and civic education in a liberal democracy like the United States should go hand in hand.

That does not mean, however, that there are not important differences and tensions between the two kinds of education.

Indeed, I think it behooves us in trying to educate citizens and leaders of a democratic republic to recognize those differences and tensions between liberal and civic education.

Thus, our effort to combine them fail as a result of our failure to recognize the difficulties involved.

To determine whether liberal education and civic education are compatible, we have to begin by asking what a liberal education is.

Turns out that question isn't quite as easy as you might think to answer.

In the 30 years my husband and I spent teaching at one of the leading liberal arts colleges in the United States, we belong to a small group of very stubborn faculty who kept trying to get our colleagues to raise and talk about that question, what is a liberal education?

And we failed every single time.

I think many of the faculty recognized they didn't have an answer to the question, or that if they offered one, there would be others who would vehemently disagree.

So they settled for the now conventional distribution requirements, constituting a general education combined with a major and a recognized discipline in the humanities, social or natural sciences, mathematics, or the fine arts as a description of liberal education offered at that college and many others.

To conclude, liberal education is in some ways a highly desirable, if not absolutely necessary extension of civic education in a liberal democracy.

But it's not a form of education that is desired by or possible for all.

That might be just as well, because there is an enduring tension between liberal education and civic education.

Liberal education begins with the need to assess the adequacy of our own thoughts and opinions undertaken by the young, it necessarily leads them to question the opinions they have acquired from their parents and the community as a whole.

But we see a similar generational divide today between sympathizers respectively of the Palestinians and Israel.

This conflict is not necessarily insoluble or violent, but it is inevitable.

I began by suggesting that it is not as easy as one might think to say what a liberal education is.

I have argued that it consists primarily in the examination of our opinions in the company of others, on the basis of reason in order to determine what is best.

It may be easier to conclude simply by emphasizing what liberal education is not.

It does not consist in the inculcation or indoctrination of young people with partisan political views or ideologies.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) - Okay, so I think I'm the only person on this panel who's not a political theorist.

So bear with me, I'm a philosopher, which means that I just wanna start by drawing a distinction that I think will be helpful, and that is a clear and sharp distinction between the liberal arts and what I would call the modern humanities.

Contemporary practice of the humanities is not continuous with the traditional liberal arts, or I would argue, the kind of renaissance studia humanitatis.

Our contemporary humanities for better or worse in its self-conception and its practices has its roots in the modern research university as this was developed in 19th century Germany and then imported to the United States.

As such, it is by and large now conceived and practiced in ways that I believe cut against liberal learning.

For example, in our universities today, by and large, we no longer read literature in order to think about its meaning for our lives and how it might help us grow in virtue or self-knowledge.

We read it through the lens of a variety of critical theories with an eye to producing scholarly works.

The modern humanist has by and large become an expert, and therefore is not principally engaged in liberal learning with undergraduates.

Liberal learning is not aimed at expertise, but at wisdom which seeks to see how various disciplines and modes of inquiry form a unified and coherent whole.

Moreover, of course, the liberal arts is much wider than the modern humanities.

A liberal study is one that pursues wisdom for its own sake rather than for the sake of some useful end.

Its goal is a form of interior freedom rather than some specific external end or work.

It's important, I think, to keep this distinction in mind when we're thinking about reform and higher education, because to my mind, the difference is not so much about subject matter, but about pedagogical practices, methods, and goals.

Unfortunately, the modern humanities is often not very humanistic in the traditional sense.

So we cannot simply seek to revitalize the humanities if we are to solve our current problems.

And of course, I say this as a modern humanist.

Given this, I want to be clear that what I would like to defend is the liberal arts.

The liberal arts, of course, are the arts that make a man free.

Those are the arts that help us understand what it means to be a good human being and citizen.

And therefore, I would say that liberal education is actually a kind of civil education, civic education.

It's just a especially high form of it.

A civic education is not merely about imparting knowledge that is relevant to understanding political reality and goods the way that it might be in K through 12, although it is of course partly that.

It is a kind of education that forms or shapes students so that they are capable of the duties and demands of citizenship.

Meaningful democratic participation is a part of this, but a civic education is much broader and also includes an ability to understand and perceive how one can give back and strengthen one's communities beginning with the community that is a classroom and a college.

To practice liberal learning is to become at least partially equipped with those habits of mind and character that allow students to construct a vision of a good life.

It's an education and freedom because that vision, right, will determine their life choices.

They'll keep coming back to that vision.

It will determine what they choose in life.

Part of our job is to make sure that our students are able to understand themselves as parts or participants in the greater whole that is civil society.

And to understand how in our education we are helping them fulfill their duties and obligations to it, as well as helping them to think creatively about how they can positively contribute back to the flourishing, not just of themselves, but to this greater whole.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) (gentle music) - For students who treat liberal or civil education as more of a shackle, kind of like you guys talked about earlier, and for the amount of Americans who just simply don't understand, I believe 26% was the number who don't understand like the purpose or the inner workings of the different branches of government.

What would you say to those type of students to kind of allow, like how would you make sure that we can kind of increase those numbers and those statistics, and how would you say that we can kind of, if you don't understand how government works, how can you allow government to be truly representative?

So what would you do in the K through 12 or in higher education in order to ensure that?

Thank you.

- There's a kind of chicken and egg problem here because students go to kindergarten and high school before they come to college.

And I'm old enough to have heard students in this case coming to Carlton who said, "Oh yeah, I came to college.

I studied a Greek tragedy as a senior and I really would like to study another one."

Or "I've heard of this guy Faulkner, he's kind of interested."

But when I went to my freshman seminar, they told me, "Oh no no, this is not what it's about.

It's about the disciplines."

The German, sorry, research university.

So first thing in a way is that we have to try to teach a cohort of people in college who are interested in teaching younger people that education isn't all about the disciplines and specialization.

And there's no easy answer to this.

I mean, I have spent my life teaching what are known as great books, and that was a choice.

And I love doing it.

And I think I'm a fantastically privileged individual.

But here I teach teachers from the Great Hearts Academy who teach great books, and they surprisingly say "You know, the students who read them in high school, they think that then they've read them from, that's it.

So we don't need to do that."

So they're different levels of education.

So I think yes, you need to introduce sympathetically some works from the past that are hard, not just in college, but beforehand.

I also think, and I guess I would just fill in my version of what Levin was arguing partly that people in this country have come to understand what's now called democracy.

It's not even called liberal democracy anymore.

The way the Athenians understood democracy, IE is direct democracy.

We all get together, we punch something or we poll the things, we vote, and that's what it is and the majority rules.

And that was shown, I mean, Athens didn't last for long because that's a terrible unstable form of government.

So what's a better form of government?

Actually in the United States, the Federalists put a lot of thought into that.

However, my experience when I taught in American government was "The Federalist Papers" are really hard for students to read now, either in high school or introductory college.

There's a colleague here who did an edited version of "The Federalist Papers."

And I think it would be wonderful if that were a sign, not the whole thing, but some pieces and taught.

So people in this country would come to understand, as far as I can tell, they do not understand how this government is supposed to work and why.

It's really reasoned.

And it's not just go to vote.

It involves institutional design and a lot of complicated things.

And it's not also just participation.

One of the other opinions I acquired teaching American government is if you want students to lose any interest they ever had in politics, send them to a school board meeting or have them go to the city council.

So teaching takes a lot of imagination and dedication.

There's no formula for it, but we have to try to introduce things that have been lost, not just in college, but also earlier.

- I would say I think young people... Look, we can't get indignant at young people for not understanding the good or what's good for them, that they really are naturally political animals.

Maybe a little gentle teasing doesn't hurt.

I remember Ben Stein, the political writer and sometime financial advisor, son of a famous economist, he wrote an article in the American enterprise talking about his intern at UCLA who came into his office indignant.

She had just read that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941.

And she wanted to do something about it.

And he's the guy who appears in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" as the teacher.

And he said, I had to calm her down and say, "Well, we won that war.

The Japanese are our friends.

They're actually doing much better than we might've predicted in 1945."

And I had a colleague who taught theology, and he would get these students who would say Saint Augustus is boring and everyone is boring.

And so he just started reading them a line from Saint Thomas Aquinas.

"Boredom is a reflection of the sin of sloth."

Usually you're readily bored if you're lazy.

And I would just add one other thing.

I think one of the most loathsome things we see, and I haven't seen it at ASU I have to say, but I did see it when I was a visitor at Princeton a year or two ago.

When you don't have a liberal and civic education, what fills the gap is what I call the tyranny of ideological cliches.

You have a lot of ignorant young people speaking in cliches.

From the river to the sea.

They don't know what the river is, they don't know what the sea is.

I think they sort of know what the idea is.

But when that kind of activism not rooted in historical knowledge or civic engagement or philosophical reflection where you just run around angry repeating, it's not very dignified, it's not very productive.

And maybe young people, if there was a little more self-criticism, and some of you guys said to those guys, "We're tired of this.

We actually wanna talk about things."

Because it is sort of a laughable pose, you know?

And really what's happened is you have these vociferous minorities, I don't mean racial minorities, just voices, they don't really represent the majority of students, but they're allowed to represent the majority of students precisely because they're the most aggressive and they have the most cliches.

So a liberal education will liberate you from boredom.

You won't make the mistake that Ben Stein's intern made.

And you might actually find that you could live a life with some leisure in it where it's not just the bars on Thursday and Friday night, as important as that is in the college experience.

But you might actually, when you have some free time, be able to sit down with a book and find illumination.

So yeah, one thing I learned a long time ago, we on our side can't be getting too cranky on this because students won't listen to us, but maybe some way of just saying, "Look, there's a lot before you if you open yourself up to it."

But that's hard.

And it's not for everyone.

And I'm absolutely convinced that much more damage has been done by the gadgets and the internet than good, especially for your generation.

And I don't have any idea how to get around that.

But anyway, those are some thoughts.

- [Speaker] Thank you.

- At the 2022 midterm elections, I counted 86 items on my ballot.

And a lot of smart people in this room, a lot of well-educated people in this room, I would argue that there's not a single person in this room that knew that could logically think about and make a conclusion on all 86 of those issues.

What do you do in terms of civic education to get people encouraged to be involved when the ultimate process of being civically involved is so confounding and overwhelming?

- You try to introduce them to the other parts of politics because it isn't all about voting.

And there are many, many ways in which you can participate in sub-political associations that still teach you things that are relevant to the community and ultimately to politics.

- I do think that there's a danger in identifying citizenship too much with voting.

I'll follow Catherine here.

Rousseau, who says many wise and unwise things.

- [Catherine] Like forcing to be free.

- But in the contract social, he mocks the English.

Now most of us look at the English, this is the home of modern liberty, that's Montesquieu's view, that's the founders' view.

And he says, "Look at those slaves.

They're only free when they vote every two, four, or six years."

He said, "What kind of citizenship is that?"

And he had in mind active citizenship.

But that's Sparta, and that can fill one with some fear and trembling.

But I do think we can be reminded that it's not sort of, they use an old fashioned image, the League of Women's Voter stuff from the '50s and '60s.

Be informed by your local issue and referendum.

That stuff's not unimportant.

But I do think the Tocquevillian art of association of being involved in a full array of intermediate institutions that sort of mediate everyday life and political life.

It's a very important way for Americans learning citizenship in a way that's not excessively preoccupied with voting every two, four, or six years.

- All right, well if there's nothing further, please join me in thanking our panelists.

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

(upbeat music)