The Higher Learning

"Why is it that the chief characteristic of the higher learning is disorder? It is because there is no ordering principle in it. Certainly the principle of freedom in the current sense of that word will not unify it. In the current use of freedom it is an end in itself. But it must be clear that if each person has the right to make and achieve his own choices the result is anarchy and the dissolution of the whole." Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America

BK: Hutchins is referring to the system of electives that allows students to choose what courses they will take. His point actually brings up several issues.

The problem is not that freedom is an end in itself. The problem arises from a fundamental tension between liberty and belonging to an institution. What may the institution dictate and what ought to be left to the choices of individuals? This leads to the second issue.

Failure to adequately map out the boundaries between institution and individual can be a disaster. Here students have liberty but do not understand what liberty is; and neither does the institution. Here is where Hutchins is right: Institutions that try to give too much liberty to students find themselves in a quandary. Why should any decision be denied to students, including institutional choices? (This problem also rears its head in shallow understandings of Democracy)The institution cannot allow this. Students do not understand why. Campus unrest ensues because neither the administrators nor students understand the realm and limits of freedom. I submit, the campus unrest of the 60's was a direct result of failure to even try to understand the proper role of liberty. This leads us to the third issue.

Hutchins assumes that freedom is letting students and faculty do whatever they want. This cannot serve as an organizing principle of the higher learning. What could, though, is the principle of freedom understood as the study of individual liberty within and between various institutions. Here what orders the higher learning is a proper understanding of the realm and limits of liberty combined with how it may be legitimately enjoyed. This need not be the entire curriculum, but it could be a powerful unifying element tying together students' earlier theoretical studies with their later choices of a profession. Hutchins' own advocacy of the great books provides no such tie and it comes as no surprise that he thinks professionalism does not belong in the university. Here he is consistent, but he fails to realize that even a curriculum of great books does not really provide a unifying principle. It must be the ideas in those books, and one of those ideas is surely liberty.

The Purpose of Education

Much maligned, but seldom read, Herbert Spencer on education:

" How to live? - that is the essential question for us. Not how to live in the mere material sense only, but in the widest sense. The general problem which comprehends every special problem is - the right ruling of conduct in all directions under all circumstances. In what way to treat the body; in what way to treat the mind; in what way to manage our affairs; in what way to bring up a family; in what way to behave as a citizen; in what way to utilize all those sources of happiness which nature supplies - how to use all our faculties to the greatest advantage of ourselves and others - how to live completely? And this being the great thing needful for us to learn, is, by consequence, the great thing which education has to teach. To prepare us for complete living is the function which education has to discharge; and the only rational mode of judging of any educational course is, to judge in what degree it discharges such function." - Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical


BK: This is what liberal arts education has forgotten. Colleges struggle to find a mission. Departments focus on their disciplines and denigrate other fields as second class knowledge. This author has done it in his less thoughtful moments. To communicate how our specialties fit into the broader picture, though, is the task for the undergraduate educator. This is the challenge for Liberty Studies as well: to explore how and when liberty is essential for the good life, while acknowledging that it is not the only component of living completely.