Education for Freedom
Robert Maynard Hutchins
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U., 1943)

passages selected by Adam Kissel

Now the things we want are good things. First, we want our private and individual good, our economic well-being. We want food, clothing, and shelter, and a chance for our children. Second, we want the common good: peace, order, and justice. But most of all we want a third order of good, our personal or human good. We want, that is, to achieve the limit of our moral, intellectual, and spiritual powers. This personal, human good is the highest of all the goods we seek. As the private good, which is our individual economic interest, is subordinate to the common good, which is the interest of the community, so the common good is subordinate to our personal and human good and must be ordered to it. Any state in which the common good is sacrificed to private interests, or in which the moral, intellectual, and spiritual good of the citizens is sacrificed to the political organization is not a state. It is a fraud subsisting by force. 88-89

We must first determine what ideals we wish to propose for our country. I would remind you that what is honored in a country will be cultivated there. I suggest that the ideal that we should propose for the United States is the common good as determined in the light of reason. If we set this ideal before us, what are the consequences to the educational system? It is clear that the cultivation of the intellect becomes the first duty of the system. And the question, then, is how can the system go about its task? The only way in which the ideal proposed could ever be accepted by our fellow-citizens and by the education system would be by the gradual infiltration of this notion throughout the country. This can be accomplished only by beginning. If one college and one university--and only one--are willing to take a position contrary to the prevailing American ideology and suffer the consequences, then conceivably, over a long period of time, the character of our civilization may change.
     I am asking you to think, therefore, what one college and one university might do to establish for the country and the educational system the ideal of the common good as determined in the light of reason. I suggest again that the primary object of institutions with this aim will be the cultivation of the intellectual virtues. I suggest that the cultivation of the intellectual virtues can be accomplished through the communication of our intellectual tradition and through training in the intellectual disciplines. This means understanding the great thinkers of the past and present, scientific, historical, and philosophical. It means a grasp of the disciplines of grammar, logic, and mathematics; reading, writing, and figuring. It does not, of course, mean the exclusion of contemporary materials. They should be brought in daily to illustrate, confirm, or deny the ideas held by the writers under discussion. 59-60

But we know that the United States is not a country devoted to the achievement of the common good through reason. We know that we are a people devoted to the acquisition of material goods by any means not too outrageous. What will be the fate, then, of our graduates? They will be, in my opinion, as well equipped for financial success as our graduates are today. But they may not want it; and they should be quite unwilling to use some popular methods of attaining it.
     I am afraid, therefore, that I am proposing some notable sacrifices on the altar of reform. The first few generations of graduates of my educational system might suffer the same fate as the martyrs of the early church. They might be that phenomenon horrible to American eyes, financial failures. Yet it is possible that if the one college and the one university for which I hope could persevere, the blood of martyrs might prove to be the seed of an enlightened nation. Like the early church this ideal college and this ideal university might gain strength, power, and influence. They might slowly alter the aspirations of our people. They might become a light to this country, and through it to the world. 63-64

The liberal arts are the arts of freedom. To be free a man must understand the tradition in which he lives. A great book is one which yields up through the liberal arts a clear and important understanding of our tradition. An education which consisted of the liberal arts as understood through great books and of great books understood through the liberal arts would enable us to comprehend the tradition in which we live. It must follow that if we want to educate our students for freedom, we must educate them in the liberal arts and in the great books. 14

I am interested in education, in morals, in intellect, and in metaphysics. I even go so far as to hold that there is a necessary relation among all these things. I am willing to assert that without one we cannot have the others and that without the others we cannot have the one with which I am primarily concerned, namely education. 22

Now wisdom and goodness are the aim of higher education. How can it be otherwise? Wisdom and goodness are the end of human life. If you dispute this, you are at once entering upon a metaphysical controversy; for you are disputing about the nature of being and the nature of man. This is as it should be. How can we consider man's destiny unless we ask what he is? How can we talk about preparing men for life unless we ask what the end of life may be? At the base of education, as at the base of every human activity, lies metaphysics. 23-24

Our university graduates have far more information and far less understanding than in the colonial period. And our universities present themselves to our people in this crisis either as rather ineffectual trade schools or as places where nice boys and girls have a nice time under the supervision of nice men and women in a nice environment. 25-26

It is hardly necessary for me to add that nobody can think about a practical problem like the problem of improving society unless he knows the facts. . . . Neither can he do so unless he has some standard of criticism and of action. . . . If then, we are to have standards of social criticism and social action, and if they are to be anything but emotional standards, they must result from philosophical and historical study and from the habit of straight thinking therein. 29

It seems obvious to me, therefore, that the kind of education I have been urging is the kind that helps to develop a social consciousness and a social conscience. What isn't it obvious to everybody else? The first reason, I think, is the popularity of the cult of skepticism. I have been saying that I want to give the student knowledge about society. But we have got ourselves into such a state of mind that if anybody outside of natural science says he knows anything, he is a dogmatist and an authoritarian. Anybody who says, "I don't know because nobody can"; or, "Everything is a matter of opinion"; or, "I will take no position because I am tolerant and open-minded" is a liberal, progressive, democratic fellow to whom the fate of the world may safely be entrusted. 30-31

A second reason why some people doubt the social utility of the education I favor is that they belong to the cult of immediacy, or of what may be called presentism. . . . There is no past. Any reference to antiquity or the Middle Ages shows that you are not interested in social progress. Philosophy is merely a function of its time and place. We live in a different time and usually a different place. Hence philosophers who lives yesterday have nothing to say to us today. 31-32

We should try to frame a course of study that is good for any pupil and then focus our attention on developing the methods of transmitting it to those we cannot teach today. 53

I do not deny that the law schools have manufactured some very crafty fellows and that the engineering schools have graduated some smart mechanics. I do deny that either the public schools or the universities are devoting themselves to producing people who have had genuine intellectual discipline and who have acquired those intellectual habits which the ancients properly denominated virtues. 56

If you are going to war, you must know what you are fighting for. . . . If you are going to defend principles, you must know what your principles are any why you hold them. We may be fainthearted, even in defense of our native land, if we believe that the enemy is just as right as we are or that we are just as wrong as he. 80

In order to believe in democracy, then, we must believe that there is a difference between truth and falsity, good and bad, right and wrong, and that truth, goodness, and right are objective standards even though they cannot be experimentally verified. They are not whims, prejudices, rationalizations, or Sunday school tags. We must believe that man can discover truth, goodness, and right by the exercise of his reason, and that he may do so even as to those problems which, in the nature of the case, science can never solve. 86

What is needed for free minds is discipline, discipline which forms the habits which enable the mind to operate well. Nothing better can be said on this subject than the concise statement of John Dewey. "The discipline," he said, "that is identical with trained power is also identical with freedom." The free mind is first of all the disciplined mind. The first step in education is to give the mind good habits. 91

Reading, Writing, and Criticism - the name of a course, 15