Arnn, Larry P. Liberty and Learning: The Evolution of American Education. Hillsdale College Press, 2004.
As classical educators in the liberal arts tradition, we think there is a natural link between education and freedom. In Plato’s Cave (perhaps the oldest and most well known educational allegory we have in our Western tradition), the state of ignorance is portrayed as people chained to a cave wall where reality is a dim, flickering shadowland of puppet images. Enlightenment is depicted as the process of breaking free of those chains, recognizing the puppets and puppeteers for the shams they are, and making our way out of the cave into the brightness of the real world. This journey from bondage to freedom, from ignorance to enlightenment, is accomplished through an education suited to our nature—one that addresses and develops the parts of us that make us human, namely: our intellectual reasoning and moral sentiments.
The liberal arts, or the study of language through grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the study of the natural world through mathematics, geometry, and natural science, are the best ways we have discovered to facilitate our humane development. Thus the liberal arts become the liberating arts—freeing humans from ignorance and vice by empowering them to think reasonably and act morally.
In his important book Liberty and Learning, Dr. Larry Arnn, 12th president of Hillsdale College and stalwart defender of liberal education in America, illustrates this relationship between education and freedom by telling the story of Hillsdale College within the context of America’s political founding and the evolution of its education system. In his book, Arnn argues that America, being founded on principles of freedom and equality of all people, demands an education dedicated to these principles as well. He claims that education is too important to be governed by a centralized power at a state or federal level; that America’s founders understood this and gave no constitutional authority over education to the federal government; that the progressive political movement has ignored the constitution and centralized the educational system anyways; and that if we wish to remain free, we must reclaim and decentralize our education system.
Arnn starts his story in 1787 when the United States Congress under the Articles of Confederation passed the Northwest Ordinance. At first this seems an unlikely place to start a history of America’s education system—what does a law establishing the legal details regarding the country’s westward expansion have to do with learning and liberty anyways? Apparently quite a lot. Article three of the Northwest Ordinance declares that “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall ever be encouraged” (Arnn 2). This, Arnn argues, is the premise of America’s education system, and a noteworthy premise too, as religion and morality are listed alongside knowledge. We think differently about the premise and purpose of education today, Arrn notes, as modern educational legislation focuses more on material concerns of career readiness than the acquisition of knowledge and virtue for their own sakes (6).
But how will schools be “encouraged” under the Northwest Ordinance? By the systematic gifting of federal lands in developing territories to the local township to finance common schools (Arnn 3). This gift of land was not a federal grant to territories with core standards they were expected to meet and graduation quotas to fill. Arnn points out that it was taken for granted that the people would know how to organize themselves to teach their children to be moral and knowledgeable people, and that all they needed was a little encouragement in the form of land that could be sold to finance the schools (5). It is clear from this substantial gift that the founders believed education to be critical to the development of the country and the preservation of the people’s freedom.
At the same time Congress was passing the Northwest Ordinance, Arnn notes that another elected body was ratifying the country’s new constitution, a document that had no provision regarding education. At first this seems like an oversight. If the founders thought education was so important to the political regime’s success would not they have included a sentence or two in the constitution related to it? But according to Arnn, “The Founders did not seek administrative control of education because the nature of man is, in their view, best able to flourish under a regime of limited government. And if the government is to be limited then the control of even vital things like education must be decentralized” (12). This is the all-important matter for Arnn, that the government be limited in its administration of education if we want to enjoy education’s liberating effects.
America’s expansion into the northwest territory thrived under the self-governing system in the country’s first century, and Hillsdale College, founded in 1844, was one of the liberal arts colleges born of this pioneering era. Unfortunately, in Arnn’s view, this decentralized approach to education did not last as progressive educators and politicians began envisioning and promoting a federal department of education in America based on the Prussian model where “government is to stand in the place of parents in regard to the education of children” (34). Without legitimate constitutional authority, Arnn argues that the progressives developed the U.S. Department of Education into what it is today: a bureaucratic behemoth that “obstructs our own efforts to care for our own interest…, denies us practice and experience in government…, [and] thwarts our private efforts to raise our families” (35).
Arnn has good reason to protest, for he and past presidents of Hillsdale College have spent the last 70 years working to safeguard the academic integrity and institutional independence of the college from the encroachments of federal and state governments. Thankfully they have largely succeeded, making Hillsdale, Michigan a Mecca for liberal arts educators. Their efforts at the collegiate level have borne fruit on the primary and secondary education levels as well, leading to the Barney Charter School Initiative that has been seeking to wrest partial control of curriculum and pedagogical approach from the state and federal governments and give it back to individual communities and schools.
Some classical educators fear that because classical charter schools are funded by tax dollars their mission is inherently compromised. And while this is a valid concern that each new charter school must perpetually wrestle the local school board and state over, it is a worthy cause considering the tens of thousands of young Americans they introduce to the liberal arts. Classical charter schools may have unique challenges, but Arnn and many others think they also have their place in classical education’s mission of liberating as many people as possible from ignorance and vice through a study of the liberal arts.
Ross Garner is a 12th Grade Humanities mentor at John Adams Academy in Roseville, California. He was home-schooled in the classical style with his five siblings, attended a classical charter school, and studied at a liberal arts college in Utah. He has a BA and MA in American Studies from Brigham Young University and Utah State University with an emphasis in political science and American religious history. He loves to garden, serve in his church, and read The Chronicles of Narnia to his two children, whom he home-schools with his wife, Amanda.