Why study?

The value of a university education

When my students file into the classroom, I always ask them why they chose to study politics and philosophy and I have noticed a shift in their answers. You do get the occasional student who answers that they are interested in resolving a specific philosophical conundrum they are facing in their lives. Many are just “interested in politics”. But more and more students are studying just to find a job. This is a problem not only because it buys into education becoming a product that can be bought and sold and that has restructured the way that universities operate. It is a problem because it concerns the very core of what education means. But what does it mean?

On June 6th 1959, Leo Strauss addressed the Tenth Annual Graduation Exercises of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adult at the University of Chicago to answer this very question. He asked “What is Liberal Education?”, and what he meant was to ask what liberal education is for? What is the point of studying politics and philosophy? His answer may perplex some readers, but it still holds true today.

Strauss argued that liberal education is education in the tradition of western culture. This is not meant to be read as the defense of a parochial understanding of the world, or as an exclusion of other points of views. Rather to the contrary. Western culture, according to Strauss, is an approach to understanding the world through literature - it is the approach of understanding political and social questions through reference to the texts of the great teachers of philosophy. In itself, this is not a matter of intellectual masturbation. Liberal education matters, because it is education towards democracy.

Democracy is more than just a series of repeating elections of elites that rule the rest of us. Strauss points out that it ought to be conceived as “an aristocracy which has broadened into a universal aristocracy”. Returning to the etymological roots of the word, he reminds us that the term refers to the rule of the best, which ought to be distinguished from its historical degeneration into meaning the rule of property-owning classes or the nobility. The word ought to remind us that making sense of democratic rule requires us to assume the virtue of its citizens. How so? In societies in which the virtuous and knowledgeable can be clearly identified and distinguished from those who are not, democracy becomes superfluous. Democracy may be beneficial at some points in a spectrum leading to, but becomes necessary exactly when citizens are considered equal in their virtue and knowledge. If we are all considered to have something to say, then it becomes necessary for a political commonwealth to turn to democracy. It is because of this reason that Strauss quotes Rousseau: “If there were a people consisting of gods, it would rule itself democratically.” Unfortunately, we are not gods. We are not perfectly virtuous. Many of us succumb to scrolling through social media for hours on end. We are consuming political messages, comparing them to our already held beliefs and political opinions, or remain squarely within an unpolitical world, caring only for new avenues of personal gratification and consumerism. While we can never rise to the level of gods - we can never become perfectly virtuous - Strauss’ lesson is that liberal education provides us with a philosophical reference point to building knowledge, and hence virtue. Rather than developing political beliefs, we can hope to generate political knowledge through the study of the great teachers of philosophy. When we let them converse with each other, we can shed light on the political problems and proposals we face today. But his is hard, and it requires time. Philosophers have traditionally written in monologues. They claim academic allegiance. We ought not to give it to them. Liberal education requires us to become the imperfect judges between the great philosophies - Judges who take the wisdom of the ancients and apply it to the problems of the moderns.

Liberal education is then important because it is the counter-poison to mass culture and indoctrination. It crafts the aristocracy of the mind and introduces the intellectual reference points and standards against which we need to judge current politicians and media. Liberal education is valuable because it educates towards democracy.

Here is the link to Strauss’ text: https://www.ditext.com/strauss/liberal.html