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PDF Text
Text
�����
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Speeches, presentations, and other lectures
Description
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Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span>
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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speechespresentationsotherlectures
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paper
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5 pages
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"I hate books" or making room for learning
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Transcript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given on June 15, 1997 by David Levine in Santa Fe, NM.
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Levine, David Lawrence
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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1997-06-15
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Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online.
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text
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pdf
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Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778. Emile.
Education
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English
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24000406
Convocation
Graduate Institute
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St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe
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St. John's College Meem Library
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Santa Fe, NM
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wav
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1:53:30
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Constitution Day Panel Discussion: Grutter v. Bollinger
Description
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Audio recording of an online panel discussion with Benjamin Baum, Caroline Randall, Piér Quintana, Cesar Cervantes, Martha Franks, Guillermo Bleichmar, and Walter Sterling on September 16, 2020 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office provided this description of the event: "For our annual event recognizing Constitution Day, this Wednesday afternoon a panel of faculty and staff will lead a discussion on (excerpts from) the landmark Supreme Court case, Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), in which, writing for the majority, Sandra Day O'Connor articulates a constitutional framework for, and surveys public policy surrounding, considerations of race and student diversity in the context of college admissions. This case underlies the more recent rulings in Fisher v. University of Texas (2013, 2016). For those who wish to attend, you may find a review of encyclopedia entries or journalistic reporting on the case (and related cases such as Fisher) sufficient. But the entire case can be found here: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306 (among other places)."
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Baum, Benjamin
Randall, Caroline
Quintana, Piér
Cervantes, Cesar
Franks, Martha
Bleichmar, Guillermo
Sterling, Walter
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2020-09-16
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Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available.
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sound
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mp3
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Education
Supreme Court
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English
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SF_BaumB_et_al_Constitution_Day_Panel_Grutter_v_Bollinger_2020-09-16
Friday night lecture
-
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
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The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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mp3
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00:56:41
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Euclid as Teacher
Description
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on July 10, 2019 by William Braithwaite as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
Mr. Braithwaite is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His talk centers on Euclid's role as an educator not just of mathematics but also of life. In particular, Braithwaite examines the ways in which Euclid's mathematical reasoning has applicability outside of what would be traditionally thought. Using examples from Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, and others, this talk deepens an understanding of Euclid as a teacher of logic, mathematics, and life.
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Braithwaite, William T. (William Thomas)
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2019-07-10
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library and to make an audio recording of my lecture available online."
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sound
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mp3
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English
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Braithwaite_William_2019-07-10
Subject
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Teaching
Euclid. Elements
Mathematics
Geometry
Education
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
Tutors
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St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe
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St. John's College Meem Library
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Santa Fe, NM
Sound
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wav
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2:01:53
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Invention: The Art of Liberal Arts
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Audio recording of a lecture given by J. Scott Lee on November 6, 2020 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "Liberal education is in deep trouble. The path to rescue lies through artistic invention. What is the trouble? Recruitment. Why is this trouble? Most defenses of liberal education rely on ineffective persuasives. What other resources do we have for our defense, our future? We could emphasize a liberal arts education; we have neglected the role of invention and freedom that comes with emphasizing the arts. The talk illustrates what a focus on invention, particularly in the visual and liberal arts, might achieve in curricula. Concentrating on perspective, we will look to works of Scott Buchanan, Brunelleschi, Alberti, and Botticelli. The talk concludes by suggesting a liberal arts curriculum is a work of art which opens possibilities to students for inventing their own future – the kind of completion a work of art like a curriculum needs."
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Lee, J. Scott
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2020-11-06
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Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available.
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sound
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mp3
Subject
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Liberal Arts
Education
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English
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SF_LeeJ_Invention_The_Art_of_Liberal_Arts_2020-11-06
Friday night lecture
-
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Dublin Core
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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Zoom video conference
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01:03:38
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Reading Plato’s <em>Meno</em> Online
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Video recording of a lecture delivered on June 24, 2020 by William Braithwaite as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. The final minute of the recording (beginning at 01:02:00) is in audio format only. <br /><br />Mr. Braithwaite describes his lecture as follows: <br /><br />"Traditionally serving to introduce the study of Plato’s two dozen dialogues, the <em>Meno</em> raises questions about what virtue is and how it is acquired, about what knowledge is—both in itself and in relation to opinion, and about how teaching and learning are connected. <br /><br />I will offer a preliminary, or serious beginner’s, reading of the dialogue, with a view to opening one path to these questions: What are the conditions Plato suggests as ideal or best, indispensable or useful, for learning and teaching? How, and to what extent, are these conditions affected by the differences between face-to-face student-teacher meetings, and meetings among geographically-dispersed teachers and students, mediated by an electronic screen? What sort of community is an 'on-line' community?"
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Braithwaite, William T. (William Thomas)
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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2020-06-24
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library and to make an audio recording of my lecture available online."
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moving image
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mp4
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Plato. Meno
Web-based instruction
Education
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Langston, Emily
Language
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English
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Braithwaite_William_2020-06-24
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
Tutors
-
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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00:51:37
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wav
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Bib # 82743
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The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art
Description
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Audio recording of a lecture delivered on July 8, 2015 by Daniel Harrell as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.<br /><br /><span>Mr. Harrell is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis. His talk delves into the conversation surrounding the liberal arts education. In particular, he examines this argument through certain calls for "relevance" as well as the truth of the liberal arts in general. He further meditates on the relationship between the liberal arts and the world at large, and those tensions and rewards offered by a student of the liberal arts.</span>
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Harrell, Daniel
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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2015-07-08
Rights
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
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sound
Format
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mp3
Relation
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<a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/320">Typescript</a>
Publisher
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St. John's College
Subject
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Education
Education, Humanistic
St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.)
Language
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English
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
Tutors
-
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PDF Text
Text
The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art
Daniel Harrell
July 8, 2015*
Contents
Introduction
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Acknowledgment
Introduction
The title of my lecture tonight, “The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art,” is meant to
express a worry I have about the future of liberal education. This puts me in a
sizable club. To have worries at all has become reflexive among those of us in
any way devoted to this education. And there is no end these days, it seems, to
prophecies, even pronouncements, of death. Type the words “death of liberal
education” into Google, and you get back such headlines as
Why Liberal Arts Education is Dying (or Already Dead)
Is the Four-Year, Liberal-Arts Education Model Dead?
The Death of Liberal Education
The Death of Liberal Education
Who Killed the Liberal Arts?
Liberals are Killing the Liberal Arts
Conservatives killed the liberal arts
In Our High-Tech World, Are the Liberal Arts Dead?
The Liberal Arts Are Dead; Long Live STEM
Jobs: The Economy, Killing Liberal Arts Education
The Liberal Arts Major: Would you like fries with that?
*A
lecture given on the Annapolis campus of St. John’s College.
1
�All these headlines, I think, have one thing in common. While they may disagree about the threat to liberal education, they agree in distinguishing liberal
education from the threat, as if the threat were external. The headlines make
you think something else is killing liberal education, whether it be liberals or
conservatives or technology or the economy. And it is hard to envision a defense of liberal education without such a distinction, even if headlines draw it
simplistically, or even inaccurately. For if liberal education itself were somehow
the threat, then death might well be liberal education’s best defense, but in
defeat. No surprise, then, that those of us devoted to liberal education are wont
to conceive its threats as if they came from outside it. For this justifies a defense
that succeeds only if liberal education survives.
And there is no shortage of such defenses. Type the words “defense of liberal
education” into Google, and you will find one, it seems, for every headline predicting the death of liberal education. And not just in articles. There are books
to defend liberal education, most recently a bestseller by Fareed Zakaria, bearing the title In Defense of a Liberal Education.1 There are blogs to defend
liberal education, including one at St. John’s featuring regular posts by Christopher Nelson, the Annapolis president.2 There are campaigns to defend liberal
education, with slogans like Securing America’s Future: The Power of Liberal
Arts Education, to mention just one initiative, launched in 2012 by the Council
of Independent Colleges.3 And behind these campaigns are associations to defend liberal education, like the just-mentioned Council of Independent Colleges,
or the Association of American Colleges and Universities, or the Association for
General and Liberal Studies, or the Association for Core Texts and Courses, or
the American Academy for Liberal Education. There are so many defenders of
liberal education, in fact, that you can even find think-pieces pondering why
they seem to have failed, since liberal education remains in peril.
But what if the defenders have succeeded—by putting liberal education in peril?
What if the threat to liberal education comes from within? This is my worry.
Let the idea of a liberal art, for the moment, simply mean whatever it is that
distinguishes a liberal education from any other form of education—a technical
education, say. What if our many defenses of liberal education have made us
forget this idea? What if the idea of a liberal art is lost?
Back to top
1 Other books include Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters by Michael
S. Roth; and College: What It Was, Is, And Should be by Andrew Delbanco.
2 Other blogs include “The LEAP Challenge Blog,” sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities; and The Power of Liberal Arts “Blogs” page, sponsored by the
Council of Independent Colleges, that gathers blog posts defending liberal education.
3 Other campaigns include Liberal Education and America’s Promise, launched in 2005 by
the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
2
�Part One
Now in one sense, I think, the threat to liberal education must always come from
within. The fate of liberal education, after all, will not be decided in headlines,
but in choices made by each of us about the best education, once education
matters. Not the best education, then, in general, as such, per se; but the best
education for my daughter, or my son, or me. In having to make such choices,
those devoted to liberal education are no different from those dismissive of it.
And in this respect, the threat to liberal education can never lie outside it. To
pursue an education at all, liberal or no, is to have answered a question that a
liberal education obliges each of us to ask, and ask on our own behalf: What
does it mean to be educated? And we might well answer this question in a
choice against liberal education, even at the risk of its extinction, if the same
choice is made repeatedly. But this is perhaps the best evidence we have that
the question is real, and the threat to liberal education therefore intrinsic to
it. The death of liberal education, so understood, would similarly come from
within, in a proof of its life, and perhaps the only proof of life.
But again, those of us devoted to liberal education are unlikely to want this
death, especially just to show we were devoted to something rather than nothing.
And while the threat may be internal in this general sense, it is still external, I
think, in a specific sense. For if the threat to liberal education does come from
within, in a question it would have us ask for ourselves about what it means to
be educated, then while we may well answer this question in a choice against
liberal education, we may also answer the question otherwise, by choosing liberal
education. Liberal education would then be a second answer to the question,
opposed to the first. And insofar as one answer opposes the other, the threat
to liberal education would be external.
But if the threat is external, as one answer opposed to another, then we can
infer at least one thing, I think, about any defense of liberal education against
this threat. It will have to convince us that liberal education does provide an
answer, even for those who give a different answer. It will have to show us
that something is lost in a choice against liberal education, whatever might be
gained; and that the answer we give in such a choice, even if it turns out right,
risks being wrong. And showing this much, it seems, means showing there is
something learned in liberal education, that would otherwise go unlearned. To
show, in short, that liberal education has a subject-matter. Or, in a word:
content.
But what, then, is this content? What should we say is learned in a liberal
education alone? Traditionally, the content of a liberal education was identified
with a curriculum of seven liberal arts, a so-called trivium of grammar, logic, and
rhetoric; and a quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Each
of these arts was thought to wed a skill to a subject. And together, these arts
were thought to form a whole. This is why one could say there was something to
learn in a liberal education, rather than many things, or anything, or nothing.
3
�This is also what I want to say is contained in the idea of a liberal art: a skill
wedded to a subject, in a whole of such skills and subjects, that gives a liberal
education its content.
But one might also suspect that a liberal education has no content in this sense,
and that the liberal arts as traditionally conceived show us why. They were
learned, after all, by the few rather than the many—the leisured few, in that
sense already free from servitude. Perhaps the education they received was
‘liberal,’ then, not in liberating them, but in shaping them, stamping them, and
perpetuating them. And the same might be suspected of any content. For in
what sense could we be freed by it, rather than bound to it? What distinguishes
content, so-called, from dogma, or doctrine? What keeps it from closing the
mind that a truly liberal education is meant to open?
This suspicion of content can also come from the opposite direction, so to speak:
by what we take to threaten liberal education, or indeed any form of education.
For leaving headlines aside, this threat can seem to reflect a kind of triumph of
content over context, from college rankings and scorecards at the start, to tests
and grades at the end, making the very meaning of education a matter of datadriven results; and a choice against liberal education the answer to a question
never asked. Or we might conceive this threat in economic terms, reducing
education to just another a product with a price in the global marketplace.
Against all this, the first thing we might think to say in defense of education is
that products are not enough, results are not enough, answers are not enough,
content is not enough.
Defenses of liberal education, accordingly, have generally made education a
matter of context rather than content. And the most common way of doing this
is to locate learning not in a set of subjects, but instead in the self. Thus it is
said that “the maturation of the student—not information transfer—is the real
purpose of colleges and universities.” Or that “if we are to navigate skillfully
the turbulent changes of the twenty-first century, we must educate students not
only to process information effectively, but to think wisely and well.”
And talk of turbulent changes points to another way that defenses of liberal
education have made it a matter of context: by locating the self in an everchanging world. A good example comes from an address by President Nelson:
With boundaries among the disciplines vanishing, with job requirements and needs changing rapidly, we need citizens prepared for
change, prepared to adapt to jobs that do not yet exist, prepared
to enter an unknown world with a kind of fearless determination to
undertake whatever is required to succeed. We will need skills of
inquiry to enter a world we cannot yet even envision.
We can begin to see from this quote why making liberal education a matter
of context rather than content, means forgetting, more or less deliberately, the
4
�idea of a liberal art. For suppose we did live in a world that changes more than
it abides, where our freedom, to the extent this depended on skill, were a matter
of adaptation more than application. Any art that deserved the name ‘liberal’,
in that case, would involve a skill more likely divorced from any subject than
wedded to one; which is to say, a skill that can be applied to many subjects, even
to every subject. And suppose the number of such subjects to have multiplied
past counting, in one way the world indeed seems to have changed, since the
advent of modern science. If the liberal arts could still be said to encompass a
set of subjects, then it would seem better understood as a diversity than as a
totality.
So once defenses of liberal education make it a matter of context, it is unsurprising that they separate its skills from its subjects. The subjects, if they are
specified at all, are specified to give an impression of breadth, as if there were
many things one might learn in a liberal education rather than just one. The
current St. John’s website, for example, speaks of the college’s “wide-ranging, interdisciplinary curriculum,” where “areas of study include philosophy, literature,
history, mathematics, economics, political theory, theology, biology, physics,
music, chemistry, and languages.” Other lists of subjects are even more expansive. One from the earlier-mentioned Power of Liberal Arts campaign makes it
sound as if you might study anything:
You might be surprised by the kinds of subjects and majors that are
included in the liberal arts. They include much more than studio
art and English classes (though those are great!)—they range from
mathematics to Mandarin, from statistics to sociology. At liberal
arts colleges and universities students can study the sciences—such
as biology, chemistry, and physics—and social sciences—including
economics, political science, and psychology. Students can study
newer subjects, such as environmental science and neuroscience, and
traditional ones, too.
This same impression of breadth is given in the way defenses of liberal education
present its skills apart from subjects. You can indeed learn anything, then, in
learning how to learn. And this encompasses a range of skills similarly presented
apart from subjects: how to read, how to write, how to speak, even how to
think.4 St. John’s current way of putting this is to claim that its students “learn
to speak articulately, read attentively, reason effectively, and think creatively.”
In a similar vein, defenses of liberal education will call the liberal arts “transferable skills,” 5 , again against the backdrop of an ever-changing job market.
And “usefulness” has become a ubiquitous word to counter the opinion, and
4A
good example of this is found in Fareed Zakaria, “What is the Earthly Use of Liberal
Education.”
5 “Although modern liberal arts curriculums have an updated choice of a larger range of
subjects, it still retains the core aims of the liberal arts curricula maintained by the medieval
universities: to develop well-rounded individuals with general knowledge of a wide range
5
�the traditional conviction, that the liberal arts are useless. It is more generally
the habit in defenses of liberal education to talk of the liberal arts as if they
empowered us rather than enlightened us—the aforementioned Power of Liberal
Arts campaign being the most explicit example.
There are deeper strains in this line of defense, that try to reach beyond a
liberal education’s usefulness for any career, to the way it might be useful for
life, making the self, in sense, the subject of its skills. A liberal arts education can
be “truly, enduringly useful,” so one recent defense puts it, once it is “oriented
towards the question of how to live.” Or as President Nelson has written:
The primary purpose of college—contrary to the opinion of hiring
managers—is not to provide trained-up workers for business, nor
even to provide young people with the skills needed to make a living.
The primary purpose is to help young people develop the character
and the judgment to shape a life worth living.
In these appeals to the way a life might be shaped, defenses of liberal education
might be said to deepen the sense in which liberal education is a matter of
context, not content, by locating what is learned in a cultivated readiness for the
world, whatever the world may hold. Here is how a recent St. John’s graduate
puts it:
After my two-year commitment with Teach For America, I hope to
continue my work in the field of education. But really, I can do
anything. St. John’s has given me the tools: the ability to listen,
to think, to speak, to write, and ultimately, to act. I need only to
decide where to direct my passion, and the world is mine, thanks to
the incredible education I have had the blessing to receive here. 6
And there are ways to deepen this context still further; the most common being
to take this readiness for the world as an openness to the world, whether the
self so opened is described as curious, inquisitive, imaginative, self-critical, or
sympathetic. Thus we find Martha Nussbaum, to pick on a famous example,
defending liberal education insofar as it develops
1. The capacity for Socratic self-criticism and critical thought about one’s
own traditions.
2. The ability to see oneself as a member of a heterogeneous nation and
world.
of subjects and with mastery of a range of transferable skills. They will become ‘global
citizens’, with the capacity to pursue lifelong learning and become valuable members of their
communities.” http://www.topuniversities.com/blog/what-liberal-arts-education
6 This comes from Grace Tyson, “‘When You Know Better, You Do Better’: A Senior’s
Reflections on St. John’s. Parts of this address are also quoted in Christopher Nelson, Is It
Worth It?.
6
�3. The ability to sympathetically imagine the lives of people different from
oneself.
And as suggested by Nussbaum’s reference to Socrates, the sense in which a truly
liberal education opens minds rather than closes them has particular appeal at
St. John’s, where it would now sound antiquated to claim, as Scott Buchanan
did in the first catalog of the New Program, that the liberal arts put us in
possession of the truth.7 What we say instead is self-consciously Socratic. Thus
President Nelson will say that “liberal education is the best and quickest way to
become comfortable not knowing.” Or that “learning is grounded in recognition
and acceptance of one’s own ignorance.” Or as the same St. John’s graduate I
quoted earlier puts it:
I have learned that great questions lead to more and more questions,
not necessarily to answers, and I have learned that the greatness of
the human spirit shows itself in just this realization. As Socrates says
in Plato’s Meno: “We shall be better and braver and less helpless if
we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we
indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in
seeking to know what we do not know.” We must have intellectual
bravery, that is, the courage to push forward, to continue seeking
truth even in the face of doubts about its very existence.
It is this same Socratic self-consciousness that explains how St. John’s can make
even an all-required program of books, which might thought inescapably full of
content, into a matter of context. For anything written down, we might claim,
is simply doctrine, until a reader puts it into dialogue by questioning it rather
than assimilating it. And underlying this shift from doctrine to dialogue is
perhaps the deepest belief one can have about a truly liberal education: that
we are only able to learn, truly learn, insofar as we do this for ourselves. It
would seem to follow directly from this that what we learn is found indeed in
the self, or even the soul, rather than in a set of subjects. And the more liberal
an education becomes, so we could say, the more that what we learn is a matter
of how we learn, and who we become in learning it. Which at this college, at
least, means the more that any so-called subject is found in a book, which is
found in a reader of that book, who is found in a conversation about that book,
which brings the book to life, with all it may contain. And this conversation,
both with others and with oneself, might then be said to exemplify the sense in
which a liberal education is ultimately a matter of context rather than content.
For this is an education in selfhood rather than subjects, where the something
we finally learn is what it means to learn, and even what it means to love it.
The suspicion that a truly liberal education has no content, then, can be cast in
terms that encompass what many of us, I think, might say a liberal education
7 “The arts of apprehending, understanding, and knowing the truth are the liberal arts, and
they set their own ends.” (Bulletin of St. John’s College in Annapolis, 1937–38).
7
�finally is, and where any appeal to a number of liberal arts seems beside the
point. St. John’s even tried dropping any reference to the liberal arts, along
with any mention of liberal education, when it first launched its new website,
as if indeed to forget the whole idea. But it did this, I think, to locate the
place of a liberal education in the present rather than the past. It was only a
matter of months before the college restored these references to its website, since
there were prospective students still using such terms to find such things. But
St. John’s has otherwise remained embarked, like nearly every other liberal arts
college in the country, on a communications project carried out in images rather
than text, in the attempt not simply to say what a liberal education is, but to
show it, and capture something about the experience of a liberal education when
mere explanations are thought no longer enough. Gone are the days when the
college could package its education, as it were, in a brown paper wrapper, as if
the education were not only a matter of content, but the kind of content that
couldn’t be seen from outside. Even the first video St. John’s made of itself, back
in 1954, was mostly staged and performed in vignettes, retaining at least that
much separation from the ongoing world. But it is just this separation that is
now deemed better erased than preserved, leading to efforts that range from the
Summer Academy to the college’s Instagram feed, as if to give the impression
that what separates the college from the outside world is only a window, and
a window more often open than shut. At its worst, this project might be said
to pander or flatter rather than inform or educate; but at its best, it might be
said to make St. John’s finally look like a college rather than a cult. Or to put
the sense of this strategy more generally: it tries to defend liberal education by
locating the place of liberal education within the world rather than apart from
it. —And this is perhaps the most visible way that a liberal education is now
being made a matter of context rather than content.
Back to top
Part Two
By this point in my lecture, however, I think one could make an objection. For
I haven’t yet given any grounds for worrying about any of this. If we have lost
the idea of a liberal art, by making liberal education a matter of context rather
than content, then at most all I have shown so far is that we have lost this
idea deliberately, in what might be called an act of forgetting. So let me now
explain my worry, which the rest of the lecture will try to justify. My worry is
that in losing this idea, more or less deliberately, we risk another loss beyond
our control: which is to lose any way of giving a clear and compelling answer
to the question of what it means to be educated. —Which is to say, an answer
that distinguishes liberal education from any other form of education; and that
sheds any light, in turn, on what is lost in a choice against liberal education,
whatever might be gained. I worry, then, that once the idea of a liberal art is
lost in defense of liberal education, the defense is lost. And once the defense is
8
�lost, liberal education is lost.
To begin to see all this, I want now to revisit the various ways that defenses
of liberal education have made it a matter of context. For example: the basic
set of skills, again separated from subjects, that defenses of liberal education
claim are imparted by it. There is no doubt that learning how to learn, along
with how to read, write, speak, and think, are useful skills; and one might even
grant their necessity for a life lived in freedom. But it is hard to see how these
skills belong to a liberal education rather than to any education. And the more
indispensable these skills sound, the harder it is to conceive them as liberal
rather than remedial. Shouldn’t we already know how to learn, and read, write,
speak, and think, before we go to college?
There are, of course, ways to specify such skills, but they reflect another aspect
of the problem. To recall St. John’s way of doing this, in a liberal education
you learn how to speak articulately, read attentively, reason effectively, think
creatively. But are we we then to believe that you’ll be left speaking inarticulately, reading inattentively, reasoning ineffectively, or thinking uncreatively,
if you choose another kind of education—say, to pursue a degree in computer
programming? This is doubtful. But if so, then what again distinguishes a
liberal education from any education?
The same problem emerges from the attempt to distinguish a liberal education
on higher-sounding grounds. In one of his blogposts, for example, President
Nelson writes: “St. John’s College is the right fit for someone who is seeking
a special sort of education—an education in the arts of freedom, an education
in how to make learning and life their own.” But one could ask how such encompassing terms could distinguish a St. John’s education from any education,
or even from human experience as such. For isn’t the distinction between experience and innocence, or experience and endurance, found in just the kind
of learning, and living, that is necessarily one’s own? Or suppose we take our
bearings from Socrates, and claim that St. John’s will teach you intellectual
courage: how to persevere in the pursuit of knowledge rather than yield in the
face of ignorance. Perhaps St. John’s will, but so then will any field of research
one might pursue, it could be argued, that relies on science to reach its results
rather than superstition. And direct appeals to Socrates, as if the Enlightenment never happened, won’t be enough to distinguish St. John’s in particular,
or liberal education more generally, on the matter of intellectual courage.
But there is a whole other side to this problem. Insofar as it becomes hard to
distinguish a liberal education from any education when it is made a matter
of context, it becomes easy to make a choice against liberal education merely
by wanting an education with content. To consider this problem from one
angle, take the penchant in education nowadays for testing and ranking and
training and specializing. It may be good and even necessary to speak against
all this in defense of liberal education. But this risks the impression that a
liberal education is an education for dilettantes, providing an escape from being
challenged or judged or driven or dedicated. And what can be said to correct
9
�this impression, if in a liberal education, these virtues are matters of context
rather than content? Matters, that is, about which nothing more, really, can
be said, but only shown—where you see such students for yourself? Or even be
such a student yourself? For as one noted defender of liberal education, Andrew
Delbanco, has put it:
One of the difficulties in making the case for liberal education against
the rising tide of skepticism is that it is almost impossible to persuade
doubters who have not experienced it for themselves. The Puritan
founders of our oldest colleges would have called it “such a mystery
as none can read but they that know it.”
This way of putting the problem captures what is potentially self-defeating in
defenses of liberal education that make it a matter of context. For if the point of
any defense is to persuade people to experience liberal education for themselves,
then how can there be a defense that depends on such an experience to be
persuasive?
There are, of course, ways of trying to capture this experience in images, as
I earlier discussed in the case of St. John’s. But this same case reflects the
problem. If we make its education a matter of context, by showing a student
playing croquet, or reading a book on a bench near a tree, or even speaking
with passion and eloquence about how much her education means, we haven’t
yet distinguished St. John’s from any other college where such things might
be said or done—even though St. John’s is unique, in having renounced the
elective system and established an all-required curriculum. But St. John’s is
unique, then, as a matter of content, not context. And something similar by
way of distinction-erasing might be said of the defenses of liberal education more
generally. For if these defenses were products of a liberal education, one might
have expected them to reflect a diversity of views, or an originality of thought.
But so far as these defenses make liberal education a matter of context, and
speak of the kind of skills one needs to flourish in life, it becomes hard not
to speak in platitudes or commonplaces. And indeed these defenses more or
less follow a script: In an ever-changing world, now more than ever, we need
the truly useful arts of a liberal education. Even President Nelson hasn’t quite
managed to liberate himself from this script, even though I regard him as a
gifted writer, who is making the most of the script.
Still, I suspect that those of us devoted to liberal education will need more than
a script to survive. And if my lecture so far is right, this means finding what
we have lost, or recollecting what we have forgotten. So in the time I have left,
I want to sketch one way back to the idea of a liberal art.
Back to top
10
�Part Three
To take the first step back, I want you to imagine that we have shut every
window at St. John’s College, and drawn every curtain; as if St. John’s were
indeed a cult. Or to put this more generously: as if the place of liberal education
were not within the world but apart from it. But why would we believe this? We
would believe it, I think, because of something we believed about the freedom
promised by a liberal education. We would take this freedom to be important
enough, yet fragile enough, to protect its pursuit. We would regard this freedom
as invaluable, then, but not indispensable. A life could be lived, and even lived
well, without it. And this would be why its pursuit would need protection from
the outside world. For it would be a freedom that might well be forgotten in the
living of life; or even dismissed, or denied—for example, in the choice of another
form of education. Or in the quest for power, or the drive to succeed. The kind
of freedom that someone like Meno might not want, but that his slave-boy might
need, to be free at all. The kind of freedom, then, that might be possessed even
by those in chains, or in prison, or in poverty. The kind of freedom we can still
possess at the moment of death, when there is no life left to live. The kind of
freedom you can count on, then, not when you might do anything, but when you
can do nothing. At moments of life when you might be said to need a useless
skill, not a useful one.
But what kind of freedom could this be? The answer takes us a second step
back. For this would be a freedom, I think, that transcends the horizons of life,
and indeed be the freedom it is—perhaps the highest kind there is—in having
no horizons. But what does having no horizons mean? Here is one answer, and
to my mind the best answer: having no horizons means having the truth. And
a liberal education, then, would promise you the truth.
If this promise sounds ridiculous, then good. For if what I have so far argued
is right, then we are better off saying ridiculous things than obvious things in
defense of liberal education. But this promise, you’ll also have to admit, is
one way, and perhaps the simplest way, to claim that a liberal education has
content. And truth might be the only way to understand a content that frees
us rather than binds us. The promise of truth should also sound attractive,
at least if there is any chance to keep the promise. But perhaps you think no
liberal arts college these days would dare to make the promise. Well, you would
be wrong. At the time I write this sentence (which was yesterday), the college
whose curriculum most resembles St. John’s had the slogan “Truth Matters”
emblazoned across its home page. And this same college began its own defense
of liberal education by claiming that “to learn is to discover and grow in the
truth about reality. It is the truth, and nothing less, that sets men free.”
Now, I have to admit that the college in question is Thomas Aquinas. And
perhaps you would tell me their belief in truth is based on their belief in Christ.
I would agree, but hasten to add that St. John’s has a source of its own for
a belief in truth. Which takes us a third step back. For though we may not
11
�have to believe in Christ to believe in truth, perhaps we do have to believe in
Ptolemy.
But what do I mean by a belief in Ptolemy? To explain what I mean, and to
take yet another step back to the idea of a liberal art, I’m going to turn now not
to Ptolemy, but instead to Socrates; and indeed, a Socrates we are all familiar
with, from Plato’s Meno. I do this because if St. John’s can already be said to
believe in anything, it believes in this: you can only learn, truly learn, insofar
as you do this for yourself. But if Socrates’s myth of recollection to Meno can
be believed, then learning for yourself would be impossible, unless you somehow
already possessed whatever you might learn. Which is all but to say: unless
you somehow already had the truth. Of course, we might take this myth to
be merely myth; and one sign of its doubtfulness even at St. John’s can be
glimpsed in what I earlier quoted from a St. John’s graduate, when she claimed
that “We must have intellectual bravery, that is, the courage to push forward,
to continue seeking truth even in the face of doubts about its very existence.”
I think Socrates’s myth is meant to suggest, to the contrary, that all doubts
about truth’s existence are put to rest, as soon as we start to learn.
But I call this a suggestion, because the proof, I suspect, actually lies in
Socrates’s dramatic turn to the slave-boy, and a shift from myth to mathematics. Which brings me to my final step back. For it is in Socrates’s encounter
with the slave-boy, I think, that we can find the lost idea of a liberal art. And
to recover it, I now offer what I call a loose reading of this encounter.
The central question of this episode is: how long, exactly, is the side of an
eight-foot square? (Meno 82e) Now, as you no doubt know, because the line in
question is irrational, there is no answer to the question in terms of feet. But I
prefer to put this a different way. There is an answer, but only insofar as the
answer is made into a matter of research, with a divide-and-conquer approach.
And this is one way to describe the slave-boy’s initial stab at the question, when
he finds that the line in question is between 2 feet and 3 feet in length, before
giving up. (84a) But under one idea of intellectual courage, we could say, we
should not give up. And we could forge ahead, on the slave-boy’s behalf, in
further research, by dividing the 3 foot line even more. And putting the results
in suitably modern terms, we learn that the line in question is between 2.8
and 2.9 feet; then we learn it is between 2.82 and 2.83 feet; then we learn it is
between 2.828 and 2.829 feet. Or to put what we learn still more exactly: the
first number in the length of the line is 2; and the next is 8; and the next is
2; then 8; then 4; then 2; then 7; and so on. There would be no pattern in
the numbers thereby found, but this is what would make every number found
a genuine discovery, which carried us ever farther in truth, leading us from one
learned thing to the next. We could even say we were learning for ourselves,
and persevering in the pursuit of knowledge rather than yielding in the face of
ignorance. And I think this more or less captures the meaning of learning in
what I will call the idea of a field of research, which we have inherited from
modern science.
12
�But again, the slave-boy gives up on this approach at the very first number 2.
And Socrates doesn’t exhort him to keep at it, or show him how to divide the 3
foot line any further. Instead, Socrates says to the slave-boy: if you don’t want
to count the line out, then just show it to me. (84a) —It’s as if Socrates had a
different idea of intellectual courage, a different idea of learning, and a different
idea of how the question should be approached, forming a different discipline
from a field of research. And I think we can already say why. For while you
can certainly make the line in question a matter of research, you thereby put
it out of reach—as a matter of recognition. For there is no end to the numbers
you will find in the divide-and-conquer approach to the line in question. So
you are learning more and more about an object that you will never get to see,
and in that sense, never get to know. We will always be left, as it were, at the
first number we find, with an ever-expanding but never-vanishing horizon at the
latest number we find. Or more simply put, we will be seeking the truth, and
even advancing the truth, but never possessing the truth.
So what idea of approach does Socrates have in mind instead? We can see it
coming-to-be in the very next thing he does with the slave-boy. For the slaveboy is truly stumped, and can’t even show the line in question. For of course it
is not in front of the slave-boy yet; and in his mind, we might say, it is not yet
a matter of recognition, but still a matter of research, even though he’s given
the project up. So in perhaps his one outright act of teaching, giving birth, we
might say, to the very idea of a liberal art, Socrates simply draws the line in
question—erasing at once any remaining horizon of discovery, and showing we
are already in possession of the truth. (85a) And what he does in drawing this
line radically changes what it means for the slave-boy to learn. For this is no
longer to discover any more about the line in question, but instead to recognize
the line in question. Or perhaps I should say recollect the line in question. But
in either formulation, this means seeing that the line Socrates has drawn is
indeed the line in question. And the slave boy does this in yet another act of
recognition, when he sees that the figure Socrates draws, upon the line that he
draws, is indeed the eight-foot square in question.
But let me try to clarify this by generalizing it. Let us suppose that Socrates
has asked the slave-boy a more encompassing question. Such as: “Why do
the heavens move as they do?” One way to answer this question is again to
make it a matter of research, producing fields and even sub-fields of research,
in a divide-and-conquer approach to the question. But this risks putting the
matter beyond the reach of recognition. True, we will learn more and more about
heavenly motions in this approach; but there is no promise that we will ever learn
enough to finally answer the question. And this reflects one way to understand
learning, leading to one interpretation of “astronomy,” that we have inherited
from modern science. But there is still another way to understand learning,
leading to another interpretation of “astronomy,” that we have inherited from
ancient science, and that promises us an answer, in promising us the truth. And
a college like ours is committed to it, I think, if we believe that learning is a
finally a matter of recognition.
13
�So another way of answering the question “Why do the heavens move as they
do?” that we can still call “astronomy,” produces a liberal art. And in this
approach, strange as it may sound, we can simply answer the question, in already
possessing the truth. We don’t even have to stop at one answer: Ptolemy, as
I recall, gives us two—suggesting that the truth is more generous than frugal.
And we don’t even need any telescopes. All we have to do is draw lines just
like Socrates did, that allow us to see, or more exactly see again, the object in
question. Which in this more encompassing case is the motion of the heavens;
hence we have to draw the lines—circles, basically—that allow us to see again,
and in that sense to recognize, the very motions of the heavens we were asking
about. And in this way we can give a true account of these motions, since this
account allows us not simply to explain what we see, as if to move past it, but
to recognize what we see, in a recovery of it.
But now suppose we made the question Socrates asks the slave-boy allencompassing—something like: “Why is the world the way it is?” In one
approach—let us call this a technical education—we would be led into ever-more
numerous fields of research to answer the question, with no promise that we
will ever recover the world by the end, in an act of recognition. But in another
approach—let us call this a liberal education—we would be led to seven liberal
arts to answer the question, where this recovery of the world in an act of
recognition is precisely the point. And this is why, I think, these antique seven
arts might still be said to form a whole, that gives a truly liberal education its
content.
But let me say one final thing in this spirit of recollection on behalf of St. John’s
College. Let us suppose that the truth is very generous. So generous, that when
we ask the question “Why is the world the way it is?” there is not just one
answer, or two answers, or seven answers, but something closer to a hundred.
And let us suppose that the lines that might be drawn to produce this hundred
are drawn, not to form squares, or circles, but letters; and that the letters are
suitably arranged in words, sentences, paragraphs, to compose what we might
call “books.” Any of the hundred so-called books, in that case, would allow us
to recover the world in an act of recognition. And we could recognize the world
in such a book, by reading it with the same generosity possessed by the truth.
The book would be inescapably be full of content, in being inescapably full of
truth. These are the books I think we read at the college, and believe in. And
in being full of truth, they give, to any conversation at the college that brings
them to life, a purpose, and a point, beyond that life; proving there is more,
even to life, than life. Truth.
14
�Acknowledgment
Much of the thinking in this lecture is indebted to Barbara McClay. So I wanted
to thank her for that, and dedicate the lecture to her. For more on her own
defense of liberal education, which is much better than the defenses I discuss
here, see:
“In Defense of Liberal Arts”
“ ‘What is Liberal Education For?’: A Preview”
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Contributor
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
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paper
Page numeration
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15 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture delivered on July 8, 2015 by Daniel Harrell as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
Mr. Harrell is a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis. His talk delves into the conversation surrounding the liberal arts education. In particular, he examines this argument through certain calls for "relevance" as well as the truth of the liberal arts in general. He further meditates on the relationship between the liberal arts and the world at large, and those tensions and rewards offered by a student of the liberal arts.
Creator
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Harrell, Daniel
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
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2015-07-08
Rights
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A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a copy of my typescript available online."
Type
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text
Format
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pdf
Language
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English
Identifier
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Bib # 82742
Relation
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<a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/275">Audio recording</a>
Subject
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Education, Humanistic
Education
St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.)
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
Tutors
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