Liberal Education and Liberal Democracy

Key Points

• The problems in contemporary liberal education are exacerbating problems in our practice of liberal democracy.
• Liberal education today does a poor job of teaching young people the art of choosing—which requires thinking well about ends.
• Liberal democracy depends on citizens capable of building communities around chosen ends while working with others who have different understandings of the good life.
• Classical education responds effectively to the shortcomings of contemporary liberal education. It is growing in popularity and deserves more study and support.

Read the PDF.

Introduction

I come from a family of educators and education reformers, and I know from watching them how devotion to education can test one’s moral resolve. After all, the rewards in educational endeavors are by their nature not immediate; indeed, they’re not often seen for a generation. Because of this, thinking about what makes a good education also poses a particular kind of intellectual challenge. We have to discern what is truly worthy in our past so we might bring out the best of who we are in the future.¹

Now, this is the kind of thinking that the conservative mind, with its loving attention to history and its tendency to favor reform over revolution, is naturally suited to do. So while progressives dominate many facets of American education, from teachers unions to college faculty, conservatives should feel confident that they have the intellectual resources to think well about what education is needed for the future flourishing of our country. That’s why I’m deeply appreciative of Frederick M. Hess’ call for conservatives to not just stand against some seriously damaging trends in education today but also articulate a more positive program to say what they stand for.²

This is a challenging task, but one I think we must undertake. I’ll attempt to contribute to that effort by presenting what I’ve seen from my perspective, that of a professor who has worked with students at a liberal arts institution for many years, a scholar whose specialty is the history of political thought, and an academic entrepreneur who has helped build a flourishing program for the humanistic study of politics at Furman University.³ Thinking about the problems we’re having in higher education from the perspective of a teacher, scholar, and educational reformer has led me to see that there is an essential connection between the problems we’re having in liberal education and the problems we’re having holding a liberal political order together. So I’ll suggest an answer to the question of what conservatives should stand for in liberal education to keep our liberal democratic republic viable.

Read the full report.

Notes

1. These remarks were cowritten with Benjamin Storey for a presentation in September 2021. Thanks also to Yuval Levin, Peter Crawford, Evan Myers, and Jackson Wolford for their comments on our draft.
2. Frederick M. Hess, “The Next Conservative Education Agenda,” National Affairs, Spring 2020, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-next-conservative-education-agenda.
3. Furman University, “Tocqueville Program,” www.furman.edu/Tocqueville/.