Ep. 193: The Theory and Practice of Liberal Education w/ Pano Kanelos (Part Two)

0:00 Mark Linsenmayer: We should talk more about this idea. Klein put forward that Bloom had also expressed. What makes education liberal is, is that it's pursued essentially without a practical ulterior motive, that it's knowledge for knowledge sake. And this seems to be something that not only many people outside of academia would just say that's actually the cancer at the heart of philosophy specifically, and this sort of snobbiness. Most people are not in the situation, economically or otherwise, where they'd ever be able to do that. To say that to really be a full human being, to act as human beings act, you have to be free of practical concern is obnoxious.

And I would think that even deans and presidents of liberal arts colleges don't typically sell it to their supporters, to their funders, as we're going to get your students to just think for thought's sake. No, no, it's having a liberal education will get you a good job. It will give you the skills necessary to fix the world's problems. It is essentially a practical endeavor.

1:01 Pano: I don't know that that's exactly right. That what Bloom or Klein would claim is that it's knowledge for the sake of knowledge. I mean, I think what they're saying is it's pursuit of knowledge in pursuit of wisdom, which is a different phenomenon.

1:13 Wes: Klein explicitly says, only in pursuing this

goal is man really man and really free. And the other part of it is knowledge is a little bit misleading too. It's not like I'm acquiring trivial bits of knowledge for the sake of being in possession of those bits of knowledge. Ironically, it's more about abandoning assumptions, jettisoning preconceived opinion, lightening the load, actually, you know, not acquiring more baggage for the sake of being able to function in a non sedimented way in order to be free. And that includes all the moral implications of that sort of freedom, not to simply live according to custom and according to desire and popular opinion, but to be someone who can rise above that,

1:55 Mark Linsenmayer: but not to change the world, to change yourself.

1:57 Pano: Well, but I mean, they're interlinked. I mean, we are in the world unless we actually commit our whole life to being a philosopher, and then maybe we're not. But I think the common criticism that higher education encourages some to seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge, I think that's merited. But I don't think that's liberal education. I mean, I think of my own graduate student days where I knew people whose entire life was dedicated to mastering 17th century English pamphlets, argument between the Puritans and the Cavaliers. And so that was the acquisition of knowledge, a body of knowledge and expertise in something that was completely divorced from any sense that this had any kind of moral quality to it or quality of development for the person who was gaining that knowledge or anything to contribute to the world other than another grain of sand in the kind of accumulation of things that we know as a collective people.

So I think that's a merited criticism. I just think liberal education doesn't accept that as its end, doesn't accept that kind of knowledge. The knowledge that one seeks is primarily knowledge of oneself and the quest of human flourishing. And I think if I understand Klein and Bloom well enough, I think that would be their case.

3:07 Dylan: The way Pano just formulated it, it made me think that while maybe the way Klein is going to in the end formulate it, it just strikes me as really not quite the way in which, at least I hear, maybe it's the way St. John's talks about it, but it's not so much the way in which other places talk about it. I'm not sure that always, like in the way I hear St. John's talking about it as being directly sort of about a person's own flourishing of soul. At the very least, when we talk about liberal education, maybe that is what you mean by the kinds of person, the kinds of quality of person that you're going to end up with.

And I don't mean morally, I mean like the activities that they do. So Seth told a story on our last podcast because we were talking about liberal education at the time he was at Reed visiting with his father. And his father was quite skeptical about a liberal education in Reed. And they were having lunch or something with a student and the student had this sort of report that had been put together and Seth's father was asking him about it and he said, well, we want the college to divest of holdings in companies that do business in South Africa.

So what I did is I went and I analyzed the college's stock portfolio and came up with a new set of companies that don't own holdings that do business in South Africa that will actually make the college more money. And we're presenting this to the college. And his father asked, so what class

did you do this for?

He says, no, I didn't do it for class. I just did it on my own in turn. To Seth, you're going to this college. So I wonder how that relates to the kind of goal of liberal education that you were talking about and whether it does or doesn't, that kind of spirit of person that would be self moving, that would be creative in their endeavor and those kinds of characteristics of

person, which I sort of feel like

is underpinning and can be persuasive in a liberal education, that you cultivate the activities of soul of someone but also feed it with the practicalities of what they're actually going to do.

5:12 Seth: There's a context here that's I think, unspoken. I don't know from the articles if that context existed when those articles were being written. But for the entirety of my, both teenage and adult life, my desire to have pursue and my championing of a liberal education, I've been on the defensive. I think there probably was a time when a St. John's education, it was taken for granted that that's the right thing to do and you didn't have to defend or justify your participation in that type of an education or perhaps leading an institution that provided such an education.

We try to positively articulate the value. When I talk about it and speak publicly about it, I talk about how the skills that you need to be successful professionally and personally, you don't get from a technical or professional education. You only get them from a liberal education. But if you look at it negatively and you say, okay, somebody's questioning the value of pursuing a liberal education, what's the alternative that's being proposed? And it strikes me that 9 times out of 10 the claim is that a liberal education doesn't turn you into an entity with economic value, or at least not economic value for the society that you're entering.

And that can be clothed in a variety of different ways. But you're not going to be able to get a job, you're not going to be able to support a family, you're not going to be able to consume, right? That and $1.25 will get you a cup of coffee. That's what I was told about my philosophy degree.

6:36 Mark Linsenmayer: I had a high school teacher say, you got a philosophy degree? We use it for toilet paper.

6:40 Pano: Yeah.

6:41 Seth: The point being that while we're sitting here trying to talk about the value and what a liberal education is and does, there's no good alternative that I see other than the alternative approaches to education make you instrumental for somebody else or some other purpose, in which case I think we can construct an idea about just what you were kind of pointing at earlier is the liberal education actually values you in yourself, not for another purpose. And it's to cultivate, encourage, inspire, develop the you that is you, and not for some other purpose. And I think the reality is, and I'm very on Bloom's side in this realm, respect and anti Nussbaum, I guess, is that's very not democratic. Not every person in the society is interested in exploring who they are or critically questioning their own beliefs. And it's not for everybody.

7:32 Wes: I want to make a third distinction.

7:34 Seth: I'm okay with that.

7:34 Wes: Before I do that, I just want

to say because we do get a lot of email from young people who are thinking about what to do and might be attracted to philosophy, that there's no evidence that the undergraduate degree, in fact the evidence is that it has absolutely no correlation to your future income or prospects. Person with a business degree on an undergraduate business degree does not do better on average than someone with a philosophy degree.

I don't know what that says about

the value of undergraduate degrees in general.

But anyway, as far as the practical value, but I think there's a third

distinction to be made. So a lot of the rationale you'll see at liberal arts colleges throughout the country, they are focused on more non selfish concerns, right? More altruistic concerns. And the way Nussbaum puts it, she's going to say first page, philosophical education is practical. It is the rational search for the best human life. Its subject is above all the study of moral and social conceptions. And its purpose, as Musonius makes plain, is through reflection, the amelioration both of the individual student's life and through the choices of educated individuals of the surrounding society.

The question here, and even though she's going to give a sort of virtue ethics oriented portrait of it, largely you're going to get a more utilitarian justification for a liberal education. In other words, it's very, very focused. And I know this just from a friend who's an administrator at an Ivy League liberal arts college and my own teaching of a course recently at a liberal Arts college. So it's anecdotal evidence, but, you know, looking at what's going on in the news, it's very focused on alleviating the material suffering of human beings.

It's focused on social justice. That's the sort of rationale of what an education is for, above and beyond providing you with an income. I think the model that Klein gives is much more focused on a sort of virtue ethics conception of flourishing and self development that is actually quite foreign to most institutions.

9:32 Pano: The way that I frame this is liberal education has to steer between the Scylla and Charybdis of, on the one hand, utility, and on the other hand, ideology. We're leaning towards the utilitarian side of things, which is just, you know, producing technical skills for profit, for the betterment of the individual or society. There's nothing inherently wrong with that kind of education. But it's not liberal education. It's not an education in freedom. It's an education in a kind of vocational sense. And on the other side, ideology. Ideology presupposes commitments that precede inquiry.

So if you're going to a school and what the college is providing for you is a slate, a template of ideas that should and ought to be promoted, and their job is to make sure that you understand the urgency or necessity of following through on those ideas. That's also not liberal education. Going back to this young man at Reed College who was researching to divest, my question in that case would be what motivated him to do that? If it was a loose sense of a kind of conventional social justice that seems to pervade higher education and he was just kind of, you know, drinking the Kool Aid, as it were, and then motivated by that, to me, that compromises an education.

If an institution has sort of already formulated the conclusions that young people should come away with and don't give them free inquiry. On the other hand, he may have arrived there differently. You may have arrived at through full and open inquiry and a kind of sense of justice and came to that. I don't know. I can't judge that. I mean, I suspect it's probably the former, just from what we know experience of college students today. But I really do think that liberal education has to avoid either of these, either ideology or utility as the end point, and be able to reflect back on both utility and ideology and force them to give an account for themselves.

11:32 Seth: So to me, the moral of the story of the guy. So those of us who were alive in the 80s and remember all the student protests and divestment and all that. The moral of that story is he could have just done a sit in or protested like the other students. What he did was he said, what's the most effective way for me to make an impact and affect the change that I want to see in the world? He's like, they're not going to listen to me as a student, a 19 year old, just telling them what they're doing is morally wrong. So if I make a different kind of argument, I will be more persuasive.

And I think that to me was the most impressive part about it, was that he was trying to engage with the administration in a way that he thought would most likely achieve the outcomes that he was interested in seeing, which is acknowledging the point of view of the other. It's understanding the power structure, it's understanding what rhetorically works or doesn't work. There's a whole bunch of calculations that go into that. And that's what was impressive about it to me as well. By the way, I'm in marketing, so basically all I do is persuasion.

I'm a big fan of rhetoric and maybe that's what connected with me about that as well. But Wes, I take your point about social justice too. And then the idea that the purpose of education is somehow to right some wrongs or to level the playing field in some extent. I see this with my 25 year old niece. She went to a small Quaker school near her home in Greensboro. And that is an important part of their ideology. Maybe they didn't steer so far away from that side of the channel, but she has internalized that. And her purpose in life is very much associated with social justice.

And in a way that it's a contemporary analog to what I was talking about with this other student, but flavored very differently 25 years later.

13:15 Mark Linsenmayer: So maybe when we're talking about the end of education, it might be useful for us to distinguish its intrinsic end, the end that you actually have in mind while you're engaging in the education. And I think that's what Klein has in mind when he says this kind of education does not look for some goal or good beyond itself. It is itself its own end. That you really are sort of surrendering yourself to the material and seeing where it leads. Of course, as Pano pointed out, there's plenty of learning like that that is not liberal education because it gets caught up in trivia, historical trivia on one level, as opposed to following the line of questioning.

I think the telos of this is always getting more fundamental. Is the philosophical urge is this, why urge? So even if you started with 17th century poetry, you would get to the psychology that produced that, and then universal psychology and something about the human condition. So we could distinguish between again, the intrinsic goal when you're engaging in education, and that's what makes it liberal, is that it's detached from, I'm not just reading Martin Luther King. Let's say I want to read some Martin Luther King. Maybe I was even driven to do that because I have social goals.

I want to change the world like he did. But it's a difference between, like, what is the minimum of Martin Luther King I have to read in order to learn from him and be a more effective advocate myself? Or can I actually read him like literature, like a thinker, like a philosopher, and let his soul more or less infect mine? And indirectly then perhaps by becoming a more whole human being, becoming more independent, maybe that will then enable me still to become a better advocate. But it's a matter of are you directly doing it for the practical benefit, or is that just a side benefit?

So you could sell a liberal education by stressing these side benefits. Yes, it makes you a good citizen. It can help you advocate better. It can help, just as Nussbaum says, make conditions better for other people in the world. It can also give you better skills in writing and logic and things that will make you a good lawyer and all this stuff. But all that is extrinsic to the actual goal you have in mind when engaging in the activity.

15:19 Dylan: I want to move to talking more about the implementation of liberal education. Just because of what you just said, Mark, thinking about what is it that you're doing on a day to day basis. We were talking about cultivating wonder and having those epiphantic moments. But it strikes me that, whether it be at St. John's or at Reed, that there are a number of components of the way in which you engage in the education that are more or less elemental to it. So one of them is certainly going to be small groups of people in relatively intimate experiences working on something together.

That conversation or discussion, depending on your point of view, is integral to that education. I think the argument would be it has to be done with other people. So for instance, just reading the books, whether they be textbooks or great books or whatever, you're not going to get a liberal education doing that, right?

16:15 Wes: Although I will say I think that's something. So when I taught this course recently, I learned a lot from what they expected of me about the kind of pedagogy that at least was common there and I suspect is common in other places. So for instance, lots and lots of exercises where you put students in little subgroups together. For instance, you do breakout sessions, you do something they call the fishbowl, and lots of other little exercises that are focused on getting students engaged, you know, making them active. And that's something that's on the mind of the average educator.

But I actually having a seminar of the St. John's form where the professor is quite laid back and lets the students sort of run the show and lets the conversation organically develop and maybe steps in here and there, I think that's actually quite rare. And so it's not enough to simply say, okay, here's some books and then have a conversation.

17:09 Pano: You know, I think a St. John's seminar presupposes engagement. It doesn't cultivate it. But to have that, you have to create a culture of engagement, expectations of engagement. And that's one of the reasons, one of the many reasons why at St. John's everybody comes in and reads the same books together. Because you are all literally on the same page and you sort of feel mutually responsible for what's happening in the classroom. There shouldn't be anywhere to hide. But it's a rarely found form of pedagogy and it does take a while to acclimate incoming freshmen.

It's not something they come in sort of ready made. Some do, but most of them aren't ready to go. But it happens very quickly actually in the scheme of things. I think within a month or so in most seminar rooms they're getting the hang of it. And it's being modeled by the tutor. And this is why face to face interaction is so important. It's modeled by those who get it faster than others. And I'm thinking about how we just got a new puppy a few weeks ago and we have a two year old dog and watching the two year old dog teach the puppy how not to nip and how to be quiet and where the water bowl is, that kind of modeling behavior, that's part of the process of education generally, even for human beings.

We have to watch others do it and then participate in the doing of it.

18:24 Wes: Yeah, I still remember my first seminar at St. John's it's on the Iliad, right? It's the first one and just how intense that was. And it was exciting, it was anxiety producing. It wasn't just like stepping into a regular classroom. And I think, yeah, there are some ineffable things there including the culture, to some extent. We were supposed to dress up, at least at that time. I don't know if I ever did.

18:47 Dylan: But you were beginning of the fall of the culture.

18:50 Wes: Yeah. More dressed up than not. And you call people by their last names, which I assume still happens.

18:57 Pano: And the fact that we hold our seminars in the evening, holding them in the evening, it's an interesting cultural phenomenon because it sort of elevates them in the course of that day. You have kind of all day to day be preparing for thinking about seminar. And then something in the evening has more of the feeling of an event to it.

19:11 Wes: It's a real event. Yeah. Incredibly exciting.

19:15 Dylan: One of the components of it, which I think is particularly unusual for a seminar at least, is that the opening question, which would be put forth by one of the tutors and then expecting the students to say something to run it. So I mean, I was in seminar after seminar, we'd have an opening question and there would be commonly a discussion amongst tutors and students. Well, how long was it before someone said something? Before someone started to answer the question. But you would wait in expectation that someone's going to take charge of starting the conversation. And it had to be a student.

19:50 Seth: Okay, Johnny. Snobs. We had seminars in my school too.

19:54 Pano: No, I.

19:56 Dylan: So yes, that's why I wanted to pick on that sort of opening question phenomena as being particularly unusual.

Because I agree with you.

I had seminars when I was in undergrad.

20:05 Seth: This to me, gets to the heart of it. Reading the books by yourself is not a liberal education. It's active dialogue. It's active engagement. Now you can have an intellectual engagement with a text. I mean, I do believe in the idea of hermeneutical struggle with the text. But the reality of the situation is that philosophy may begin in wonder, but it ends in conversation or it's perpetuated in conversation. Which is why Plato wrote dialogues to begin with. And the seminar format is just exactly what Wes said. He used emotion, words, exhilarating, anxiety inducing.

It creates accountability to the other. It exposes you to other people's direct ideas in a kind of unvarnished way. You're not reading what they said. They're not across a screen that you can kind of tune out from. They're right there in the room with you. And if emotions are get heated, you have to deal with it. Or if somebody just says, my experience is completely different, as traditional and white and whatever. As my education was, time and again I was disabused of my prioritization of my experience. I stopped making the philosophical fallacy of generalization from my own experience early on because people I was in the room with were like, well, I didn't grow up with my dad in the Air Force and I didn't live in suburbs all my life or I didn't do this or I'm female or whatever, and my experience isn't like that.

And I was like, oh shit. Because I went to high school with people who were just more or less like me. And so it was a real eye opener for me. And I would not have gotten that experience sitting at the back of a lecture hall listening to somebody drone on. To me, the seminar is the heart of the liberal education, regardless of what text or topic or whatever you're following.

21:49 Mark Linsenmayer: All right, just compare the idea of reading Heidegger's Being and Time on your own and then going into a seminar to talk about it with other people that just read it the night before, versus having that same experience of you encountering the primary text, then going, listening to Hubert Dreyfus, an expert on it, explain to you in everyday terms what it means related to the historical background, do all this stuff. And then also having a discussion section. Maybe not as long, maybe not as in depth, maybe not as student driven, but something that is approximating what you're talking about in seminar.

It certainly can't hurt to have the expert that is not serving as a substitute for your primary engagement with the text, but serving as a modern day focal point so you're not just getting lost. You don't have the historical context, you don't have any point of reference to connect it to your present day. It seems so much more effective to have that guide through it than merely to struggle it out with fellow students.

22:47 Wes: I saw both sides of this. Remember the Leibniz class, Seth? We've talked about this before.

So this is in grad school where

the professor gave us so much secondary reading and I did all of it and I just got really, really deep into Leibniz and it's a totally different experience than the way we would read it and talk about it at St. John's there are benefits to both. But I think for younger people, the problem with all the secondary literature and focusing on becoming an expert, right, focusing on becoming a scholar or something like that of Leibniz is the secondary literature. People are doing your thinking for you. It's a far more passive experience. If you're at St.

John's you're reading Leibniz, you're treating the text just as one among many voices in this dialogue between participants across history. And you are fumbling around with. The idea is that there's a virtue just to fumbling around and not knowing what the hell is going on and having to reconstruct it and sitting there and thinking about the meaning of a paragraph for an hour, as opposed to having that just explained to you in the second method. It's definitely faster, and it's not like

there's not a place for it.

But as far as encouraging reflection, I don't think it performs that fundamental goal of a liberal real education. I think it can foreclose on reflection.

24:07 Mark Linsenmayer: Although what you just described is not what I just described. I'm saying you're still having that primary engagement with the text, but then you're also having not reading a bunch of secondary literature, but somebody that's experienced dealing with students, that has a pedagogical thing in mind, that is engaging with students in a more aggressive, traditionally professorial way.

24:28 Wes: I agree that there's a benefit to

that, but I think there are drawbacks as well. There are benefits to going it alone and reflecting, because, again, I think it does become a bit of a crutch. I have the same ambivalent attitude in preparing for the show whether to do a bunch of secondary reading or not. Yeah, you can gain a lot of circumstantial knowledge and background and through doing little secondary reading, but there's something else going on when you are simply grappling with the text itself.

25:00 Pano: It doesn't become a question of authority. If you are in a classroom where there's an expert with a degree on the Wall and a PhD with the books on the subject, and that person is sharing their opinion of, let's say, Heidegger. The authority that they bring to the table, I think, forecloses your ability to think for yourself. You might be able to think for yourself around the edges of that, but you really are essentially encountering a second text, even if it's a spoken presentation, stands between you and Heidegger. Maybe that leads to getting to know Heidegger better, but I think the end of liberal education is getting to know yourself better.

And I think the kind of wrestling with ideas along with other peers who are wrestling with ideas. I was professor for many years, and I've taught in relatively conventional, traditional college settings. And, you know, I would have my agenda going in there and teaching Shakespeare, and this is my reading of Richard iii, and I would present it and make a case for it, and the students would generally be entertained and often have some interesting things to say. But my goal at the end of that class was to go where I had intended us to go from the beginning, to get us there.

That was my goal. Sometimes with swerving along the way. I think with a true liberal arts seminar, you have no idea where you're going to end up. You don't predetermine the path ahead of time. And it allows a kind of unfolding of conversation, unfolding by exploration that allows for deeper penetration into the text than if there's somebody there with their hand on the wheel guiding you along the way. And that's why in St. John's seminars, the custom is to have two tutors in the room so that there really is no center of authority, that the tutors are both present and they kind of cancel each other out in terms of their authority.

And the habit of trying not to interfere, be a facilitator rather than an authority, really does move the responsibility for one's education back to the student.

26:53 Mark Linsenmayer: I'm not going to argue the particular point. I mean, obviously the. Just the format of our show shows that as a learning experience, I value conversation over having an expert on. We could have an expert on every single episode who's the scholar of that thing. And we purposefully don't do that because it really wouldn't give us enough chance to talk and struggle with it. And I don't know for the listener, given that either way, they don't get to participate. I don't know what's pedagogically better for them if we had an expert on every time or they just listened to our.

27:23 Seth: You just did a beautiful job of articulating attention that we experience in our little philosophy project here as well is that we read some stuff and we sort of semi agree beforehand that we want to cover certain topics or get to certain things. And more often than not, we spend so much time on just one thing, just getting kind of lost in it. And then it's like, well, should we move on to this? Should we cover this? You can mine something. That's rich. But because we read this stuff, it's like we have to talk about it or somehow we'll. Sometimes we're smart and we do a follow up episode.

But it's definitely true. I'm with you. I like the organic nature of the discovery aspect, which is not to diminish the value of what Mark would say. And again, in my own experience, that was the way things are structured at Reed. It was lecture and then breakout seminars. Right. But you were not required to actually talk about what was in the lecture. It was just sort of context and background provided by the usual suspects. The classicist talks about the language. The historian comes in and talks about the period. But. So we've been doing this almost 10 years now, and I think about this frequently.

I've now read, and I've far exceeded both my undergraduate and graduate time spent reading and participating in seminars and all that with these three guys right here. And when I look at it, what I've done constitutes an education in itself, not to be certified by any accreditation agency or anything like that. And to me, this is a liberal education. It doesn't require the institution, but it has all the essential elements. It has the key text, the agreed upon ground rules for the conversation, so to speak, which includes generosity, courtesy, fidelity, work, putting in the work, and then it's a conversation.

And so this is actually the thing that excites me and excites a lot of our listeners about what we're doing here is there are people that say, I would love to be able to go to school and sit in a room and do nothing but talk about these texts. There's hardly a listener to Pel who wouldn't jump at the chance to go to St. John's if their life means and financial means and all those things afforded it. But they get to participate sort of vicariously by listening to our conversation. And that's what excites them, and that's what's created the Hook.

In essence, we are validating the value of the undertaking, the value of the liberal education. But we're also. We've identified the hidden market for that. The people who spent a career already in engineering or truck driving or whatever, and say, I would love to go back to school, but, you know, I'm 65 and I've. I have responsibilities and things like that.

30:05 Mark Linsenmayer: So I think we have to at least very briefly get into these other criticisms by Hook, which are familiar to anybody that's contemplating the St. John's experience is just the fact that everybody reads the same thing. You're already saying, Pano, that it creates more of a sense of camaraderie if everybody's literally on the same page. One of the quotes that Hook gives in his article, he's quoting Mark Van Doren, who is writing in favor of St. John's if the best is known, there's no student to whom it will not fit, and each should have all of it.

And Hook replies, this is like saying that since the aim of medicine is to breathe health for everybody. If the best diet is known, there is no individual whom it will not fit in. Each should have all of it, which is just evidently bullshit. I think Nussbaum says this as well. A liberal education has to actually take into account the level of preparation, the proclivities, the nature of the individual learners, not just in choosing how exactly to teach, what assignments to give, but in even choosing what books will be most effective. I think that you can very much buy into all we've been saying about discussion being good and being active and communing directly with the text, but still think that fundamentally, I see a practical difficulty here that I can say in the abstract, yes, we should modify the curriculum for each person.

But given that, who would be doing that modification? It would either be the student who doesn't know anything and thereby picking randomly, or some mentor who you get through the required courses together, and then the mentor is sort of looking at the individual students. You know what? I see? You have this. More interest in science will steer you that way. Do these sort of practical considerations come into how the curriculum is made up, or is it really just we're just locked into everybody? And along with this, Hook says at least the pretense of the St.

John's program when it was initiated, is this should actually be rolled out nationwide. This is not just one choice among many. You make the choice to join St. John's but this, the Unitary 100 Great Books, everybody reading them cover to cover. Having this thing that that really is a panacea for social ills. Has that lessened over the years?

32:14 Pano: I would agree wholeheartedly with you that what you're doing is liberal education. And also that the spirit of liberal education as we hold it at St. John's does extend well beyond the boundaries of the campus. I mean, we have a graduate institute where we take people at all different quarters of their life. We go out and we do seminars. I was just in Phoenix, Arizona, running seminars out there. We do seminars across the country. We have the sort of sense that the kind of Arcadian campus might be the center of the kind of core experience of St. John's but that liberal education really shouldn't be bounded in too restricted of a way, and that you can replicate this way of knowing, this way of learning really, in any context,

32:55 Dylan: because we only have a little bit more time left. I wanted to bring up something about liberal education that's often not included, which is that it's not just about disciplines that are loosely called the humanities. And that this was something that was really important to me when I was trying to formulate my own liberal education was in fact, to make sure I had inquiry into nature and natural science and mathematics as a central piece of it. And that's one thing that was attractive to me about becoming a faculty member at St. John's was that that was true as part of the core understanding of what a liberal education.

That's part of what Klein has in his formulation of a liberal education, that even though we end up talking about Plato or about souls or about philosophy, in terms of content, the content includes the inquiry into the natural world and also the methods of doing so. An inquiry about those methods. And that, I think, is still often controversial in understanding a liberal education. If anything, when people say, oh, my, liberal education is useless, or that liberal education is going to be useless, what they often mean is that there's nothing about the world of science that you're going to have learned in it, except for maybe talking a little bit about medical ethics or something.

So I just wanted to say I don't think either the four of us think that that's true.

34:20 Wes: Mark, have we satisfied you at all?

34:24 Dylan: We don't care about the souls of our guests, Mark.

34:28 Wes: We do get emails all the time, though, by people who are just sort of stunned that this type of conversation even exists. It's an epiphany experience for them. They're grateful for it.

And the fact that we're not experts

and that we just struggle and say lots of dumb things, that opens a path for them into the conversation. And we also hear people say, often in emails, they're responding in their heads to some of the things we say. They're participating in the conversation. It's much harder to do that with a lecture.

34:55 Dylan: It is amazing how often we get correspondence about how just listening to conversations like these enlivens people's lives, intellectually, enlivens their souls. And that's not every day. But we certainly have gotten a stack of emails that amount to. Listening to these conversations has altered my life in some important way.

35:19 Pano: I mean, I think that goes back to the ends of liberal education itself. I mean, if you think about why do the four of you do what you do here, apart from the power and the glory that come with this podcast, you know, the money. But, you know, what is it that drives this project and that sustains it over 10 years, engages other people to sort of be on the periphery of this? I think fundamentally there is that drive to know. And how do we know, we talk, we use our language in ways, in increasingly complex ways. And those ways can be made even more complex when we're intersecting with other people who are using language and looking at difficult text.

And things become exponentially deeper the longer we converse and the more that we converse with one another. Well, I would not necessarily make that claim, but let me go back to the first criticism from Hook and Nussbaum. I think they're sort of fundamentally misapprehending what we're doing. It's not that we've picked 100 magic books and that you open the books and you absorb the magic from those books and that makes you into some philosophical supernova or something. It's the program is really the program, the process of learning that reading great books instills, it's the process itself.

Now we read about 175 to 200 books because we don't actually read every single book cover to cover, thank God. And we don't do four languages as they did in that article there. We do two Greek and then French, but otherwise it's pretty consistent. The idea is that what we're doing is we're studying great books, not the great books. Not that this is a comprehensive compendium of all the greatest things that have been thought or read. You could make 15 curricula just out of the stuff that were left out and that you'd be just scratching the surface.

It's that we are studying great books. Books that have rise to a particular level of greatness by having in them something that has historically and in the present has evoked kind of the questioning process that we're trying to get young people and even older people to engage in that self reflective questioning process. These books have proven themselves effective at that. And so you have a selection of books. It has to be a kind of reasonable selection because you have a period of time, right? So four years. What's reasonable to read within four years?

If it was a 10 year program, we'd have 300 books. If it was a two year program, we might have 25. Whatever fits within that. And then the way the books are selected, there are different criteria, but one of the criteria is that we study across fields of knowledge. So we have works of science and mathematics and music and poetry and philosophy. So there's a kind of spread of knowledge. And the other is that there are books that have roughly been engaged from one to the next in conversation with one another, even though there are a lot of books that we have to leave out that have Been part of that conversation as well.

The idea is that this kind of education is a foundational education. Liberal education may be the end in itself, but a St. John's education is just the beginning that you instill habits, you instill a way of learning, instill ways of reading and thinking and conversing that are going to propel somebody into the rest of their life to continue. The fact that we do books in the Western tradition is one of necessity. The metaphor I like to use is if this is a foundation you're building, a structure, a house. There are kind of two things that could weaken the foundation or make it impossible to build on.

One would be is if you make it too large, if you spread it out too thinly and it's too shallow, you can't really build anything on top of it. Or if it's too narrow, if you decide you're going to do one thing and you go really, really, really deep and you kind of bore to the ground, it's too narrow to construct anything on it. So we have to find a foundation that's right sized for learning for the rest of one's life. Hook came out quite a long time ago and was very skeptical. You know, he was there the first decade of this, you know, we've got 80 years going of this.

It feels right sized over time, the curriculum. We have that in the four years we're accomplishing what we hope to accomplish. And not to turn personal here, but I think the evidence of the Johnny's we have as part of this conversation is that we have engendered in our graduates that the desire to keep going, to keep learning, spread your wings. We begin in the Western tradition. But I would be very sad if every Johnny just stayed the rest of their life solely in the Western tradition. By learning how to write, read and think and talk, you take yourself elsewhere, you explore things beyond the boundaries of the tradition that is the core tradition at St.

John's so it's more about learning how to learn and being instilled with a kind of passion and eros, if you will, for I would put it for wisdom.

39:59 Seth: I'm wary of the learning how to learn thing only because it feels to me like it doesn't do credit to some non liberal disciplines. But I'm going to close with my two things. The first is the why what how or the why how what is exactly what people in tech, I hear that all the time, right when we start our year, we have to tell the market why we do what we do, what we Believe, right. And then how we go about helping people do it and what the specifics. So, yes, that's very much a corporate thing. I will close with this. You guys know stem, right?

The new trend that I've been seeing and been hearing about, after a decade of cranking out computer science degrees or now moving to certifications, you don't even have to go to college to work in my industry, as long as you can prove that you have competency in the programming language or the administrative administration and what have you. But science is all about coulda, not about shoulda. And so the acronym that's gaining traction now is called steam. So it's science, technology, engineering, arts and math. And it's all because what people have come to realize is that functional skills, without understanding the value of what's being done or what can be done or why, to focus efforts, or more even having the second order skills that are required to manage people that have those skills.

Like how do you manage a team of technologists or engineers to be most effective? Where do you put your resources and efforts when you're trying to solve a problem? Plus, functional skills are in a global workforce. If you go to school to learn something that 150 million people in the rest of the world who are learning also and will take a lower wage to do, put you at a severe disadvantage. The skills that we learn by being able to read, think, analyze, assimilate information, and most importantly, communicate it is the one thing nobody ever talks about, Nobody's ever asked me in an interview.

So tell me about your communication style or experience communicating. And yet it's the most important thing. If everything you know is stuck in your head, then you're essentially useless in an economic sense. If you can't translate what's in your head out onto paper and articulate it to other people, or translate it into product or utility and then also art. That's the one thing we haven't mentioned here, is the role that creativity and arts. If I had one criticism of a liberal education, it would be that there needs to be a creative thread that takes you into visual, pictorial arts and things like that and forces you to try to actually go through, through the act of creating to understand that process as well.

42:37 Mark Linsenmayer: We've talked a little bit about how you want to have this history of the conversations of the books talking to each other. I think maybe the rhetoric has gotten more modest over the years between the thing that Hook was objecting to, to Klein, to what we're hearing out of Pano here. And I think it's moving in the direction of more relativist, for lack of a better term, in terms of this is a useful understanding. It's no longer a question, as Alan Bloom was spelling out of you have to understand this chain of meaning from ancient times to the present, or else you don't truly understand democracy and you can't be a good citizen of a democratic state.

You have to understand the chain from the philosophy back to Parmenides and Heraclitus to current science. In order to be a really intelligent scientist, you have to have that unbroken picture of history, because I think there are many histories. In other words, you draw a common thread, a thread from the past to the present. And as Pano was just saying, there are all these books that are part of the conversation that you're not going to have time to read. That understanding something historically in this way is a lifetime project. And so the best that a liberal education can do, a college education can do, is give you the hint of that is to ground a few of the transitions.

And I think that there are far from what Bloom seems to be painting as a singular story, that unless you understand this story, you're not truly educated. There are many stories, and in fact, the act of storytelling itself is the thing that you are learning. And this is what I'm hearing in Pano. It's the critical faculty, the engagement. It's not the dog. You know. So this is the way Hook was taking it, that St. John's was presenting a dogmatic this is the canon. You have to absorb the canon. That is not the way he probably even should have taken it back then, and certainly is not the way that it's intended.

44:25 Pano: Now, if I can just quickly respond to that, I think if I'm accused of being a relativist, I'm gonna get in all sorts of trouble.

44:32 Mark Linsenmayer: A pluralist, let's say.

44:34 Pano: I think in its mature state, St. John simply appreciates that where the liberal tradition comes from, and that is essentially a Socratic tradition. And so it's not necessarily that St. John's or I should say even I personally, have given up on the notion of there being some sort of transcendental truths or beauty or that, but our capacities to uncover those, especially in a kind of limited time frame through an institution, capacities are limited. And so there's a kind of Socratic humility, I think, that undergirds the enterprise that we're engaged in.

45:08 Mark Linsenmayer: All right, next time we're going to talk about truth, we're going to read Alfred Tarski's classic paper the Semantic Conception of Truth from 1944. Tarski's Theory of Truth by Hartry Field from 1972. We'll also read Donald Davidson's the Folly of Trying to define truth from 96. Thanks everybody. We'd love to hear what you think of this. Please go to parsleyexaminedlife.com you can make comments on our blog post for this episode or you could follow us on Facebook. There's a Facebook group you can have engaged in conversations. You can have your own little seminar right there.

Or Twitter. Twitter pretty much replicates the St. John's experience. I think it's very close. I wanted to announce that there is a follow up discussion to what you've just heard. It's between Wes and Dylan and it has to do with two articles that we considered reading for this episode but did not ultimately decide to do them as a group. They focus on the relationship between a liberal education and democracy. And they are by Leo Strauss and Richard Rorty, two often requested authors. If you want to hear that discussion, Partially Examined Life citizens will see that in their citizenship feed within the week after this comes out.

You can also hear that at the $5 level@patreon.com partiallyexaminedlife our closing song today is called Preservation Hill. It is by the Bevis frond from their 2011 album the Leaving of London. And I was very happy to talk to the creative force behind the Bevis Frond, Nick Saloman for Nakedly Examined Music, episode 75. You can check that out@nakedlyexaminemusic.com He's a true genius and I thought that listening to this song in light of the issues just discussed here was an interesting and fun hermeneutic exercise. Hope you agree. Thank you Pano so much for coming on.

46:49 Pano: Thank you. Thank you very much guys. Really enjoyed this. Great pleasure.

46:53 Seth: Yeah, thank you so much.

46:54 Mark Linsenmayer: Good night, everybody.

46:55 Seth: Good night.

47:13 Mark Making Music: There ain't no big bang, no blinding flash of lights, no fanfare blast of trumpet or marching. So slowly we can see the what's our corner view some the of reflected in a C When the lights go down on Preservation Hill and no one in the world can deny we're f all I have you stand to. We take part out world on which we all rotate and there pure our dreams in attendant place and we're just the same despite our jaunts in the air. It's only when our span of attention waves we come back down to earth with unbecoming force. You wake up with you to stay and be on my high horse when the lights go down on Preservation Hill and no one in the world can unite with us all I, Sam, Disdain my high horse when the lights go down on Preservation Hill no one in the world can I will fight all Love is still. I love you. I love you.