Liberal Arts Education Needs Brave Defenders

Last updated on: November 27, 2015 at 9:48 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Liberal Arts Education Needs Brave Defenders 2015-11-27T21:48:41-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Civilization is hard to build and easy to lose. Without courage and conviction, much we now take for granted, peace, relative liberty, and civility will be lost. One mark of the health of a civilization is the value it gives the liberal arts. At every level of education from kindergarten to college, we need the arts and humanities to be strong.

This Republic depends on knowledge of philosophers such as Locke, scientists like Newton, writers such as Shakespeare, artists like Michelangelo, and musicians such as Bach.

We are now governed by craven politically correct, pusillanimous, profiteers who have never had real education themselves and would deny our children and grandchildren such blessings.

Against political correctness, a great society will value excellence. I love popular culture, but the simplicity allows laziness in the soul. The greatest artists of the past have endured. The fittest survive. The art of our day has had no such chance. DuBois was right and Booker T. Washington was wrong: a person needs the liberal arts to lead. The liberal arts were sadly once the preserve of men, especially white men, but they can belong to anyone. If a person wants to live in this Constitutional Republic, he or she must master Plato, Cicero, Dante, Locke, Jefferson, Hamilton, and other great thinkers that formed the culture.

Is a better world possible? Only if we do not lose the freest and best culture the world has yet produced. We assume that we can kick out the props, Judeo-Christian morality, the nuclear family, the liberal arts, and still retain what is good. So far the results are not promising as we produce an ill bred, badly educated, class of functional illiterates with credentials and no education. How many pastors do we have that cannot read the Bible in the original languages? How many doctors who have no poetry to know what is humane? How many lawyers whose ethics are shaped by the bottom line and not by nobility?

We need education that will say: first master what has been good and then experiment.

We need education that is knowledge based regardless of politics. We cannot attack what we do not understand, or we risk speaking only to those who agree. We cannot defend what we do not understand, lest our very defense open holes for our foes assault.

Against pusillanimous administrators, we need courage. We have too many administrators and too many of those we have are interested only in survival. They have a dream and that dream is too often something bigger and more expensive than what they were given. They are obsessed with the form of education in the 1950’s and imagine that more of it will be better. As a result, they offend only those without money and bow to the donor class: liberal elites themselves badly read and intolerant of dissent.

Administrators fire educators to hire sycophants. In schools with large endowments, students are placated to avoid bad press that will decrease donations. In schools that are tutition dependent, high standards deter transfer students from shoddy junior colleges or retention and so standards are dropped.

Against profiteers, we need charity. Education ahs become big business. Public unions dominate the government schools with their administrative allies. Teachers and students are ill served by the compact between the great powers. In private education, we have those attracted to the lifestyle of education without the commitment to scholarship and teaching that existed in the past.

CS Lewis was right: no school dedicated to education will ever have finances that can be described as “satisfactory.” We are in the business of training souls and though we can be efficient, this should never be money making scheme.

We need those called to the charity, the non-profit charity, of education.

Virtue (another name for excellence), courage, and charity: those are what our schools need. and without such schools the liberal arts cannot exist. Who will defend the liberal arts? God helping us, The Saint Constantine School will in Houston. Will you join us?

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