LiberalArtsOnline Volume 2, Number 10
November 2002
by John Agresto
Senior Research Fellow
Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College
I once read how the Virginia colony asked the British Crown for the authority to begin a college in the New World in hopes that a proper education would raise up an intelligent citizenry and perhaps even save a few souls. The response was blunt -- "Souls? Damn your souls. Raise tobacco!"
In surveying the field of higher education today, a person might wonder if the Crown had won. Looking inside more than 3,000 American colleges and universities today, we would see students engaged in today's practical equivalents of growing tobacco -- business, agronomy, sports medicine, and any number of technical and professional training programs directed at practical and potentially lucrative outcomes. The liberal arts take up a small and, by some counts, an ever-dwindling share of class time, often marginalized into the dreaded "gen. ed." courses of the freshman year, as something to get done quickly before one moves up to the more specialized and useful courses.
One might have thought that America's Founders, an eminently practical bunch, would themselves have been on the side of practicality. This was, after all, a great and empty continent, sorely in need of industry, commerce, invention and agricultural know-how. What statesman would have the temerity to hold that real value might come from history, the musings of dead philosophers, ancient languages, or old books?
Well, at the start, such statesmen were everywhere. One cannot read more than a few pages of Madison's notes in the Federal Convention without running across references to ancient Rome and Athens, or to Cicero, Plutarch and Aristotle, or to the political histories of places as far-flung as Persia, Sparta and Thebes. These were living examples that informed their understanding, not only of historical truths or political forms, but also of human types and human psychology.
I raise this not to show the Founders were learned men. Rather, I was struck by the use to which they put their learning. I was struck, above all, by Hamilton's comment in the very first _Federalist Paper_ --
"It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force."
"Reflection and choice" rather than "accident and force." We would not be a nation shaped by outside conquest or fated by its past. We would reflect on what was best and then make our choice accordingly. But what is the promise of the liberal arts other than the ability to reflect and, then, to choose? What more than to survey the history of human lives and makings, to read moral and political philosophy, to read the book of human nature and see the workings of virtue and vice, ambition and altruism, wisdom and foolishness? What were they doing in Philadelphia other than thinking through our future with the sharpest tools they had -- their readings and their books? It's the liberal arts that help free us, both individually and together, from the tyranny of accident and force, and give us the ability to make more rational and, yes, more practical choices.
It wasn't practicality per se that the Founders were arguing over in 1787. It was History, Philosophy, Politics, Law, Psychology and the Classics. And it wasn't a nation resting on ancestry, history or traditions, which they created. Rather, it was a country that took seriously the examples and arguments in its books, which were then discussed and debated. If we need to see the _practical_ powers of the liberal arts, we need only to look at their ability to inform statesmen, who, upon that basis, could and did raise up a wholly new nation.
Let me be so bold as to say that America's founding in "reflection and choice" makes us the world's first, and perhaps only, Liberal Arts Nation.
LiberalArtsOnline is an occasional email essay on the liberal arts, provided as a public service of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
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The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author, LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.