The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders, by Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle (Kansas, 360 pp., $35)
THE AMERICAN founders believed that a moral or civic education was necessary in the new republic. Drawing on a variety of irreconcilable sources—classical, Calvinist, and Enlightenment—they differed on fundamental issues, yet their implicit debate was of a depth and seriousness that puts present-day discussions of education to shame. We are in the debt of Lorraine and Thomas Pangle for so deftly weaving the founders’ thought into a rich and smoothly flowing dialogue. Words now over two centuries old are never allowed to seem quaint but are brought vividly to life. Writings that influenced the founders and with which they assumed familiarity—Xenophon’s Cyrus, Addison’s Cato, Milton’s “On Education,” Montesquieu on honor, Locke on the social contract—are concisely but clearly explained. Nor is the topic limited to formal schooling: the founders asked whether the Constitution itself, political participation and jury duty, agrarian self-sufficiency or commerce, a free press, or the churches would provide the education in freedom we need. The Pangles have tacitly made one question central to their book: whether a democratic republic can long survive if it imparts to its citizens no goal higher than self-interest.—Thomas Short
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