So I’ve been asked here and there to say more about the content of liberal education. I keep saying, after all, that real education is more about content than a method of acquiring skills and competencies such as critical thinking or collaborative learning. Below is a test I am giving today in my general-education honors section on Democracy and Its Friendly Critics. The texts involved are part of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and the essays (by Leon Kass, Ronald Bailey, Larry Arnhart, Lee Silver, Ronald Green, and others of that pay grade) in Sean Sutton, ed., Biotechnology.

I’m still for in-class tests, in addition to papers and such, because it’s through tests that all the students are held accountable for coming to terms with the same content.

Maybe you’ll have to agree that if you could demonstrate your ability to be engaged in a genuinely informed way with all the below you’d be well on your way to being liberally educated. Liberal education includes, of course, being able to connect perennial theoretical and theological concerns to the real questions of public policy and character development we face today

Write pithy and pointed essays in response to four of the following:

  1. Describe what Tocqueville says about aristocracy in America in the last chapter of volume one of Democracy in America. Focus on both strengths and weaknesses. Conclude with a few thoughts on the possible resource of the South in thinking about the limitations of middle-class America.
  2. Describe what Tocqueville says about our Puritan founders in the second chapter of the first part of Democracy in America. Focus on both strengths and weaknesses. Conclude with a few thoughts about deploying our Puritan tradition in thinking about the limitations of middle-class America.
  3. Describe the promise of biotechnology when it comes to death. Give an argument for pursuing that objective with all means available. Give the argument “for death” as a kind of gift that makes life worth living. Conclude with your own view (which might be a point of view not covered by those two arguments and might have something to do with religion). Draw from and mention the names of the authors of the relevant chapters.
  4. Describe the promise of biotechnology when it comes to moods or “happiness.” Give an argument for pursuing that objective by all means available. Give an argument for sticking with our “natural moods” and even misery. Conclude with your own view (which might, of course, be a third view). Draw from and mention the names of the authors of the relevant chapters.
  5. Describe how both nature and religion might be used as standards to evaluate biotechnological transformation. Give the argument that nature is enough. Give the argument that religion is indispensable. Conclude with your own view (which might be about going with neither nature nor religion or about drawing from both). Draw from and mention the names of the authors of the relevant chapters.
  6. Make up and answer a question that shows that you clearly understand the extent to which Tocqueville anticipated “the era of biotechnology” as an outcome of the progress of democracy. What didn’t he anticipate and why?