Stained Glass: The Aims of Education at the University of Chicago
Before their moving boxes have been fully unpacked or course listings are released, in the nervous energy of new friends and a new place, fifteen hundred freshmen at the University of Chicago gather in Rockefeller Chapel’s wooden pews for an important tradition. For over six decades, the Aims of Education address, given by a different faculty member each year, has served to introduce freshmen to the University. Before they embark on their collegiate journey, these students are asked to reflect on how liberal education might change them.
Only five years ago, I too, sat in these hard wooden pews, looking up at Rockefeller’s intricate ceilings, curious about the experience to come. I listened to Professor Deborah Gorman-Smith, that year’s speaker, talk about the value of learning to be wrong. However, as a student of classical religion and political philosophy, it was only once I experienced a liberal education that I fully understood its aims.
Liberal education constantly takes us out of ourselves. It asks us to consider times and places far different from our own. We do not feel at home in Thucydides’ Peloponnese or Plutarch’s Chaeronea, with their strange customs and unfamiliar ways of thinking. As Plato writes of learning, it is a metastrophē or a periagogē—a complete conversion, a turning outside oneself. When we question even the familiar, it distances us: “Why does rain fall to the ground?” takes the thinker to the skies.
A modern liberal democracy requires the same of its citizens. In a difficult balance, it demands that we detach ourselves from only serving our own interests to focus on the interests of our country. When well functioning, a democracy is a whole, not an aggregation of selfish individuals, or even a mob of 51 percent.
A robust liberal education draws its students not only outside themselves but specifically to the past. In contemporary politics where new is always regarded as better, where “tradition” is a dirty word, it may be more crucial now than ever to revive what G. K. Chesterton dubbed the “democracy of the dead.” As a lifelong lover of the Classics, I have always delighted in the wisdom of the ancients. If education involves learning to be wrong, as Dr. Gorman suggested, we can learn a great deal from our forebears' losses and victories.
William Faulkner famously wrote, “[t]he past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Indeed, the study of the past also informs our future. It is for good reason that military academies like West Point still require a study of Thucydides’ History. Though technology has moved toward laser-guided missiles and away from triremes, the tension between the Corinthians and Corcyreans still rings true. Likewise, anyone who has experienced loss can recognize themself in Plutarch’s consolatory letter to his wife after the death of their two-year-old daughter. The men and women of the past made difficult decisions, grieved, and loved as we do today.
This same mediation between the past and the present occurs between the private and public spheres in a free society. Beyond merely thinking of others’ interests from an outside perspective, we are called in a liberal democracy to imagine ourselves as the outsider. When Tocqueville describes the philosophical spirit of an American, the denizen of a free society par excellence, he says that he “cannot consider any part whatsoever of the human species without having his thought enlarge and dilate to embrace the sum. All the truths applicable to himself appear to him to apply equally and in the same manner to each of his fellow citizens.” In this way, citizens of a free society are naturally philosophical; they move from the particular to the universal because of their democratic character.
The process of liberal education contains crucial, tacit assumptions. The act of learning seeks that which can be known. Education assumes objective truth, regardless of the postmodern deconstruction that has taken over the academy in recent decades. In fact, true liberal education aims at a holistic understanding of truth, a universal knowledge in which, as Saint John Henry Newman puts it, all branches of learning connect. When students engage in liberal education, though wide ranging definitionally, they see that each part of truth leads to another: the perfection of math draws us to the arrangement of the stars in the sky (or vice versa). Our eyes lifted toward the heavens, Ovid’s defining characteristic of man, and we start to contemplate the Gods. It is no accident that the “Aims of Education” begins each freshman’s university experience in a chapel, centering the object of learning in a space devoted to religious devotion. Though the University of Chicago has long since abandoned its Christian roots, there is still a deep recognition that knowledge ought to begin in an institution of universalizing faith. Through undertaking this learning of the whole, the students of liberal education avoid becoming what Max Weber calls “specialists without spirit.”
However, it is yet another step to renounce becoming “sensualists without heart.” To pursue education requires, as the Greek root of the English “school” (scholē) suggests, leisure. This educational leisure, Aristotle tells us in the Politics, is valued ἑαυτῶν…χάριν, “for its own sake” as an intrinsic good. Through this discipline of liberal education, man may grow in virtue, exercising what it truly means to be a full human being.
Learning in the true sense always has this reflexive nature; it is done for its own sake, not another. In a similar sense, as Leon Kass emphasized in his own “Aims of Education” address, the search for knowledge begins with self-knowledge. The Delphic oracle entreats learners: Γνῶθι σαυτόν, “know thyself.” Liberal education shapes the learner by revealing oneself to oneself. Though liberal education comes to us in the form of an intellectual tradition, that tradition does not absolve us from the duty of self-reflection.
Of course, liberal education does not exist in a vacuum. For a long time, liberal education has been under attack from both sides, often seen as outdated bigotry by the left and merely a patina for certain political issues by the right. Though liberal education may make us more thoughtful, more interested in truth, and thus more virtuous citizens, many put narrower political objectives above these goals.
Liberal education can also fall prey to becoming mere polish or a credential. Indeed, the form that modern liberal democracy has taken often encourages its citizens and their educators to become hollow shells of the virtue liberal education is called to teach. Even three centuries ago, Benjamin Franklin criticized Harvard students, writing, “For want of a suitable Genius, they learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely, and enter a Room genteely.” Our social and economic systems privilege specialization with a veneer of “general education,” training generation after generation in empty careerism rather than a joy-filled love of learning.
This is to say nothing of the inherent tension between public and private in a free society. As Plato’s Republic makes clear, every city demands that each of its citizens be willing to sacrifice his time, money, and sometimes even life, for the sake of the whole. In giving up these “lower” attachments, the sacrifice unmoors him from the ties that bound him to the city in the first place. In some ways, citizens in modern democracies may feel this tension even more keenly, as every citizen has (it is claimed) a voice in national deliberations. Additionally, by pursuing a liberal education, a student removes himself from full participation in society—the ivory tower is not the assembly. In the Republic, philosophers must be compelled by warriors to rule, because man cannot be a fully theoretical and fully practical person at once: there are simply not enough hours in the day.
In this light, liberal education and today’s conception of a free society appear to be at odds. Rousseau states: “If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.” Essentially, he has pointed to the perennial problem of society and, indeed, of liberal education: many have no interest in the practice of virtue. Democracy, it seems, cannot maintain the balanced body politic to which ideal liberal education appears to point us; this body reveals itself to be, in fact, an endless stomach. Instead, this same education exacerbates the inequality—intellectually, financially, and experientially—against which democratic nature fights. However, it is not clear that this disparity is necessarily a bad thing or even as incompatible with democracy as it seems. As Tocqueville outlines, the great danger of modern democracy lies in mediocrity, the “tyranny of the majority,” and its forgetting of individual greatness in favor of collective equality. Liberal education, by contrast, reminds us of the possibility of human genius, unattainable to many.
So, is there an impossible gulf to bridge between liberal education and a free society? Not quite. Indeed, it seems that a functioning modern democracy requires liberal education. As little bastions of mental excellence in a sea of rapidly homogenizing complacency, a port arguing for truth in a storm of moral relativism, liberal education is a necessary closed society that inhibits the openness of larger civilization from acting as its downfall. Good liberal education, in imbuing at least some of its participants with thoughtfulness and bringing forth great minds, acts as itself an education to onlookers. It guards against the mediocrity of which Tocqueville warns through a constant striving for greatness. Crucially and simultaneously, through showing education’s participants the beauty of their own minds, they become aware of their own dignity and thus that of others. Indeed, this transference may not have been possible without the democratic spirit itself educating its students on the inherent similarity of different types of man. Liberal education, though cultivating elite minds, makes them at once humble in their recognition of others and bold in their pursuit of greatness.
Pronaque cum spectent animalia cetera terram, / os homini sublime dedit, caelumque videre… “Prone, other animals survey the ground, / but [god] gives to man an elevated countenance to contemplate the heavens…” Indeed, the question of man in both personal and political philosophy begins with what he looks up to. When I sat in the pews of Rockefeller Chapel, I looked up at the glittering stained glass, the craftsmanship of skilled hands and meticulous planning. However, its striking beauty emanated from something past it—a mediator between man and nature, it reflects the sun. Rockefeller’s central, stained-glass window is called “Light and Fire” and displays five tongues of flame dancing out from the middle. Indeed, in being filled with knowledge, students of liberal education engage in an evocative sort of Pentecost.
Likewise, liberal education points to something beyond itself—truth. The true power of liberal education, its uneasily sought duty in a free society, is to angle society up at something higher than itself. In doing this, it simultaneously personalizes the truth, filling each listener with knowledge that will shape and be shaped by his learning. Like Cicero speaking of Socrates’s philosophical work, truth must be called down from the heavens and come into our cities, our households, and, indeed, into our hearts. When I raised my eyes to the heights of the Chapel, I was filled with the warmth of the light.
Kate Whitaker is a Program Fellow at the Collegium Institute and the manager of the Legal Humanities Fellowship. She graduated in 2023 from the University of Chicago, where she studied political philosophy and ancient Mediterranean religion. In graduate school, she hopes to continue her research on public religious ceremonies of the ancient world.