Hutchins, Robert M. The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952.
Robert Hutchins may not have been the first to characterize the Western intellectual tradition as a great conversation, but his important book certainly solidified the term in the imagination and vocabulary of our generation of classical educators. Hutchins wrote The Great Conversation in the early 1950s while serving as president of the University of Chicago. At the time he and his friend Mortimer Adler led a team of scholars compiling the Great Books of the Western World series, a 54-volume set that serves as a greatest-hits library of Western philosophy, history, literature, mathematics and natural science, to which The Great Conversation serves as a preface. Together Hutchins and Adler advocated for a return to the great books as the foundation of education in the West, an educational movement called perennialism because it maintained there were books and ideas that were always relevant no matter how advanced our technology or progressive our politics.
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Adler’s books How to Read a Book and How to Speak, How to Listen are more well known among classical educators, probably due to their practical self-help nature; but Hutchins’ The Great Conversation offers a more sophisticated assessment, analysis, and criticism of modern education and politics. In this sense, Hutchins’ book serves as the mission and vision of an educational renaissance and Adler’s as the how-to manual, as The Great Conversation explains why universal liberal education is the only sure basis for democratic societies if they wish to remain free and prosperous.
First, let us consider what Hutchins means by his titular phrase.
According to Hutchins, the Great Conversation is the millenia-long dialogue among Western civilization’s greatest thinkers about the fundamental questions of humanity—a dialogue made possible by the books those thinkers wrote. “No civilization is like that of the West in this respect,” Hutchins posits, “that its defining characteristic is a dialogue [which can boast of so many] great works of the mind” (1). He attributes the greatness of the dialogue to “the spirit of inquiry” that animates the West, and “its dominant element of Logos.” Armed with curiosity and logic as primary values, the West has developed a culture where “nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined. The exchange of ideas is held to be the path to the realization of the potentialities of the race” (1).
By participating in the Great Conversation, we participate in liberal education, which Hutchins argues consists of developing three primary intellectual skills: 1. “the recognition of basic problems,” 2. “the knowledge of distinctions and interrelations in subject matter,” and, 3. “the comprehension of ideas” (3). That is to say, a liberally educated person is one who asks the right questions to clarify basic problems, who draws distinctions as well as connections between ideas, and who understands the underlying forms the questions, problems, distinctions and connections are grounded in. These are the fundamental skills of the proverbial Renaissance man—one who “has a mind that can operate well in all fields'' (4). “For this reason,” Hutchins asserts, liberal education “is the education of free men” (3).
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Hutchins’ description of liberal education is lofty and inspiring, reminding us that “the aim of liberal education is human excellence” and that we should all strive to “be as good liberal artists as we can in order to become as fully human as we can” (3, 5). But where he succeeds in lofty generalities he fails in helpful specifics. Unlike Adler’s books that spell out how to read, speak, listen, and write (the major learning activities of liberal education), The Great Conversation leaves one wondering how to pursue, let alone transmit a liberal education. The best he can do is provide two warnings to classical educators of what not to do.
Based on his historical view of the decline of liberal education and the rise of modern trends toward specialization, Hutchins attributes the decline of liberal education in the West to two causes: “internal decay and external confusion” (26).
Liberal education’s internal decay is the result of liberal educators becoming illiberal in their pedagogical practices. Hutchins warns that when the great books “become the private domain of scholars,” when “the word ‘classics’ [come] to be limited to those works which were written in Greek and Latin,” when, “professors [are] unlikely to be interested in ideas” and more “interested in philological details” the liberal arts “degenerate into meaningless drill” (27). Hutchins admonishes educators not to take for granted that “interest is essential in education,’ reminding us that “the art of teaching consists in large part of interesting people in things that ought to interest them [by discovering] what an education is” ourselves and inviting our students along for the journey (27, 49).
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In terms of external confusion, Hutchins explains how the traditional liberal arts education has declined because of the great technological advancements driven by the experimental method. Culturally, we have become “fascinated by the marvels of experimental natural science” and are “convinced that any results obtained in [the humanities] by any other methods [are] not worth achieving” (28). We have confused the epistemologies unique to literature, history, and philosophy by trying to make those branches of learning conform to the epistemology of natural science, thereby severely limiting them. They are called the liberal arts, not the liberal sciences, for a reason. Science is one of the liberal arts, but it has come to dominate as the only liberal art and the only culturally accepted way to find truth. In the face of this dilemma, we should not dismiss the scientific method for its tyrannical tendencies but strongly insist that it take its proper place in the Great Conversation as only one of many methods of discovering truth and transmitting it.
The Great Conversation is an important contribution to classical liberal education. In my estimation, it ranks alongside other seminal works of that era including Dorothy Sayers’ The Lost Tools of Learning and C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man. It lays out the intellectual and moral tradition of the West and argues in no uncertain terms that the continued freedom and prosperity of the West lies in our commitment to the tradition of liberal education. It establishes a vision to make liberal education universal in the West, transforming our nation into a “republic of learning” that makes “education responsible to humanity” (64). It is my hope that we may continue the great conversation and make it universal in the West as Hutchins envisioned.
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.