Education: Freedom Must Be Learned

“The destruction of the tradition of the liberal arts at this crisis in our history … would be a crime comparable, in my opinion, with the burning of the books by the Nazis. . . . Burn your books—or, what amounts to the same thing, neglect your books—and you will lose freedom as surely as if you were to invite Hitler and his henchmen to rule over you.”

If this defense of liberal education had come from a college president—as such defenses often have come—it might have been dismissed as the cry of a man watching his business go to pot in wartime. But the speaker was no college president. He was Wendell Willkie, speaking last week at North Carolina’s Duke University. What he added has not so often been said in recent months:

“The liberal arts, we are told, are luxuries. At best you should fit them into your leisure time. They are mere decorations upon the sterner pattern of life. . . . Men and women who are devoting their lives to such studies should not be made to feel inferior or apologetic in the face of a PT boat commander or the driver of a tank. They and all their fellow citizens should know that the preservation of our cultural heritage is not superfluous in a modern civilization. … It is what we are fighting for.

“The relationship between a liberal education and freedom is good sound American doctrine. … I regret that during the last several decades we have had a tendency to overlook this important American fact. And I think we are paying the penalty for our shortsightedness in unexpected ways.

“For instance, there has been a trend recently toward what is called ‘leadership’ —but what is really nothing more than the idolization of individual men. … In Russia there is Joseph Stalin; in China, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek; in Britain, Winston Churchill; in the United States, Franklin Roosevelt. . . . They deserve the high positions they have won. And yet, dare we say that any one of them is indispensable? The moment we say that our world must change. . . .

“Had we more faith in liberal education, we would have, I believe, more faith in ourselves—more faith in the great leavening process of democracy, which forever pushes new men to the top. I think it was William Howard Taft who said you could find a man fit to sit on the Supreme Court Bench of the United States in any town in America of more than 5,000 population. Possibly Mr. Taft exaggerated. Yet surely the principle has been proved time after time in American history. The vast American educational system has set men free —free not alone to serve, but free also to lead. Education is the mother of leadership.”