This article was originally published in Vol. 4 No. 4 of our print edition.
Some years ago, as director general of The International School of Geneva, I invited a former pupil to talk to a group of current pupils about her experiences of sixty years earlier, as a teenage Jewish-Hungarian girl during the Second World War. She recounted the traumatic train journey that brought her from Budapest to Geneva and the few months that she had spent en route in the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Asked what helped to give her hope while on the train and in the camp, her unhesitating response, to the evident surprise of the pupils, was ‘la culture’, by which she meant memories of the great creative achievements of the human spirit that, kept alive in the camp by poetry readings and talks, had acted as a talisman against the surrounding barbarism.
In responding in this way, I realized that she had been demonstrating what the political philosopher Alan Ryan, writing about ‘liberal education’, had called ‘a sense of cultural ownership’—that feeling of being part of a culture that is inherited gives meaning to life and is valued—and which he had found absent in contemporary teenagers in Britain and the USA.1 She had clearly received, whether from her family or her school or both, the kind of ‘liberal education’, focused on the transmission of what the nineteenth-century English poet and educator Matthew Arnold had called ‘the best that has been thought and known’, which Ryan was recommending. This article deals with the origins and nature of this ‘liberal education’ and the need for it to continue.
A similar education, George Steiner pointed out many years earlier, had been received by some of the senior German figures organizing the Nazi atrocities from which this girl had been escaping in 1944–1945. In a devastating critique of the poet T. S. Eliot’s defence of this ‘high culture’ in his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Steiner drew attention to the way in which products of a demanding humanist education, readers of Goethe and Rilke and performers of Bach and Mozart, were complicit in the administration of the Holocaust.2 There were doubts, he concluded, as to whether the kind of elite education which had traditionally been lauded in Western culture could continue to be deemed to humanize those who received it.
The article explores the different ways in which the concept of a ‘liberal education’ has been defined and applied in practice since its beginnings in Greece and Rome. It has been given many different purposes and there have been many varieties of educational programme that have gone under its name. I discuss its connection with different political philosophies and ask whether this is an education appropriate for all or just an elite. I argue that there are principles which can help to define it, and that distinguish it from what in modern practice is its antithesis. I conclude with a tentative answer to the question: ‘does liberal education have a future?’ The focus of the article is principally, though not exclusively, on schools rather than universities.
The term ‘liberal education’ has been in use in English since the sixteenth century, as have references to ‘liberal arts’ and ‘liberal sciences’, the core distinction between what is ‘liberal’ and what is not being that the former is something pertaining only to free men (in Latin liberalis) and does not refer to an activity aimed at earning one’s living.3 The term ‘liberal arts’, in its Latin form artes liberales, goes back to Roman times. There is no inevitable association between a ‘liberal education’ and ‘liberalism’, as I hope to show, despite Ryan’s book having this potential connection as one of its core concerns, and certainly no association with the contemporary US meaning of ‘liberal’ as ‘left wing’, even though there are some who might wish to recruit it to that cause. ‘Liberal education’ has in recent years, especially in the USA, at times also been referred to as ‘classical education’. This article reserves the latter for an education in the Greek and Latin classics, which may or may not be part of a wider ‘liberal education’.
Plato and Aristotle
As in matters of political theory, discussion about the nature of liberal education often begins with Plato. His prime concern was for the education of the small elite of ‘Guardians’ needed to rule the ideal city state that he had envisaged. The main focus of a Platonic education would be on identifying the most talented and turning them into an elite dedicated to the pursuit of truth, virtue, and beauty. This would involve a process of continuous ethical and intellectual self-examination and self-improvement, which would last throughout their lives. Those Guardians reaching the ultimate stages of this process would, at least for some of their time, devote themselves to a state of advanced philosophical contemplation, alongside serving the state.4
Plato’s disciple Aristotle shared his mentor’s view that the core purpose of education was to produce individuals capable of the highest levels of thought, but extended this to a wider group of citizens while recognizing, as Plato had also done, that there would be some who would need to be habituated to virtue rather than coming to understand its necessity through reflection and choice. Aristotle placed great emphasis on the importance of leisure in giving his elite the time required to think and read. Recognizing the substantial differences between types of states, he stressed the need for education to be adapted to their differing circumstances.5
The Seven Liberal Arts
Plato and Aristotle continued to be read, and had a major influence on the development of Rome’s thinking and practice in educational matters, not least in the teaching of dialectic and rhetoric. It was under their influence that the main features of the ‘classical education’ that was to persist in many parts of Europe up to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were gradually formalized during the Roman Empire and the period immediately following its collapse.
This was a programme of seven liberal arts divided between the trivium (grammar, logic or dialectic, and rhetoric—how to use language, think, and argue), and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—areas of knowledge to which these three arts need to be applied). Key figures helping to establish this as the core curriculum for medieval Christendom were the great sixth-century Christian statesmen and scholars Boethius and Cassiodorus. Christian attitudes towards what was in origin a pagan educational programme were sometimes ambivalent, though the use of these pagan tools could be justified in the European universities which emerged from the eleventh century onwards not as ends in themselves but as laying the groundwork for advanced studies in theology and philosophy.6
Classical Learning: For and Against
Over the 1300–1400 years during which this classical curriculum was in use in much of Europe, it took many different forms. It was always a curriculum with mastery of the Latin language—the language of the Christian Church up to the Reformation, and of law, medicine, and scholarship—at its heart, though at times and in places it would also include Greek. Sometimes, and especially in the last few centuries of its use, it included some learning of vernacular languages and also of more modern history. Like most curricula, it was sometimes well taught and sometimes badly taught, with the infliction of corporal punishment on the unsuccessful and unwilling a perennial feature.
It had some distinguished critics. Montaigne called the methods of teaching generally used as ones designed to produce ‘donkeys laden with books’ rather than people who thought,7 while Milton denounced the ‘barbarous’ methods that led people into a ‘hatred and contempt for learning’,8 and Locke objected to the ‘very unpleasant Business’ of learning long lists of words.9 In the nineteenth century, one of England’s greatest novelists, Anthony Trollope, reminiscing about his twelve years of classical teaching at Winchester and Harrow, two leading schools, could not remember coming away from a lesson in which he had learned a single thing.10 Winston Churchill had comparable things to say about his own education at the second of these schools, despite ending up as a great master of English prose.11
I cite these examples to show that the ‘classical’ form that ‘liberal education’ mostly took during the 1,500 years following the fall of Rome was not an unmixed blessing. Where it was successful, as with Montaigne, Milton, and Locke, it helped to produce immensely learned people able to use their knowledge of Greek and Roman literature and philosophy to great creative advantage. One of the best examples of a programme of classical education, influenced in this case by currents of Renaissance humanism, is to be found in the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, a set of school regulations issued in 1599 for the provision of ‘a good liberal education’ both for future members of the Society of Jesus and for laymen being taught in Jesuit schools.12 It was in use wherever Jesuits were to be found, not just in Europe but also in Spain’s overseas empire and in India. The focus was predominantly on the classics, but the mother tongue and natural science were also taught, a diversity of teaching methods used, punishment kept separate from academic matters, and students given opportunities to perform in plays. It was the curriculum that educated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries some of Europe’s most impressive intellects: Descartes, Corneille, Molière, Calderón de la Barca, Torquato Tasso, Goldone, Voltaire, and Montesquieu.
What Is a Liberal Education for?
Studies of how people referred to ‘liberal education’ in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries show how, as in other periods, the term meant different things to different people at different times and how, as its meaning changed, echoes of former meanings continued to linger within new contexts.13 For much of the eighteenth century the emphasis was on the impact a liberal education would have on character, and an individual’s ability to conduct himself in polite society. It was seen very much as a ‘gentleman’s education’, the main purpose of which was to develop judgment and form practices of sociability. This was a long way from the aim of the Ratio Studiorum ‘to lead men to the knowledge and love of our Creator and Redeemer’ or the Platonic and Aristotelian idea that the best life was a contemplative one.
Other conceptions of a liberal education that emerged in the nineteenth century put the training of the mind before aspects of character and culture, and argued for the need to measure the success of this training through the controversial introduction of examinations.14 T. H. Huxley, scientist and pioneer of scientific education, saw it almost entirely in terms of mind and character, with the transmission of culture not even receiving a passing mention.15 Others in the nineteenth century, most notably Matthew Arnold, placed greater emphasis on the cultivation of the ‘sweetness and light’ brought by culture and the arts and, through these means, the development of an individual’s ‘high best self’.16
Contemporary writers on liberal education show a similarly wide range of emphases. Alan Ryan, writing about Britain and the USA, distinguishes between a ‘liberal education’, by which he means one designed to produce ‘an aristocracy of everyone’ as a way of sustaining the ‘liberal society’ that is his ideal, and—somewhat confusingly—a ‘liberal-education’, by which he means the modern equivalent of a gentleman’s education, one that incorporates ‘high culture’, enlarges the mind, refines the taste, and is worth it for its own sake.17 While aspiring towards the latter for some people, he is convinced, as a liberal and democrat, that some version of the former is also needed for the rest of society.
Another strong contemporary defender of liberal education is Martha Nussbaum, writing in a US context, who in Not for Profit makes a forceful case for a humanities education for all, and for education not to be dominated by economic needs. While stressing the value of the Socratic approach and the need for critical thinking, her underlying aims are not open-ended. To her, a successful liberal education appears to be one designed to produce the types of young adult, suspicious of traditional authority, freed from local loyalties, and seeing themselves as citizens of the world, whom we have witnessed dominating US campuses ever since 2020.18 ‘Critical thinking’ in this context seems to be little more than challenging the forces hostile to the kind of left-liberal democracy that Nussbaum obviously supports. Despite her rejection of economic motives, her version of ‘liberal education’ does not come across as one designed to produce men and women who are truly free.
The recent writer with perhaps the most essentialist view of liberal education is Anthony O’Hear, whose In Defence of Liberal Education describes it, without qualification, as the transmission of an inheritance from one generation to another which is worthwhile ‘in and of itself’ for the individuals who receive it. Defining it in such terms leads him to believe that liberal education, while it might thrive under some governments, is unable to do so under the ones we currently have in the West where states feel that they ‘own’ children and can do with them as they wish. Such governments, he argues, cannot be trusted not to tinker with their educational programmes by inserting into them purposes arising from whatever their concerns of the moment happen to be.19
‘In the light of such “civilizational conditions” the future for liberal education is not therefore a rosy one’
Over the centuries, liberal education has therefore been seen both as a process that is wholly for the inner development of the individual and also, very frequently, one that puts wider purposes first. The aim has been to make the individual into a better man, but also to ensure that society is better governed, that there are enough educated clergy to perform their functions, that there is sufficient suitable manpower to uphold the country’s imperial burden, or in our own times, as the French philosopher of education Laurent Fedi has put it, that there are enough highly skilled and flexible nouveaux hommes needed to take their place in a nomadic global marketplace.20 Purists like O’Hear may accept that some of these purposes are important and likely to be incidentally fulfilled through a liberal education, but argue that to put them foremost will undermine the effectiveness of any education focused solely on its benefits to the individual.
There is one purpose of a liberal education concerned with society’s wellbeing that looks beyond the individual to something wider, without distorting its main emphasis. Roger Scruton put it very succinctly when urging teachers to ensure the transmission of what was worth valuing in a culture ‘by lodging it in brains that will last longer than their own’.21
Is a Liberal Education for All People?
One of the biggest obstacles to the continuance of the liberal education once offered to small elites is having to make a decision as to the extent to which it or some version of it can or should be made accessible to the majority of the school population. The possibility of providing a liberal education for the working classes was not considered seriously in England before the Second World War.22 In Spain in the 1930s, José Ortega y Gasset saw liberal education for those outside the elite as a theoretical possibility—there were able men among the working classes who might benefit, he observed—but, despite having thoughts about almost everything else, he clearly did not see this as a priority.23
When, in the twentieth century, mass education was extended beyond the primary level, governments developed provisions for the majority of pupils who were deemed unable to meet the demands of the academic programme available for the minority. As societies became more egalitarian, these selective systems were challenged, most assertively in English-speaking countries where public education increasingly began to cater for almost the whole age group within the same school. Even where elements of selection have remained within these community schools, there has been a watering down of some of the demands made on all pupils, a move to an increasingly child-centred rather than knowledge-centred approach, and the development of a school culture less receptive to the Arnoldian ‘best that has been known and thought’.
Even more fundamentally damaging to liberal education, including in those selective schools still able to provide some version of it, are the factors that the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa identified in his book La civilización del espectáculo, published in 2012 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s defence of ‘high culture’ in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. The three main ones are as follows: the harmful effect of the pervasive cultural relativism of the modern world; the decline in standards arising from the disappearance of the ‘cultured’ class that had previously ensured the transmission of ‘high culture’; and the absence of the ‘glue’ by which religion in the past helped to hold societies together.24 Although Ryan does not cite the same negative factors, he too talks about how the ‘dis-educating society’ of the world in which schools find themselves is not a favourable environment in which to operate. While accepting that John Stuart Mill’s aspiration of a ‘liberal education for all’ was unlikely to be achievable, he nonetheless still feels that at least ‘a decent foundation course in liberal education’ should be provided for everyone ‘whether or not they like it’.25
What Liberal Education Is and What It Is Not?
The content of a liberal education will and should vary according to time and place, not least to adapt to the widely differing cultures of the countries in which it is taking place and to the age group being educated. Essential features are the following: a focus on the Platonic triad of ‘the true, the beautiful, and the good’ without resort to ethical or aesthetic relativism; an introduction to the major languages of human understanding—historical, scientific, artistic, mathematical, ethical, and philosophical—and to the Aristotelian intellectual virtues involved in their study; academic rather than social and emotional learning at the centre of the educational process; a focus on cultural transmission based on Europe and the West’s Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman roots; a positive induction into the relevant nation state; at least one foreign language started early and taken to a high level; Latin where a classicist is available to teach it well; and pragmatism in teaching methods.
In some ways, it is easier to identify the things that liberal education is not. It is not an education focused on issues of contemporary concern, as Nussbaum would favour. It is not a political project designed to inculcate children with the ideas and attitudes currently in favour with the elites that control education systems. It does not involve pupils in activism to promote political causes, nor does it restrict their freedom of expression in relation to these causes. It does not waste time ‘discovering’ knowledge that is best explicitly taught. It gives priority to the transmission of knowledge, skills, and habits of study intrinsic to the traditional disciplines, and not, at least in the early stages of education, to interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary studies. It does not see the core purpose of schooling as the emotional and social wellbeing of the child, important though this is, and does not take over education and welfare responsibilities properly those of parents. It sees parents and families as the main players in the formation of the next generation and the state and teachers as those aiding this, not the other way round.
Is Liberal Education a Liberal or Conservative Project?
Given that ‘liberal education’ and ‘liberalism’ have a common root in the Latin word for ‘free man’, and thus in the concept of liberty, the connection between the two, at least in terms of aspirations, ought to be close. John Stuart Mill, England’s greatest philosopher of liberalism, saw liberal education playing a big part in the move to the increasingly liberal society he hoped would be his country’s future. In an address in 1867 to students at the University of St Andrew’s in Scotland, he described the aim of a liberal education as ‘the improvement of the individual mind and the benefit of the race’. His vision for a liberal future was a self-educating society in which everyone would endeavour to make the best of themselves and in which access to a liberal education would open up for all.26 It was a vision shared in the USA by Horace Mann and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and in England by Matthew Arnold, though the conservative Arnold’s view of a liberal education placed more emphasis on the transmission of an inherited culture than Mill did.
From Ryan’s perspective in 1999, it was a vision—which he himself shared—that had been largely unrealized despite the previous half century having been one in which, at least in English-speaking countries, some version or other of liberalism had been all-pervasive, even among self-styled ‘conservatives’. Looking around him in Britain and the USA just before the beginning of a new millennium, Ryan saw not the ‘broadly cultivated’, lively and self-improving society he and his nineteenth- century predecessors had imagined, but one ‘narrowly self-centred’ and dominated by ‘domestic, private and familial concerns’. He was similarly disappointed by the state of liberal education both at school and university, with even the best schools in Britain and the USA being less ambitious than they might be, and US university students having shifted in huge numbers from academic disciplines to career-related ones. It would be a bold person to claim that a quarter of a century later the situation had much improved.27
According to two of liberalism’s most outspoken critics, this failure to embed liberal education is best attributed to liberalism itself. The political theorist Patrick Deneen sees liberalism as not just a political project but a movement seeking to transform human life and the world by maximizing freedom for individuals, liberating them from restraints, and enabling them to choose whatever identities they wish. This does not generate greater happiness. By freeing people from customs and traditions and breaking up families and communities it creates situations that require increasing intervention by the state. A movement committed to freedom ends up creating some of the most intrusive state mechanisms of all time (or as John Gray put it, ‘the logic of limitless freedom is unlimited despotism’).28 It is not surprising in these circumstances that education in liberal democracies ceases to be focused on the transmission of a common culture. ‘Liberal education’, concludes Deneen, ‘needs rescuing from liberalism’.29
The conservative political historian Maurice Cowling’s target is ‘higher liberalism and…liberal rhetoric’ of all kinds, but particularly as it emerges from the pen of John Stuart Mill. Despite its rigorous content and core of classical learning, the objective of the liberal education proposed by Mill in his St Andrew’s address is not, he argues, the development of free men able to make up their own minds, but to nudge them into questioning ‘every sort of received orthodoxy…every established habit, religion and institution’. The role of the clerisy Mill hopes to educate will be to absorb a body of received opinions which it will then transmit to the rest of society. Mill’s educational purpose therefore is one of ‘moral indoctrination’ and as such cannot constitute ‘liberal education’.30 Some of the emphases in the kind of liberal education proposed in Nussbaum’s Not for Profit, mentioned earlier, may not merit such a strong label, but are moving in a similar direction.31
These two objections help to clarify how ‘liberal education’ both is and is not linked to liberalism. They do not rule out a link with some aspects of liberalism, on the lines sketched by Ryan, but draw attention to the way liberal education is much more closely aligned with conservative concerns such as cultural transmission, moral absolutism, habituation to virtue, membership of communities, self-restraint, and respect for tradition.
Does Liberal Education Have a Future?
Instead of just lamenting the decline in France of an education based on transmission, a group of French academics set out in 2008 to identify what they called the ‘civilizational’ conditions which were causing it. They analyzed the obstacles to such an education arising from the prevailing zeitgeist: the general lack of interest in the past in a future-oriented society; the demand that knowledge be related directly to the learner and immediately useful; the cult of the spontaneous; the dominance of the visual; and, most fundamentally, the sense, for the first time in history, that the past is ‘dead and silent’.32 It is an excellent analysis, but not a cheerful book. A warning that the past for the first time is ‘dead and silent’ was also one of the last messages Ortega y Gasset was planning to pass on just before he died in 1955: ‘Man finds himself facing the future lacking a past tense.’33 It was found in the text of a lecture which he had prepared but which, poignantly, he did not live to give.
In Forgetfulness: Making the Modern Culture of Amnesia Francis O’Gorman gives two other reasons for our neglect of the past: first, the assumption ‘that what is important in history is only that which prefigures modern liberal values’; and second, the endless focus on the sufferings of ‘the Other’ which has ‘helped persuade too many people to regard the past only as something to be glad to get rid of’.34 Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed attributes all of this to liberalism’s ‘presentism’ and its deep antipathy to inherited culture, pointing out that Tocqueville had already warned about this liberal characteristic nearly two hundred years earlier.35
In the light of such ‘civilizational conditions’ the future for liberal education is not therefore a rosy one. The bloated Western states that Deneen and Gray see as the result of pushing liberalism to its limits are far too tempted, as O’Hear has indicated, to use their powers over the schools they control to tackle whatever the political causes of the moment happen to be—in England at the time of writing this is knife crime, tackling misogyny, countering ‘misinformation’ on the internet, and teaching children how to brush their teeth—than to find time to strengthen the academic curriculum.36
Politically, however, it is not impossible for a state to decide that it would be better, both for children and for the country, to give schools freedom to develop educational approaches that follow liberal education principles, whether within the state system or outside it, especially if evidence can be gathered to show the beneficial effects it is having. Excellent practice in liberal education exists in some schools, both state (for example some UK ‘Free Schools’) and private, and in elements of state curricula in some countries, and there are still some excellent liberal arts universities. These could be more systematically studied and communicated.37 A tradition 2,500 years in the making, and which is one of the most persistent threads running through our common European and Western civilization, still has plenty of possibilities ahead of it.
NOTES
1 Alan Ryan, Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education (Profile Books, 1999), 124.
2 George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-Definition of Culture (Faber and Faber, 1971), 60–63.
3 Entry for ‘liberal’, The Oxford English Dictionary (1971).
4 Nicholas Tate, What Is Education for? The Views of the Great Thinkers and Their Relevance Today (John Catt, 2015), 15–28.
5 Nicholas Tate, What Is Education for?, 29–41.
6 David L. Wagner, ‘The Seven Liberal Arts and Classical Scholarship’, and Karl F. Morrison, ‘Incentives for Studying the Liberal Arts’, in David L. Wagner, ed., The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages (Indiana University Press, 1983), 17–18 and passim, 32–57.
7 Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, translated by Michael Screech (The Penguin Press, 1991), 199.
8 John Milton, Of Education, https://milton.host. dartmouth.edu/reading_room/of_education/text.shtml, accessed 25 September 2024.
9 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, edited by J. W. and J. S. Yolton (Clarendon Press, 1989), 216–218, 227, 234–235.
10 Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (Oxford University Press, 1928), 17.
11 Winston Churchill, My Early Life (Thornton Butterworth, 1930), 30–38.
12 The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum of 1599, edited by Allan P Farrell (Conference of Major Superiors of Jesuits, 1970).
13 Sheldon Rothblatt, Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education (Faber and Faber, 1976).
14 Rothblatt, Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education, 119–23.
15 Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘A Liberal Education’ (1868), in Autobiography and Selected Essays (Riverside College Classics, 1909), 38–39.
16 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Smith, Elder, 1869), 23, 89.
17 Ryan, Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education, 22, 36–37.
18 Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2010), 7, 45, 55, 125, 141.
19 Anthony O’Hear, In Defence of Liberal Education (University of Buckingham Press, 2023), 14, 21.
20 Laurent Fedi, La chouette et l’encrier. Promenades dans les philosophies françaises de l’éducation (Éditions Kimé, 2011), 133, 191–209.
21 Roger Scruton, in Mark Dooley, ed., The Roger Scruton Reader (Continuum, 2011), 52–53.
22 Ryan, Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education, 83.
23 José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Misión de la Universidad’, in Obras Completas (Santillana, 2004), I, 40–41.
24 Mario Vargas Llosa, La civilización del espectáculo (Alfaguara, 2012); T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (Faber and Faber, 1962).
25 Ryan, Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education, 34–35, 55, 86.
26 John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St Andrew’s (Longmans, 1867), 11 and passim.
27 Ryan, Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education, 56, 125, 126, 129, 137.
28 John Gray, The New Leviathans. Thoughts after Liberalism (Allen Lane, 2023), 154. Gray is putting in his own words a passage from Dostoyevsky’s Demons.
29 Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018), 110–130 and passim.
30 Maurice Cowling, Mill and Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 1990), xlviii, xxx, 87, 107, 113, 143.
31 Nussbaum, Not for Profit, 7, 45.
32 Marie-Claude Blais, Marcel Gauchet, and Dominique Ottavi, Conditions de l’éducation (Stock, 2008), 8, 60, 73, 75, 109–110, 160.
33 José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Las profesiones liberales’, in Obras Completas X, 435.
34 Francis O’Gorman, Forgetfulness. Making the Modern Culture of Amnesia (Bloomsbury, 2017), 134–135.
35 Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, 72, 74.
36 ‘General Election 2024: What’s Wrong with Asking Teachers to Supervise Tooth-brushing?’, University of Birmingham, www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2024/general-election-whats-wrong-with-asking-teachers-to- supervise-tooth-brushing, accessed 29 September 2024.
37 O’Hear discusses the schools of the American Association of Christian Classical Schools (ACSS) in In Defence of Liberal Education, 58–62, and finds it difficult to categorize them as offering the kind of liberal education he is advocating.
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