In a crisis, it is best to balance change and continuity. The liberal arts help us do so by embracing both. On the one hand, they are the anchor-in-bedrock that conserves the best of our culture. On the other hand, they are the wind-in-the-sail that powers us to betterment. I. Accelerating Our Experience of Big [...]
Liberal education has as its end the free mind, and the free mind must be its own teacher. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Scott Buchanan as he asks a series of questions to discover the fruit, in individual character and thought, of a liberal arts education. —W. Winston Elliott [...]
For most liberal arts colleges, mathematics courses are simply modern math stuck on to a “humanities” program. But if liberal education is not just meant to familiarize students with classics of the humanities, or the polish of culture, but to free the student to find the truth for himself, shouldn’t math be just as emphasized [...]
The Naval Academy is regarded as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the nation, and many attend for that very reason. But what if the Academy’s curriculum does not reflect a true liberal arts education, but a radical distortion of it—a falsehood? The hour is here when midshipmen candidates of the Class of [...]
A preliminary function of a liberal education must be to serve as a purgative, a cleansing, of those who wish to be free. By its means we can cleanse ourselves of our undigested and unconscious prejudices. When it first came home to me that I would not be a tutor at the Graduate Institute in [...]
To be truly grateful means that one holds oneself in the grace of owing. It means alert and noble attention to the good intended by the giver. Giving thanks is such a beautifully natural gesture that it seems almost perverse to admire someone for not making it. But Dr. Samuel Johnson earns such admiration in [...]
Graduates sallying forth from the ivied halls need to be free men and women. That is the claim and purpose of the liberal arts. Having had a significant time to ponder and pursue and practice the virtues of freedom, these students can join the ongoing conversation of the ages and continue to refine the personal [...]
Time is not a being, a thing, or a substance in the world, nor does it operate as a power, a force, or a destiny in our life. It has no external existence; the word “time” is used by a sort of obtuse poetry for processes that have better names of their own. Here is [...]
Near the end of his recent book, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (highly recommended), the English philosopher Roger Scruton makes a very interesting observation about what is possible in America but not in Europe. As he puts it, the burden of American conservatism has been to define the customs and traditions most in [...]
Liberal arts students are “generalists in a specialized world,” and as a result, they bring many analogies to bear on the problems that they will face on a daily basis in the world of work. And those analogies come from what they actually study, from Homer to field science to statistical analysis to metaphysics. Back [...]
Imagination is what makes a person human. A well-developed imagination is the key to a richer, fuller life, not just for the individual but for the community. When society suffers a loss of imagination, counterfeit forms of it will start appearing. Therefore, it should be the goal of conservatives to revive society’s imagination. It is [...]
We say of people that they have intuition. We apparently mean that they apprehend things directly without belaboring them by analysis or even without accosting them with too close an inspection. Intuition is what we long for, thinking is what we can do. What follows? You asked me to speak about “Intellect and Intuition,” an [...]
We ought to discern the truth about our modern schools, remove our children from their ravages, and turn to the building of homeschooling communities and to involvement in classical charter schools. It is the only reasonable response to our modern schools, which have become unreasonable and morally irresponsible. As parents bring school age children into [...]
Since liberal education is non-academic, in my sense, it has real gravity, moral gravity. And so it is, finally, also concerned with questions of “good and evil.” The college years are the time for students to frame those moral allegiances that will help them decide more sure-footedly how to act when leisure is over and [...]