Liberal Education and Democracy
By Bob Pepperman Taylor.
Notre Dame Press, 2025.
Hardcover, 208 pages, $40.
Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl.
Ater an even 100 pages, Professor Taylor arrives at the conclusion to his very fine Liberal Education and Democracy. It reads as follows:
I have suggested that we find at least three partially plausible arguments in support of liberal education: (1) the cultivation of skills, practices, and intellectual habits that will be advantageous when students enter the work force; (2) the development of understandings and commitments that will encourage good and responsible citizenship; (3) the promotion of opportunities for clarity of philosophical insight and aesthetic delight. No liberal education can guarantee that a student will gain any of these values let alone all three. A comprehensive and ambitious program of liberal learning will aim nonetheless to achieve some level of success on all three counts.
My argument at the beginning is not meant to detract from Professor Taylor’s fine book, which is wide-ranging and, to use Matthew Arnold’s phrase, “disinterested.” If one casts a wider net, however, the conversation might become a bit more frayed. For example, if one were to read the prefatory pages to a book titled The Political Consciousness, where the author argues that we need no longer read Augustine since his works (and numerous other classics) are no longer applicable to us. Rather, the purpose of a liberal education is the creation of a new vanguard of interpretation which is to politicize. Such a view poses a serious threat to free inquiry, traditional values, and mainstream beliefs, which, if not enriched, are likely to diminish.
There’s more to this net casting. To be retired largely means to be outside the quarreling rooms which have been summoned by one or another administrative bureaucracy to conduct yet one more “self-study,” producing nothing. Apart from this experience, I recall a conference in which one session was devoted to what was then in vogue, “multiculturalism,” which may have morphed into diversity or something else. The idea was that within a single society or institution, say a college, diverse cultures, races, and ethnicities coexist. The groups should be treated with equal respect, which meant that different minorities should maintain their unique identities rather than assimilating into a dominant culture.
One participant offered the point of view that the institutional reality we live in is by analogy like that of a snooker table. The speaker was using the analogy to “game” a theory in a certain way. Each snooker ball is by analogy an ethnicity marked by color. When the game is being played well, the snooker balls violently smack into each other, which suggests that the game is violent and/or snookering to its opponents. And it’s true, those snooker balls smack one another around.
If snookering is the nature of reality, then the purpose of a liberal education in a democracy is to institutionalize violence as legitimate action. And to institutionalize is to teach, which means in this “game” theory to teach that violence is a legitimate response. Well, that was one too many for me, and so in passing I asked if the same was true when playing croquet. And then slumped my way out and into the corridor depressingly.
Let us turn to Professor Taylor’s argument that liberal education and American democratic traditions inform and influence one another, usually without violence. Following a prescient preface, he draws inferences from Plato’s Republic and “sympathetic listening.” It’s a powerful moment in the dialogue since the dialogue aims at change and questions how change can occur if the audience won’t listen to Polemarchus. It turns out to be a powerful notion since if there’s no listening, how can an auditor consider the positions of those who speak? And more so when Thrasymachus insists that the whole business with conversation is a test of power rather than a mutual seeking after truth, which can only be had by engaging in good faith in this searching after agreement. The point is that Socrates was aiming at democratic stability. Alas, one of the world’s great democracies and one of the world’s first great philosophers were (and this pains me) unsuccessful. The hinting here is pessimistic, with the democracy having given itself over to force and power.
Liberal education originated with the idea of education for political freedom, and this freedom is contrasted with both the politics of brute force and the practical demands on those without the resources for leisure. It’s evident that there is a certain kind of education that children must be given, not because it is useful or necessary, but because it is noble and suitable for a free person. These educated free persons who understand have a hefty requirement asked of them, drawn from the rubric “we the people,” which is to stand as safeguards for order and liberty. If such an education is a mission statement vouched by the commonwealth, then the people of the commonwealth are the safeguards of order and liberty.
And yet Professor Taylor’s first chapter ends with a “wonder” as to whether such a liberal education can be produced or persist. He quotes historian Jill Lepore, “Can a political society really be governed by reflection and election, by reason and truth, rather than by accidents and violence, by prejudice and deceit? . . . This question in every kind of weather is the question of American history.” Thus the degree to which our politics is reduced to force and fraud is the degree to which we must clearly and frankly recognize this development for what it is: an assault upon the promise of our democracy, and on the intellectual virtues and practices upon which democracy must rest.
Professor Taylor transitions then into a chapter titled “Action” and again to the Socratic dialogue in the Republic, especially when Glaucon and Socrates, student and interlocutor, discuss the kind of education provided for the philosophically inclined citizens of the polis. Glaucon founders as he considers the difficult idea that practicality isn’t a primary educational concern. He thinks education is training for the world at large rather than studying useless subjects, which are really no education at all. The same argument is found centuries later in Baconian utilitarianism, which holds that the only knowledge that matters is that which produces power over our natural and material world, which has little to do with the argument that the unexamined life is not worth living. At issue, then, is the almost unassailable fact that the practical is on the ascendant and the liberal has been assigned to the ivory tower.
What we find today is the product of the Progressive Era and John Dewey’s argument that educational practices should serve the interests of an emerging technological society, and anything apart from that is just wrongheaded. Dewey’s educational reformers attacked what they considered to be the stultifying conventions and attitudes of those who were holding on to their ivory tower conventions and attitudes, none of which provided an education relevant to the modern economic world and an emerging industrial society.
What emerges is the divide that haunts colleges and universities to this day: those with a humanist emphasis on literary culture and classical languages on one side of the divide and technical learning on the other side. Then, letting the cat out of the bag, Professor Taylor argues that this divide separates the powerful ruling class and subordinates the laboring class, which one might paraphrase as the separation of the haves from the have-nots. Dewey called it democratization. Science would meet the democratic challenge, whereas conventional humanists who have been distrustful of the forces of modern science would become a dead, mind-crushing burden far removed from the real problems and demands of the current society.
Professor Taylor concludes this chapter with this caveat,
…we would do well to heed [warnings] about turning the enterprise of liberal learning into little more than training workers for the modern economy. The danger is that these vocational concerns can distract us from other essential, even more essential, components of liberal education.
In other words, this is language from a different kind of talk than “skills-talk.”
Chapter 3, titled “Virtue,” surveys distinguished scholars who defend and challenge the view that liberal learning should be restricted to a select few and requires a special disposition to receive it. To hold this view, however, is to misunderstand what is studied and the goal of such study in liberal education. On the contrary, what a liberal education aims for is not only to think about “truth” but also exposure to books and ideas, art, music, and science—the array of cultural artifacts that illuminate our shared condition.
Here he cites philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who argues that we need to educate people’s souls. But Professor Taylor also cites Stanley Fish, who argues that the pursuit of knowledge is a form of pleasure valuable in itself. And there are others who rise to offer a constructive alternative to Dewey, including Robert Hutchins and Leo Strauss. Dewey’s contemporary, Alexander Meiklejohn, was deeply skeptical of Dewey’s pragmatic moral theory and his own idealism. The schism is interesting when Dewey rejects any dualism between mind and body, whereas Meiklejohn insists that dualism is a precondition for moral life. A body alone cannot generate moral principles. Dewey’s mistake was his failure to separate Man from Nature.
Taylor’s biggest concern appears as he nears his conclusion and is not so much that the humanities envy the sciences but that the humanities are largely responsible for their own destruction. He writes, “…perhaps the very project of thinking about our values—a project at the heart of the arts and humanities broadly conceived—is either feared or no longer widely valued in our society….there is a powerful and increasingly unselfconscious utilitarianism at work.” There is also his concern with our moral self-righteousness, which may imperil our democratic ideals and threaten democracy itself with a certain kind of messianic delusion. While you’re at it, read Professor Taylor’s Citizenship and Democratic Doubt: The Legacy of Progressive Thought as a book end to this fine volume.
Daniel James Sundahl is Emeritus Professor in English and American Studies at Hillsdale College where he taught for thirty-three years.
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