Liberal Education and the Recovery of Culture – By Roger Kimball (Real Clear Politics) / Oct 18 2020
COMMENTARY
Politics, as the late Andrew Breitbart once observed, is downstream from culture. In the United States, a primary engine of culture is the educational establishment. Since the late 1960s, it has been anything but an ivory tower, a quiet, semi-cloistered redoubt deliberately subsisting at one remove from partisan passions. On the contrary, the educational establishment—and this goes for primary and secondary education as well as for colleges—has incorporated those partisan passions as part of its raison d’être.
The chief issue is this: should our institutions of higher education be devoted primarily to the education of citizens—or should they be laboratories for social and political experimentation? Traditionally, a liberal arts education involved both character formation and learning. The goal was to produce men and women who (as Allan Bloom put it) had reflected thoughtfully on the question “‘What is man?’ in relation to his highest aspirations as opposed to his low and common needs.” Since the 1960s, however, colleges and universities have more and more been home to what Lionel Trilling called the “adversary culture” of intellectuals. The goal was rejection, not reflection.
The key issue, I hasten to add, is not partisan politics per se but rather the subordinating of intellectual life to non-intellectual—that is, political—imperatives. “The greatest danger,” the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski wrote in “What Are Universities For?” “is the invasion of an intellectual fashion which wants to abolish cognitive criteria of knowledge and truth itself. . . . The humanities and social sciences have always succumbed to various fashions, and this seems inevitable. But this is probably the first time that we are dealing with a fashion, or rather fashions, according to which there are no generally valid intellectual criteria.”
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