Climbing Parnassus - 1 - Liberal Arts and the Humanities
Chapter One
Quote
Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless. Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favours. Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demands for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death. - C.S. Lewis
Notes
🔥 Liberal education and humanities are both distant descendants of classical education, but they are not well defined. They are sometimes a name we give for wandering around different subjects.
🔥 The great books curriculum is part of this flavour of education, studying the "best that has been thought and said."
🔥 With liberal arts or the humanities or classical education, they are aiming at something higher than training for a job, or acquiring knowledge. It's about cultivating wisdom and understanding.
🔥 Liberal means "free." One possible sense of that freedom is that this education "sets the mind free from servitude to the crowd." But it's also a freedom that comes from hard work and requires discipline to attain. ("Discipline precedes the freedom.")
🔥 It's also about the search for the "good life", or "the good." Things are not called good because of a majority vote. See C.S. Lewis quote at the top.
🔥 "Knowledge is to be sought for its own sake, irrespective of immediate or material gain. Any other attitude to knowledge betrays the servile mind."
🔥 Classical education is a way of transmitting culture. Passing on our values. There is not enough importance placed in modern education on instilling a common culture, or a shared culture, things that can connect us as a society or a culture.
🔥 Education is vocational, but it also should teach you how to be a good citizen, and about the deep, meaningful questions of life. It should set high moral ideals for us to aim at.
🔥 For the Greeks and the Romans, the liberal arts were the arts of leisure. But leisure had a different meaning than it does now. It referred to "arts reckoned conducive to the contemplative or reflective life," to an expansive freedom of mind. As opposed to the servile arts, ie labour. They wanted to cultivate higher moral minds and push back against "unbridled appetites."
🔥 The Greeks and Romans also believed that morality is rational and that it can be discovered. It's not subjective.
🔥 The goal of education was happiness and "health of soul." This required self-control, control over the appetites, self-restraint. These were all prerequisites before you could be a ruler in society.
🔥 Music was also important in education. It "forms the spirit."
🔥 It's about teaching students to "like the right things." Again, it's not democratic, and it's not about your opinion. It's about developing an appreciation and an understanding of the great books and ideas that have been handed down.
🔥 The roots of classical education are in Greece and Rome. Isocrates was a central figure. They stressed the importance of having a common culture, and even of having an elite to cultivate it. There was also the importance, and centrality, of books.
🔥 "Education should preserve and transmit the past so that cultural memory is lengthened, and so that descendants will not be left to rediscover human truths already endured and expressed by eloquent forebears."
🔥 Training in rhetoric was another important goal of education. "Those who give most study to the art of words are the best statesmen."
🔥 In contrast, our civilization may be technologically accomplished, but not civilized or cultured.
Thoughts
Back in the introduction, it talked about how the way we design education has implicit assumptions of what we believe about human nature, as well as the things we ought to know.
There seem to be some assumptions within classical education about equality. It's interesting how classical education can come across as elitist or arrogant in that it thinks it knows what the good books are, or what true beauty is, or what the good life is. I think modern education puts more emphasis on allowing people to figure that out for themselves.
There's another interesting assumption to see in that difference, too. Modern education perhaps assumes that students will be able to make good judgments about what "the good life" is (or beauty, truth, etc) on their own, and informed by their own experience. Classical education assumes that students need to be directed. At least directed on where to look. They won't naturally gravitate to "good" things. And we need to be intentional about cultivating that good taste and appreciation and knowledge of the good books and the great works.
It can come across as a bit arrogant, elitist, maybe authoritarian? How can anyone know what true beauty is?
But, there's a reason these books are the classics. There's a reason they've been preserved and renewed for so many years.
Maybe it's another kind of arrogance to dismiss these books as irrelevant or unimportant. Maybe there's some healthy humility in a classical education in standing before all that has come before, all the things we've inherited, and learning to appreciate and understand them, before we jump to forming our own opinions. And that can help tune up or raise our standards for what a good book or a good idea or a good life can be.