Lehrman American Studies Center

The University of Chicago published a terrific little book in 1979 entitled Paradoxes of Education in a Republic. Its author, Eva T.H. Brann, is a Yale-trained philosopher, great books tutor, and former president of St. John’s College in Annapolis. Teaching classical Western texts, according to Brann, sustains the American Republic and invigorates baccalaureate education with radical reflection.

Liberal education for Brann consists of “artfully superintended conversations . . . aided by great books.” It provides Americans with an education that suits its political regime, a matching that Aristotle would have recommended. Students’ trust of teachers and authors corresponds to citizens’ due respect for republican authority, custom, and laws. Likewise, teachers, by thoughtfully selecting texts and prescribing courses, imply the existence of a hierarchy of ideas unknown to pupils who might otherwise assert their “mental declaration of independence.”

To round out this matching of education to the American political tradition—the “best among all practicable polities,” according to Brann—pupils do well to eventually question and check their teachers and authors. Analogously, citizens cannot completely abdicate to democratically elected officials. The unchecked errors of politicians litter the 20th century, she argues, and the intellectual class too often collaborated.

Faculties engaging in the often “pretentious talk” of specialized research do well to assimilate and transmit “original texts of poetry, science, and philosophy.” The historical ignorance of modern researchers exaggerates their sense of change and originality. To illustrate a surprising continuity, the American founders were educated in ancient classical works, the first physicist was an Aristotelian, the first Protestant was a monk, and Jesus learned at the feet of rabbis.

Brann concludes that self-evident truths such as the right to liberty become less precarious when students “become radically articulate” in its rationale. Similarly, professors’ “reverence” for our Republic improves when they recognize it as a source of unprecedented political protection for their smaller “republic of the intellect.” Finally, studying the classics and the American founding does “not aim at a return to the past but at its re-appropriation for the present.”

Tags: American Politics, Civic virtue, Classical studies, Colleges and Universities, Education, Literature, Political Culture, Political Science, Political Theory, Politics and Literature, The Liberal Arts