When conservatives hear the term “liberal education,” I suspect they immediately think evolution, global warming, whatever-feels-good morality and nutrition labels, not to mention illegal-immigrant coddling and same-sex-marriage enabling.

Of course, it’s none of those things necessarily. And all of them, too.

The term refers to a broad education, not a “liberal” one in the political sense, although a liberal education also certainly includes learning about left-wing ideologies and attitudes, but also rightist and middle-of-the-road ones, as well. A liberal education aims to inculcate in students awareness of a wide range of human realities and possibilities, to plant seeds of mind-expanding knowledge — neutrally applied, meaning non-ideologically.

Communism vs. democracy

So students “liberally” educated are taught that religion in its many forms is everywhere among humankind but without editorial comment on the fundamental veracity of “the supernatural”; that societies have embraced many governmental forms, including monarchy, Communism and democracy, and why, without judging their relative values; that science in its myriad applications has proven astonishingly successful in describing material reality, without comparing its innate worth to that of, say, non-empirical religion.

In colleges and universities, more judgmental considerations are entertained, but through high school it’s largely information free of an ideological edge. The purpose of such an education is profoundly respectful of students, acknowledging that they can be trusted after a broad education with fashioning rational, useful, respectful lives.

‘Abandoned’ curricula

I was thinking of this yesterday after reading the debut article in a new weekly newsletter by Frank Bruni, an award-winning New York Times columnist who is among my favorite American opinion writers. I believe the newsletter is unavailable to New York Times nonsubscribers, but you can try to sign-up for it here.

In his debut newsletter article, Bruni laments that many American schools have “abandoned or pared back” their “core” curricula — courses that impart to students essential shared understandings of their existence — yet “haven’t found anything commensurate to take its place.”

He quotes William Egginton, a professor of humanities at Johns Hopkins University, who writes of the same worry in his recently published book The Splintering of the American Mind. Egginton believes this common narrative provided by a so-called liberal education provided is “key in the formation of a public capable of democratic self-governance.”

Certainly, in a country now radically fractured between the left and right, between profound respect for knowledge and an aggrieved, belligerent anti-intellectualism, and between verifiable truth and provable lies, Americans need a “common narrative” more than ever.

An erosion of truth

One of the priceless losses in the current chasm in national understanding is the growing erosion of many Americans’ rational capacity for identifying factual reality, weighing its elements in good faith and arriving at constructive, productive conclusions that help the nation be healthier and stronger.

More and more, too many of us seem to listen not to the better angels of our nature but the worst. We are in thrall to raw emotion, not manifest fact. This is a dangerous symptom of something worse. Bruni quotes a 2017 article by Peter Marber in the economics-focused periodical Quartz about St. John’s College, a “liberal arts” bastion in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in which Marber contends:

“We live in an age when 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day, with much being intentionally misleading, ‘fake’ or just plain wrong. What could be more valuable than developing an intellectual filter, cultivating the capacity to know what is important to know, distilling enormous amounts of information to form a rational position, or knowing how to listen and respond to — or perhaps integrate — someone else’s point of view? In this vein, St. John’s uses traditional texts taught in ancient methods to impart skills that have never been more crucial.”

‘Liberal’ education

Indeed, such “liberal,” meaning broad, ideas taught in all schools could nurture a shared understanding of our shared reality that’s based on science and reason, not ideological bias.

Apparently, we’re failing, because people who live and are educated in widely scattered hamlets throughout so-called “flyover country” seem to be absorbing lessons opposite to folks in more populous urban and coastal zones of the country. It’s gotten to the point that we’re not only not in agreement on fundamental assumptions — like facts, truth and the essential value of personal integrity and honor — we’re sworn enemies.

Meanwhile, a third of the country watches Fox and reads Breitbart and the like, and the rest something else entirely, and never the twain shall meet.

The tragedy is we’re all dealing with exactly the same reality. Only the interpretations are different.

Something’s very, very wrong, and “liberal” education, done more rationally and far more effectively all over the country might actually help resolve it.

Image/License