The Heart of Liberal Education

I hope you all enjoyed your summer camp at Wyoming Catholic College,
what we call Peak: stimulating classes on dialectic, astronomy, theology, and
philosophy, wonderful outdoor adventures repelling and horseback riding,
Catholic Olympic games, adoration, good food and fellowship. A peak
experience, in the general sense, is a moment accompanied by a euphoric
mental state often achieved by self-actualizing individuals. Well, I am not
sure who the self-actualizing individuals are, but in any event, peak
experiences are intense, and usually quite rare. What if I told you that you
could have a peak experience that lasted four straight years? Of course, you
couldnt survive that! But a WCC education is, in a sense, Peak writ large,
and Id like to talk to you about why I think four years at WCC would be good
choice for you if you enjoyed Peak.

I have a degree in liberal arts do you want fries with that?

I attended a liberal arts college. I graduated with a Bachelor of
Unemployment degree.
Liberal arts major: will think for food.

The implied message in these jokes is that the purpose of education,

including liberal education, is, whatever else it might offer you, to get a well
paying and secure job. Education as job training. How many of you think this
is more or less the truth? Be honest now, dont just answer how you think
you should answer. Theres good reason that people think this way especially
nowadays about college education. If you spend money on something, a tool,
the tool should work and be worth the investment. College is the place where
young, dependent adults become older, independent adults, and
independent means, among other things, the ability to make a living and
raise a family, and this takes a job. Lastly, college is the only formal and
official and universal rite of passage our culture has to becoming a self-
sufficient, productive member of society, and builder of communitya good
American. And this requires, or at least is much more attainable, with a well
paying and stable career.

I think all Americans are in agreement, for various reasons, but

specifically economic reasons, that everyone benefits from a college
education and therefore should go if he can. All Americans are not in
agreement, of course, that everyone benefits from a liberal education, and
there is not much agreement about what a liberal education even is. And just
about no one in America, except for a very small percentage of Enlightened
souls, believes that everyone would benefit from a WCC college liberal
education. Id first like to enlighten all Americans why a liberal education is
necessary for everyone, particularly in todays culture, and then the harder
sell, that a WCC liberal education, or something much like it, would be best
for everyone. If I am correct, then we will need to have thousands of WCCs
all throughout America. How we shall accomplish that will be the topic of
next years Peaks talk, but perhaps it will already have been accomplished
by then! Miracles can happen!

I. Why is a liberal education necessary for everyone today? You have

all heard the standard arguments in our philosophical vision
statement and college bulletins, and in many conservative blogs
and articles and speeches on educationthe liberal arts teach you
how to learn, think, and communicate effectively, so that you can
succeed in every career choice. They make you cultured and teach
you that there is more to life than pleasure and money. They help
you to get a sense of who you are as an American by teaching you
the influential ideas, works of art, personages, events of Western
culture, inviting you to participate in the Great Conversation. Just
being immersed in the Great Books expands your mind and heart
and imagination, making you a better person, more informed, more
cultivated.

II. These are all great truths about and persuasive arguments for
liberal education, but they are not always convincing to everyone.
Cant I get all that culture and skills on my own with a private
reading plan with others on the internet for free? Cant I spend
much less money doing it with an online Great books program? Ive
already studied all this on the high-school level in my homeschool or
at Trivium school. Why repeat it? Ill get all this later in my life when
I have the timeright now, I need to get job training for a career.

III. The short answer to all these objections isno. And the short
reason is that the liberal arts are crafts, and to learn a craft, one
needs a guild, a community devoted to excellence in the craft with
Masters and Apprentices and tools, in the case of education, a
curriculum set by a tradition, of which the Masters are the
mastercraftsmen. Education is a form of cooperative inquiry, and so
it cant be done on ones own, and it takes more than an informal
 book clubtheres needs to be an institution with a Dean! A
president, and faculty. Also, to gain a liberal education that forms
ones body, mind, imagination, and spirit takes years, more than 4
years of high school, and actually, more than 4 years of college, but
that is all we have, and if the education is done right, it enables the
student to go on to complete his education on his own because it
makes him into an independent inquirer and learner, always, of
course, with Christ as the main teacher.

IV. But these descriptions of the good of a liberal education and

arguments for and against it are common fare. Id like to describe
liberal education in another way not so common. Its a different and,
I think, more fundamental reason than all the others, though it
involves and builds upon the other reasons.

V. C.S. Lewis in his great Abolition of Man exposes the poision of

relativistic and scientistic education, where truth is subjective and
where nothing exists except mindless matter in motion which
education aims to control for the sake of power under nothing but
human will. Lewis says that this education produces men without
chests, that is, men without hearts. And he says this: The heart
never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
The heart must obey the head, I agree, when the heart has been
deceived by sentimentalism, but I think its better to say, sorry
Lewis, that the head must obey the heart. Why? Because the heart,
not the head, is the core of our being, as Dietrich von Hildebrand
put is,the most tender, the most inner, the most secret center in
man It is where God comes to meet us, and it is the choices that
come out of our heart, not out of our head, for which we shall be
judged.

VI. Liberal education, according to Blessed Cardinal Newman, is

formation of the mind enabling it to seek, know, and contemplate
truth, which is the good of the intellect and which prepares us to
know fully, and love fully, the One who is the truth. But, and now I
contradict a Blessed!, I do not think education of the mind alone or
even preeminently is sufficient. Just as a specialist education in one
field or skill should not come before a generalist and integrative
education in the principles and mindset of all fields, education of the
mind alone or foremost is imbalanced, and can lead to extreme
 deformations in the soul, such as hyper intellectualism, an inability
to act decisively, and a lack of emotional integration.

VII. In addition to the mind, there must also be an education of the body
in endurance and long-suffering, the imagination in beauty, and the
will in the good. All this is to say that a proper education is an
education of the whole person, but the person is not his intellect, his
will, or his body. He is, rather, his heart. And the heart is what WCC
educates best.

VIII. Why is the heart so important? In a word, God. God makes His
presence known in our hearts, and we see God with our heart, not
our eyes, not our intellects, not our wills or imaginations, but the
synthesis of all these at the very core of our being.

IX. The heart is supernaturally educated by grace, the sacraments, the

life of Christian charity, and the teachings of the Catholic Church,
but the heart needs a robust natural education in order for the
supernatural formation to take root and bear fruit. How can the
heart be educated? Only by a curriculum of the heart, one that
forms and perfects all out powers in different disciplines, yes,
humanities the moral imagination, the fine arts the aesthetic sense,
the outdoors the will, the senses, and our character, math and
science our powers of observation and interpretation, philosophy
our critical sense, our questioning power, our dialectical mind, and,
with theology, our contemplative essence.

X. Many liberal arts colleges have all the components, and teach them
very well, but they tend to go to two extremesthey either have
specialists in each discipline, but they and the disciplines they teach
remain aloof and even hostile to each other, or they have
theologians, humanists, or philosophers teaching all the disciplines,
and so the distinctiveness of each discipline is underplayed and one
really gets an education in literature, philosophy, or theology, with
the other disciplines a means to that end.
XI. But the heart is not just educated by an intellectual curriculum,
even one that forms more than the intellect. WCCs outdoor
component feeds the heart viscerally with hands-on wisdom, one
might say, and emboldens and encourages the heart. The
community life here, ordered by and toward the true, the good, and
the beautiful, and small and intimate with personal, heart-to-heart,
not screen-to-screen interaction, and suffused with natural beauty
and Catholicism, and humour nourishes the heart and gives it a
place to expand. Joy is the language of the heart, and joy means
being happy to be in each others presence. God is happy to dwell in
our hearts, and because we know and feel this, we are happy to
dwell with each other. The best curriculum would be nothing in the
absence of joy, and we have all the ingredients here at WCC for joy

XII. But even more important than all this, the heart is the seat of
action, its the source and root of not only our goals and dreams and
loves, but the innumerable decisions of a lifetime that get us there.
In short, the heart is the place of prudence, guided by the Holy
Spirits gift of counsel and the infused virtue of charity. No human
being can teach another to be prudent, but she can serve as a
model to imitate, and great literature can have the same modeling
effect. An Institution can also provide safe but challenging
opportunities for the development of virtue, and prudence is the
virtue par excellence that enables one to become an independent
practical reasoner, one who can be the master of his own decisions
and character development, dependent ultimately on God alone and
the right and good he can accurately discern in creation and
situations and people, and a leader who can know what to do in the
moment, in new, uncharted territory. Needless to say, the outdoor
program provides these opportunities in spades, but your entire four
years here will be a training ground of prudence. And prudence is all
about how to act in the face of evil, of danger, without succumbing
to fear, acting out of it, and avoiding that counterfeit of prudence
called cunning in which we manipulate the situation and others to
get what we want, not what is good for us and others. Listen to Dr.
Glenn Arbery, our president, describe it

Because the things that most deepen us and rouse us are dangerous.
The attempt to abolish all dangers turns us into what C.S. Lewis calls
men without chests. An appetite for the real good means being willing
to face danger, and the whole point of the liberty we celebrate is that we
learn to handle danger, to face it responsibly, with care and virtue. How
many things in our culture, from contraception to gun control, stem from
the fear that liberty will lead to our ruin? What we need is an education in
the powers and dangers that come with our full participation in being
human. Our real powers need liberty as fire needs air.

XIII. I suggested before that a WCC education of the heart is particularly

essential for our culture today. Why? To put it bluntly, our culture is
becoming more and more godless, and thus, heartless. Our public
life is more and more focused on money and pleasure and prestige.
And the media and even mainstream academia is becoming one
big propaganda machine. Listen to Josef Pieper:

That the existential realm of man could be taken over by pseudo-

realities whose fictitious nature threatens to become indiscernible is
truly a depressing thought. And yet, the Platonic nightmare, I hold,
possesses an alarming contemporary relevance. For the general
public is being reduced to a state where people are not only unable
to find out about the truth but also become unable even to search
for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery
that have determined their convictions, satisfied with a fictitious
reality created by design through the abuse of language.

A fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of

language. Thats a definition of propaganda. What is the nature of
propaganda? It is the cultural indoctrination of a populous in lies,
and usually lies come in the form of half-truths and unexamined
myths that flatter us and keep us looking but never seeing, reading
but never understanding, judging but never judging right, for never
in the light of truth or goodness. The Christian sociologist Jacques
Ellul put it this way:

To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot

permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news
must remain on the surface of the event; he is carried along in the
current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate;
he can never stop to reflect. There is never any awareness-of
himself, of his condition, of his society-for the man who lives by
current events. Such a man never stops to investigate anyone point,
 any more than he will tie together a series of news events
Propaganda addresses itself to that man; like him, it can relate only
to the most superficial aspect of a spectacular event, which alone
can interest man and lead him to make a certain decision or adopt a
certain attitude

XIV. The formation of the intellect in truth, the imagination in beauty, the
will in the good, and emotions in joy that WCC provides is an
indispensable bulwark against the overwhelming seduction of
propaganda, which molds our souls to make decisions and adopt
attitudes that are not in line with Gods will, but the will of a ruling
class that has only its own selfish interests in mind. In other words,
propaganda, when not actively counteracted and unmasked, makes
us slaves.

XV. Heres a quote from a recent article by James Kalb called For the
Restoration of Reason and Reality. His prescription for doing so
points to, if you listen closely, a little college in Lander, Wyoming:

XVI. What do we do in such a setting? How do we restore ourselves to

reason and reality in a world that has turned human choice into a
divine principle? We hope ultimately to do the same for our fellow
citizens, but must start with ourselves. Since the problems go so
deep we need to turn around the whole way of life into which almost
all of us have been educated. One basic necessity is independence
from an insane culture. Instead of going with the flow, turning on
the tube, and keeping up with what people are talking about, we
should drop pop culture, media addiction, and the sayings of
pundits. Most of its illusion and distraction, junk food and opiates
for the soul made even more unhealthy by its propagandistic and
manipulative dimension. Instead of all that we need to attend to
things that better connect us to the world and human life: real
history, with people and events that dont fit the mold of current
fantasies; good literaturetheres some for every tasteto expand
our imaginative grasp of persons, events, and ways of life; actual
science, so we can know what it says and does not say; and music
and other disinterested joys that focus and illuminate instead of
deaden. No man is an island, and its hard to pull ourselves up by
our bootstraps, so we also need to surround ourselves with living
influences that pull in the right direction.
XVII. We need citizens of the Church and our country with big, God-sized
hearts, compassionate, courageous, articulate, faithful, willing to
embrace whatever crosses God gifts us with, and willing to suffer for
the poor and defenseless, the deluded and ignorant, the apathetic
and despairing, to instruct them hopefully, but perhaps to die for
them if necessary. We need men and women with warrior-hearts.

XVIII. WCCs education is practical and will enable you to succeed in a

career. It provides an incomparable opportunity for growth in self-
knowledge and virtue. It is a place where you can learn the art of
joyful living. We are commanded to love others as we love
ourselves, and loving ourselves meaning giving ourselves the
greatest gifts we can, which is not money, prestige, or success, but
a God-loving heart. Now, only God can give us such a heart, but we
can cooperate with God in developing it. WCC is small Catholic
liberal arts college, and there are a good number of other ones that
can give you a great education. But I know of no other college that
aims its educational artillery beyond body, mind, soul, and spirit to
the heart that encompasses them all. WCC is a heart guild, a heart-
making guild, and I daresay we have produced some beautiful
mastercraftsmen and women in our nine years.

Our world desperately needs heroes, but not Avengers. We need

forgivers, lovers, saints. Will you join us and become the warrior-
hearted heroes of love God calls you to be?