Liberal education

“ Both Civilisation and Education are the handmaids of Religion, but, each in its place, and the one may not thrust herself into the office of the other. It is a gain, any way, that we are within sight of giving to all members of the working classes notwithstanding their limited opportunities that stability of mind and magnanimity of character which are the proper outcome and the unfailing test of a Liberal Education ”

“ We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. ”

“ It is not just a play on words to say that the aim of liberal education is to make men free, and for this reason democracy must sustain and extend liberal education or perish, since democracy is the society of free men. ”

“ For education keeps the key of life, and a liberal education insures the first conditions of freedom, viz., adequate knowledge and accustomed thought. ”

“ A liberal education is that education which makes a man an intellectual freeman, as opposed to that which makes a man a tool, an instrument for the accomplishment of some ulterior aim or object. The aim of the liberal education of any period is the right use of the realized capital of extant knowledge of that period, for the training of the whole, or only of some privileged part of the rising generation, to act the part and perform the duties of free, intellectual, and moral beings. ”

“ One of the interesting things about liberal education is that it leaves out of the view altogether the question how anyone can directly make money out of it. We boast in our own time that mind is monarch, that we analyze things before we do them; and yet we give ourselves away in every discussion of this particular thing, and show that we have not analyzed it at all. When we discuss what the elements of a practical training are, and what the elements of a liberal training are, the advocates of a practical training all, you will find, include mathematics in their list of studies. ”

“ But none is the direct result of liberal education, though we may hope that liberal education does not oppose the acquisition and possession of some, if not all, of them. The direct product of liberal education is a good mind, well disciplined in its processes of inquiring and judging, knowing and understanding, and well furnished with knowledge, well cultivated by ideas. ”

“ It is undoubtedly easier to think soundly about liberal education if you are preparing to give it only to the few who are favored in natural endowments or economic position. But democracy is right and we must solve the problem of giving to everyone the sort of college education that is most readily given to the favored few. ”

“ Since I have admitted that our ancestors did not succeed in practice despite their sound conceptions, does it matter, then, that our institutions are dominated by misconceptions and confused theories of what liberal education should be? ”

“ But we may hope for better things. We may, some of us, live even to see liberal education divest herself of exclusive restrictions and eighteenth century idealism and walk hand in hand with twentieth century progress ”

“ No education can be "free" which leaves the child no choice, or which gives a bias against any honorable occupation; which walls up the avenues of approach to any vocation requiring intelligence and skill, A truly liberal education educates equally for all spheres of usefulness ”

“ Certainly a liberal education does manifest itself in a courtesy, propriety, and polish of word and action, which is beautiful in itself, and acceptable to others; but it does much more. It brings the mind into form,—for the mind is like the body. ”

“ But it is certainly true that with a liberal education its avenues are more largely open that without it, and that such an education is apt to inspire those who have profited by it with a sense of the sacredness of true conviction which scorns the betrayal of it for mere personal advantage. ”

“ For myself, whether an education in the classic languages and in the classic literature should or should not be discarded from the education of the noble youth of the country is the question whether [Pg 468] it is worth while in the advancing and strenuous life of modern times that men should have a liberal education. For be sure that there is no trait in that education that entitles it to the name of liberal more sure and more valuable than this education in the literature, in the history, in the language of the great men of the ages past. ”

“ Liberal education aims to give the student a conscious realization of his powers, without reference to material advantage through their use in a given occupation or profession. Through liberal education the student acquires ideas of universal interest and essential character. ”

“ Disregarding, therefore, accidental, partial and temporary phases of liberal education, we note, in the first place, that in styling an education liberal we thereby associate it with liberalism in politics, in philosophy and theology, and in men's personal relations to each other. ”

“ The history of our errors in regard to liberal education is a very plain one. They are the legacy of the mother-country from which we came, a mother-country which is just beginning to correct her own errors, even by the light of our limited experience. I wish to point out and emphasize the fact that republicanism revolutionizes our very conception of liberal education. All forms of liberal education of the past, and preeminently the one we borrowed from England, were forms of exclusive class-education. ”

“ Provision must be made for thorough training that will direct the labor which produces the fruits of the earth. Thus to broaden the scope of liberal education it must be divested of all aristocratic limitations and rendered sufficiently democratic to meet the wants of the sons of toil. ”

“ Every man and woman will have received a liberal education; life will no longer discount the ideas and aims of the schoolroom, and, if according to the Platonic saying, “Knowledge is virtue,” knowledge informed by religion, we shall see even in our own day how righteousness exalteth a nation. ”

“ It is true that many men do, by force of natural ability or by other natural and acquired advantages, obtain distinguished positions in society or political life without such education, but they are the exceptions, and, as a rule, the only one point which all prominent men, in society and politics, of all classes and opinions, have in common, is their liberal education. ”

“ The first led us to suppose that the liberal education which our ancestors advocated was essentially aristocratic in theory as well as in practice, and so prompted the false conclusion that there must be some other theory of liberal education more appropriate to a democratic society. ”

“ To supply such alleviations—to afford to our citizens who are engaged in the employment of active life an opportunity of keeping up, or of renewing their acquaintance with those great branches of knowledge which form the staple of a liberal education—is the object which this Institution has especially at heart. Its aim is to lift you, at times, above the distractions of your worldly cares, and the pursuit of your professional interests, by spreading before you man's fairer heritage of wisdom and of truth ”

“ It would be very difficult, too, at any one time to give a definition of a "liberal" education which would satisfy every one, still more difficult to give one which would hold good for a hundred years. ”

“ Since every normal being is born with an intelligence that can be disciplined and cultivated—with some degree of capacity for developing a good mind—everyone can be and should be given a liberal education to an extent that equals his capacity. ”

“ The rudiments of all those studies must be reckoned as the most valuable of all the elements of general elementary training, which, in their higher departments, and after liberal culture, diverging in various directions, form the substance of professional knowledge, both that of those professions now reckoned, and of all those hereafter to be reckoned liberal. For, what should liberal education be but the preparatory general stage for that work of life which all honest callings and professions carry on in diverse directions afterward? ”

“ Of such strands are formed the cord which binds society; and one of the main purposes of a [78] ‘liberal education for all’ is to form links between high and low, rich and poor, the classes and the masses, in the strong sympathy of common knowledge. The Public Schools have arrived at this through the medium of the classics; an occasional ‘tag’ from Horace moves and unites the House of Commons, not only through the urbane thought of the poet but because it is a key to a hundred associations. ”

“ The facts are the crude raw material of the mind, and for the process of training one fact will do as well as another of the same kind.
A liberal education should have the elements of modern learning in it. ”

“ To the list of studies which the sixteenth century called liberal, I would therefore add as studies of equal rank, English, French, German, history, political economy, and natural science, not one of which can be said to have existed in mature form when the definition of liberal education, which is still in force, was laid down. ”

“ Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentlemen, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life;—these are the [pg 121] connatural qualities of a large knowledge; ”

“ The false liberalism of which I speak is nowhere more dominant than among our professional educators, our teachers colleges, and our college faculties. The vicious circle of reciprocal causality is nowhere more manifest than in our educational system. Our educators are themselves the products of our schools and colleges and their liberalism signifies the extent to which our institutions have failed to accomplish liberal education. ”

“ The distinction represents a remnant of aristocratic feeling, and springs from the idea that it is the duty of the educated, as a higher class, to take a paternal care for the masses; not the duty of the people, as a self-governing community, to give itself a liberal education. One cannot well see a higher function to be performed by the people, acting as a body, than to promote, by public action, its own higher education. ”

“ But though ignominiously and unjustly excluded from the seats of learning, and driven to the expedient of providing at a great expense for scientific education among ourselves, we have had this advantage, that our institutions, being formed in a more enlightened age, are more liberal and therefore better calculated to answer the purpose of a truly liberal education. ”

“ But you make the mistake of overlooking the fact that a liberal education can only be secured by years of training in school, from the kindergarten to the college, and should be accompanied by the elevating influences of the home and cultured society, and followed by a life of [Pg 48] study and experience in the higher walks of life, before the average man can be reasonably expected to rise above the plane of mere physical existence, and act from the high intellectual and moral impulses which impel the most cultivated and elevated characters. ”

“ In every generation a small number of persons managed to get liberally educated, even as today a few can, in spite of bad schools and teachers. Learning has always been hard; thinking always painful; and the flesh always weak, weak in the teacher as well as the student.
The chief difference between ourselves and our ancestors is that they, for the most part, talked sense about liberal education, whereas we for the most part—I mean our leading educators—do not. ”

“ I think it does matter because I still have hope that the difficulties in practice can be overcome, that education can achieve a greater measure of success in fact than history has yet evidenced. To make this hope come true, we must think as soundly about liberal education as our ancestors, and beyond that we must remedy their deficiencies or rectify their errors in practice. But unless we start by setting ourselves straight on the level of theory, we shall certainly go backward rather than forward on the level of practice. ”

“ This is what liberal education does for the physician, the lawyer, the minister, and the scientist. This is what it can do also for the man of business; to give a mental power is one of the main ends of the higher education. Is not active business a field in which mental power finds full play? Again, education imparts knowledge, and who has greater need to know economics, history, and natural science than the man of large business?
Further, liberal education develops a sense of right, duty, and honor ”

“ When I say that American education has failed to achieve liberal ends by liberal means—and is still moving in the wrong direction—I appeal for support to the obvious facts with which we are all acquainted. ”