Educating for the Great Conversation

Compulsory education is a contradiction in terms. It is impossible to force a person to learn. We can pass laws, enforce punishments, bribe, cajole, demand, and threaten, but humans only learn when they are able and willing. They may demonstrate the trappings of learning under a compulsory system, including passing grades and impressive test scores, but their knowledge, skill, and even their character will be superficial and shallow at best. It is only when humans engage with learning freely that education becomes deep, meaningful, and true.

As a teacher of literature and rhetoric at the secondary and collegiate level, I have experienced the self-defeating nature of our compulsory education system. During my first year of teaching high school, I worked with students who were unwilling to read, write, or discuss in class. Many students refused to read the books assigned, relying on SparkNotes for discussions and essays, which they wrote only because they would fail the class and not graduate high school if they did not. When I asked them why they did not read the books, their responses varied between half-hearted excuses like, “It’s boring” or “I don’t have time to read,” but occasionally students told the truth and said, “I hate reading books I have to read.” This response struck a nerve with me, and I realized I was working against something deeply inherent in human nature that needed to be addressed.

This impression was confirmed when I read The Great Conversation for the first time, a treatise on education written by Robert Hutchins, a former president of the University of Chicago and proponent of great books education based on the Western canon. In his book, Hutchins argues that “the aim of liberal education is human excellence,” defined by our moral and civic nature. It is not enough for humans to simply develop skills and knowledge to earn a living. In addition, we must understand what it means “to lead human lives, and better lives than [we] would otherwise be able to lead.” Liberal education, then, is the “education of free men,” as it empowers us to recognize and pursue what is morally good, objectively true, and aesthetically beautiful, rather than contenting us with merely material ends.

Hutchins’s emphasis on liberal education as a way to become freer intrigued me, but his explanation about why liberal education has largely disappeared in America is what truly woke me up to the harm compulsory education inflicts. He explains how liberal education through the great books has “been destroyed by [its] teachers” who reduce great books to “philological details” and “meaningless drill,” ignoring the great ideas that might intrigue their students and demanding they take their classes to meet general education requirements. These teachers, me included, forgot that “interest is essential in education,” and killed the love of reading great books in a whole generation of students. To resurrect their love of education, Hutchins recommends teachers discover what a liberal education is themselves through reading great books “and then to invent the methods of interesting their students in it.”

This epiphany—the fact that I cannot force education and that I was partly to blame for its disappearance—was powerful. To correct my mistake, I took Hutchins’ first bit of advice by discovering what liberal education is and willingly participating in it myself. As I approached each class as an opportunity for me to read, learn, and grow, I found that curiosity is contagious. When I shrugged off the tyrannical teacher persona of being the adult who has all the answers, I freed myself and my students to truly engage in learning. The times when I had the most fun learning was when charting new territory and making original discoveries myself. When I read a new book, started a discussion, or wrote a paper with students, I did my best to abandon any presuppositions about what the book was about, only ask questions I was genuinely curious about, and write about ideas I was not familiar with to stretch my own intellectual abilities. This exercise proved most effective, for as I did the work and experienced learning along with the students, they realized I was not assigning busy work but modeling the intellectual life.

Thus, I followed the advice of Hutchins and used my teaching position as an opportunity to engage in liberal learning myself. As a result, my students grew more interested in learning, but not entirely. Many students just thought I was weird for being so into the book and writing all the same papers they were. When met with this resistance, the libertarian in me wished I could simply repeal a century or two of compulsory education laws so those who did not want to be at school could leave and come back when they discovered there was more to life than sports and video games. But as this was not realistic and perhaps a bit rash, I decided to experiment with freedom within the classroom to create interest in learning.

To be sure, I did not let the students simply run the classroom, as freedom in learning still requires structure and a leader to establish some order. But I did give them as much say in what we studied and when we studied it as their maturity warranted. Instead of presenting them with books they had to read and the order we would work through them, I gave them a larger list of books they could choose from and when we read them. Instead of a single assignment description for an essay, I gave them multiple essay prompts to choose from. Instead of telling them to memorize one poem, I let them select their own to recite in front of the class. These changes did not fix everything. I still had students who did not want to be in school and were simply miserable because they were there. But the vast majority of students appreciated the freedom and learned to use it well to improve their ability to read, write, think, and discuss great books and ideas.

I do not share this to boast or hold myself up as an example that other educators should emulate; I recognize I still compel my students in more ways than I am aware of, and that sometimes they need an external force to help them do what they should. But like the man in Plato’s Cave, who has freed himself from the chains of ignorance, seen the shadow puppets of a false reality, and seen the real world in the light of the sun, my job is to re-enter the cave — not to drag others kicking and screaming out of the cave and into the light, but to patiently and persuasively invite them to consider the higher things of the soul. By approaching education with this recognition that the human spirit cannot be forced, we empower students to act well and help things go more smoothly in the classroom. Furthermore, by adopting a non-compulsory philosophy of education, we open up our students’ affections and invite them to freely love the life of the mind as all mature people should. For properly ordering and directing the affections is what education is really about, and few people love what they are forced to do.

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