Assumptions and Liberal Education

Throughout these posts I will be giving the reference page and paragraph of each quotation from the 1952 version of the Great Books. I know this won't be helpful to most of you in the way of locating these quotations, but if you are really curious, let me know and I will try to help you find it.

The Great Conversation (Book 1)

Pg. 2.1 - "These books are the means of understanding ourselves. They contain the great ideas that dominate us without our knowing it."
Somewhere in my collegiate career I realized that the most important thing in understanding why and in what way you disagree with another person is understanding their assumptions. Often the craziest people will have sound logic but flawed premises. This is especially true in the case of great authors and the great books. These writers are incredibly intelligent people and they rarely fall into traps of false logic. We must come to understand their assumptions because, as Hutchins points out, we in the west have inherited them unconsciously. I should add that we also need to have a pretty firm grasp on our own assumptions in order to understand our disagreements. Often this understanding comes from hearing other people say things that we already believe.

17.3 “If the people are not capable of acquiring liberal education, they should be deprived of political power and probably of leisure. Their uneducated political power is dangerous, and their uneducated leisure is degrading and will be dangerous. If the people are incapable of achieving the education that responsible democratic citizenship demands, then democracy is doomed, Aristotle rightly condemned the mass of mankind to slavery, and the sooner we set about reversing the trend toward democracy, the better it will be for the world.”
This follows a section in which he details his opponents claims that liberal education cannot be for everyone which they base on various things from lack of leisure time to lack of intelligence. He also goes on to say that he firmly believes that everyone is capable of attaining the degree of liberal education which responsible democratic citizenship requires. That being said, we are seeing the effects of a democratic which is in large part not educated in any real sense at all. The guys that I work with (all of whom have graduated high school and some of whom have a year or two of college) are all equally incapable of doing things like simple math, having a disagreement without resorting to petty insults, or displaying any command of the English language. Which leads my to the next couple points...

24.1 "The object [of school] appears to be to keep the child off the labor market and detain him in comparatively sanitary surroundings until we are ready to have him go to work."
44.4 “The products of American high schools are illiterate; and a degree from a famous college or university is no guarantee that the graduate is in any better case. One of the most remarkable features of American society is that the difference between the 'uneducated' and the 'educated' is so slight. The reason for this phenomenon is, of course, that so little education takes place in American educational institutions.”
If you have had contact with college grads that went to an average college you know exactly what he is talking about. And if you have any sort of regular conversations with people who simply have a public high school degree, you start to wonder what they did for the 5040 hours that they were in class since the age of 14. The biggest problem though, is that I was little different and I went to a fairly expensive private boarding school. Where will we send our own children to be educated? It's looking more and more like there is nowhere to send them. This only means that the process of continually educating ourselves is all the more important.