Mr. Hutchins as Prophet

For a generation Robert M. Hutchins has been calling educational sinners to repentance, and no man can fairly deny that he has been a major prophet of our time. What has raised him to this high eminence is a peculiarly clear grasp of the relationship between liberal education and the practice of democratic government. Although this relationship requires no complex demonstration, the American people have yet to see it, if we are to judge by their educational choices and expenditures. Liberal education is specifically the education of the man and the citizen. In a democratic state the common citizen is vested with the ultimate power of decision; his is the final determination of policies which affect him in the unit and the mass. And, hopefully or ominously, there is no higher court of appeal; if he votes himself trouble, he cannot, according to the theory at least, expect to be saved by a more knowing elite. This being the case, there is no excuse for not training him as a thinking man. He needs for his career as a citizen those disciplines which train the mind in the interpretation of evidence and the discrimination of alternatives. He needs some knowledge of history because being a provincial in time is at least as dangerous as being a provincial in space. In sum: he needs initiation into the habit of philosophy. That courses in history, literature, mathematics, logic and rhetoric will provide this, whereas courses in truck-driving, drum-majoring, cosmetology and even nuclear physics will not, should need preaching only to a misled or perverse generation.

In Great Books: the Foundation of a Liberal Education (New York: Simon and Schuster, $3.00) Mr. Hutchins returns to this theme with a few fresh applications. The Great Books conserve the intellectual and spiritual tradition of the West; they are centrally related to liberal education; their “infinite suggestiveness” makes them better suited to study by adults than by the young; and a recovery of their wisdom is the best means—perhaps indeed the only means—of finding a basis of understanding with the renascent East. Again, as one can see, he is looking at the larger perils of our cultural crisis, and he is laying it on the line.

RW

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Richard M. Weaver

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For a generation Robert M. Hutchins has been calling educational sinners to repentance, and no man can fairly deny that he has been a major prophet of our time. What has raised him to this high eminence is a peculiarly clear grasp of the relationship between liberal education and the practice of democratic government. Although this relationship requires no complex demonstration, the American people have yet to see it, if we are to judge by their educational choices and expenditures. Liberal education is specifically the education of the man and the citizen. In a democratic state the common citizen is vested with the ultimate power of decision; his is the final determination of policies which affect him in the unit and the mass. And, hopefully or ominously, there is no higher court of appeal; if he votes himself trouble, he cannot, according to the theory at least, expect to be saved by a more knowing elite. This being the case, there is no excuse for not training him as a thinking man. He needs for his career as a citizen those disciplines which train the mind in the interpretation of evidence and the discrimination of alternatives. He needs some knowledge of history because being a provincial in time is at least as dangerous as being a provincial in space. In sum: he needs initiation into the habit of philosophy. That courses in history, literature, mathematics, logic and rhetoric will provide this, whereas courses in truck-driving, drum-majoring, cosmetology and even nuclear physics will not, should need preaching only to a misled or perverse generation.

In Great Books: the Foundation of a Liberal Education (New York: Simon and Schuster, $3.00) Mr. Hutchins returns to this theme with a few fresh applications. The Great Books conserve the intellectual and spiritual tradition of the West; they are centrally related to liberal education; their “infinite suggestiveness” makes them better suited to study by adults than by the young; and a recovery of their wisdom is the best means—perhaps indeed the only means—of finding a basis of understanding with the renascent East. Again, as one can see, he is looking at the larger perils of our cultural crisis, and he is laying it on the line.