Welcome back to New Thinkery, my name is David Barr. With me as always, it's my good friend Alex. How are you? How are you?
How are you? Good to hear. Good to hear. The guest room in my new house.
Oh yeah, that's right. You moved. How are the neighbors? We got a chance too.
I got a story about that. Greg, why don't you? Greg, excellent. How are you doing, Greg?
Hi, it's been forever since I've seen your mugs. We took a couple of weeks off and went hiking out west and we canceled a few times. Listen to us, Greg. You hiked 21 miles over cobblestones after having COVID.
Yes, correct. Yeah. You've got a number of comorbidities. What's that I'm having to do with various diseases only caught from cheese?
What was I saying? Yeah, I'm surprised you survived COVID a little on that hike, but Greg is in amazing shape. But it was hard. I'm not going to lie.
I think you could go and get out of my friend. But it was hard, but you were also with a few hard-bodied men. Yeah, well, you kept asking me to send pics, so I did. That's how we know that they're hard-bodied.
But me and three of my good friends and then we met up with one of my friends, some of his relatives, and we had a pretty good size crew. It was great. It was great. It went to Zion if you haven't been.
It's beautiful. I'm definitely afraid to fight something called Angels Landing, which is like a thousand foot drop on either side. I thought I've lived long enough. I mean, at this point, yeah, four hours, four hours, plenty.
That's right. I told my wife I said, if I ever wanted to do these murder shows, she can't get away with murder anymore. I don't keep doing it. I said, well, let's take somebody for a hike.
Whoops. Yeah. So I was a little bit of a fear in my head. I'm not going to lie.
Yeah. All right. Well, anyways. On that, I was just thinking of murder.
I want to murder some neighbors. So I just moved into this new neighborhood. We had on our sign, a sign on the front of our house. It said, no solicitor.
Do you have one of these, Greg? All people are welcome in multiple languages. This is real. Hate has no home here.
That's what I have in front of my yard. Love his love. All that stuff. David has all lives matter.
Right. I know he does. I know he does. So I know he's saying, I'm going to go ahead.
I have a new soliciting sign on the thing on our house when we moved in and I'm like, this is so awful. So we pulled it off and immediately like a day later, we get two solicitors. Kids asking for a 20 bucks for this 40 bucks for that. Well, then you're telling me that the sign was keeping away.
That's the listeners you think? Well, I didn't realize there were so many solicitors that you needed to have the sign, you know? It turns out it was absolutely necessary. Kids hitting us up for cash in the neighborhood.
Now I know David. I saw David tweeted something the other day that he's very upset about his neighborhood because he has such a long way to get into the country club. So, you know, we have our problems. I tweet.
I didn't tweet that. I didn't tweet that. I'll pull it out for a minute. Any update on your neighbors in your neighborhood there, David?
There are some titillating anecdotes you've had for us, but I guess maybe that's not public and stuff. Yeah, I mean, either neighbors. When that piece of information becomes known. Yeah.
Well, we tell the world that that becomes known. No, no, that's just the patch of beyond folks at home you'll have to subscribe and pay a dollar a month to the TNT patreon to get this. Because of shower cam. What are we doing today?
What are we doing? We're doing a little Herbert's story. Oh, that's nice. Did you guys are at Herb's story or Bert's story?
Herbie. I think it was Herbie. Herbie's story. I don't know.
This was Greg's story. You've taught this before, right? I've not taught it, but kind of the idea was just to back to school. That's kind of what I thought this is our annual back school.
What do we do last year? Didn't we do client on the bus? I think the last year. Maybe client was two years ago.
Oh, man. I thought I was losing back to school. We should make this an annual thing. We should do a back school episode every year and do something on education because, you know, I feel like the folks at home are really kind of, you know, it's a fun thing to do.
And so many of the people in our orbit have written something on education. So kind of worthwhile. What are you teaching, for example, this fall Alex? I'm doing a course on the symposium with selections from Thucydides, Stauphonies, Plutox, also the Iides, just sort of, but really the symposium is going to be the back one texting them doing for my junior seminar.
You know, a lot of familiar faces, but the basis of that is basically ourselves politics, mockability, sprints, and then some other related texts. Is it just the two classes? Just two preps, but I'm teaching an extra class because my children. So what about you Greg?
You got really cool historians class, right? Yeah. Well, first I'm teaching this class, the introductory actual class on understanding politics, probably side one one and we're doing like the education of Cyrus, parts of the Republic. I'm just a bill.
That's not that intro. I played that class in class before in American politics, mostly because students don't even they're not even familiar with it anymore. Of course, I'm just leading it as to that's also a reason show. I'm just a bill.
I have people on the Supreme Court to do it. It's basically how it works. But the more interesting class, Alex is right. I got kind of permission, but also kind of as a favorite to one of my colleagues, I'm teaching a class combined on Greek history and Greek political thought.
And so the way I'm teaching the class is kind of going to be what's the best way to understand human things? Is it through history or is it through political science? And we're going to do a rottotist, Thucydides and Senefan. Those are kind of the three main thinkers we're looking at.
And the idea being that first of all, of course, what is even history? Because I mean, I think rottotists is understanding of it. It's not the same as what we understand history be. But then how does Thucydides, who very consciously, I think rejects rottotists's way of doing history, what is it that Thucydides is up to?
And then third, my favorite, what's Senefan up to? So that's kind of what I'm doing. I'm really looking forward to it. I'm going to teach the Hellenica, David will be happy to hear.
And one of the reasons is because I am hoping to continue whom my world's lowest moving translation, this fall. And hopefully you maybe get something to some editors by the end of the fall. So that's what I'm teaching. Greg, why is it moving so slowly?
Thank you. Partly because I had COVID and it was out in the Gallivanting Mountains. And you're teaching all summer. I keep being this drum.
No, no, no, no. This guy teaches way too much. I mean, it's good that you teach, but man, you were overloaded. It is.
And so I'm just going to be the first hearing there. You're keeping the world from the Xenophon translation, which will only be down to the fame of diversity in Ashbrook Center, Institute Center, Center Center Center. We've already agreed with you. You want to give Greg a full year off from all response.
Yes. Yes. Totally agree. Just to translate the Hellenica.
Sounds dumb down. And to make somebody signing going to Comic Con and trying to meet Ryan Reynolds and say, you know what? We should be friends. I look alike.
Together as a podcast and people can't see that. Do you have any other traditional like, like, back school memories? Or Alex, anything you did every year that you did? I mean, still do, or something?
Nothing. Any big first memory? I'll quickly, I would forget everything. I remember.
Oh, yeah, sure. Especially the language is I go back to the line. I don't remember any of this. No, yeah, for sure.
Yeah. I'm actually about to do my yearly, you know, clothes shopping where I probably get two or three more pairs of chinos and a dresser or two from Charles Truitt, which is where I like because they've been based sort of mold to my body so well. But I remember one year, my mom took me school shopping. It was me, my brother, my mom, my pop, my little sister, we all hopped in the car.
we had it down to the gallery mall. And my mom started bugging with the clothes she was choosing for. Yeah. I didn't say anything first.
I'll just kind of turn on my nose and she would say, what's wrong? This shirt costs $20. And I would say mom, this shirt is plaid with a butterfly collar. The next half hour, same old thing.
Mom's trying to buy me clothes from 1963. She lost her mind. I asked for an ID to shirt and she said about zips. Parents just don't understand.
They would just really upset me. She would take me clothes shopping and not let me get the clothes that I want. It's a lot upsetting about the store. Yeah, great.
So I think what Greg is trying to do on us, Alex. Oh, yeah. I can see him looking off and reading. Yeah.
Yeah. That's it. That's it. That was a joke.
I don't remember. Oh, the folks at home will recognize it. Somewhere the Jack will get it. Probably.
I didn't realize I was so old fashioned. Anyway, that's a nice guy. I'm Jack is a nice guy. So David, you were tasked with telling us a little bit about who Herbert's story was.
You can give a goddamn. But Herbert's story and I've heard rumors just want to Strauss this fine to students. That is most hands on the plate. No, no, no, no.
That just intellectually he was at the very top. And so people always lamented, which I think is insulting that why he turns his powerful brain into the story of America rather than, you know, the Greeks or something. I don't know if that's true or not. But so Herb's story, I think, is most famous for his having collected and edited the complete writings of anti-federalists, which you can buy.
And but I would also counsel a very thin, so small volume, probably 100 pages from the University of Chicago titled What the Anti-Federalists Were For. And that's a wonderful little book. The second book of his story didn't publish too much. And so his collected essays are the title of his poor and more perfect union writings of Herbert's story.
And that's from AEI Press. That is an excellent, excellent book. I think that's probably the extent of what I've seen. Sure, selection is coming from, right?
So maybe we'll just begin with like, Alex, I was sort of, I had read this and I was intrigued by it and I said to you and that's why we decided to do an episode on it. And this little speech is called, Liberal Education of Common Man. Funny enough, this is from an essay that he gave at the Conference of Hillsdale, Hillsdale College in fact in 1975. And I don't know, I thought it was a little controversial.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the argument. So maybe I'll just lay it out in very simple terms, I mean, very, very simple terms. Basically you've heard Alex and me and David Flogg, liberal education on this podcast. In fact, I would say our podcast might in fact be liberal education for the common man.
And so far as we're trying to make this somewhat popular, I mean, we're the number five podcast in education in Estonia for example. And so, but what's storing our use is in fact that liberal education might not be for the common man, that it might be harmful to both liberal education and to the common man and that what the common man needs is a vocational education. He needs to learn how to have a job, how to learn how to take care of himself and live independently. And probably also a moral education, but also a civic education.
So in other words, I wouldn't, it's interesting because it's not elitist as far as it's not saying something like, well, there's not good enough or something like this. It's just, it's trying to lay out the reasons why the study of what Alex and I do for a living might actually just not benefit people, could be actually harmful. And I mentioned that from the outset, anything to add just to that very brief overview, Alex? No, I think that's right.
And among the things he does is try to make the case that we think of liberal education as an education that, you know, fits a free person. Right. And the thing he says is you got to be free first and that requires vocational education. Right.
He argues that there's certain aspects of educational education that can be quite liberal and interesting or you can freely enjoy it. There's some real big asterisks on this that he suggests that I think also one might want to raise. But I think that's by and large in case he relies heavily, we should say on Booker T Washington. Right.
Right. Right. But I think he did a good job summarizing definitely controversial. I, with essays like this that are written some, you know, nearly 50 years ago, it's always interesting to think to what extent they still stand up today, but maybe I'm getting ahead of us.
No, I think that's right. And I'll just, I mean, to vlog this a little bit or to agree a little bit, I suppose, like I, I mean, in my own life, I mean, look, first place, it's simply true. Like you cannot be a free independent human being if you don't have the means to take care of yourself. And for most people, that means you have to have some kind of serious job, right?
Like you have to prepare people to be. It's like working for a think tank. Or for a think tank. Well, no, the common man doesn't do that, right?
The common man does, you know, the various jobs he's rides or what words he watches and advocates in most of his educational writings. And just in my own case, like, you know, I'm even reminded of things like office space, which silly as it is. And I'm not a serious message if you've seen that movie. I mean, the guy, he has an office job and he hates it.
And he turns, you know, at the end of the movie, he becomes a construction worker. And he sort of, I mean, I think it's comic, but it's comically showing that actually these guys might have greater independence, that they're actually free or there's something more liberating about working outside and using your body and, you know, that there's something exhilarating. I don't know. There's also a finished product, by the way, I've had the few jobs I've had at manual labor.
That was part of the great satisfaction. I was reminded that you're getting any finished projects, products with your incentive on translation. That's the problem, right? There's nothing to look at when you're done.
I was reminded that book. You guys remember that story? It's just not, I can't imagine working in office. I would just sort of seems, would you say, I'm fine.
So I think what you bring up might be different from a story, which is dignity because, I mean, look, if you're sitting in a queue of coal pushing paper, that's still vocational, right? It's just, it's all sucking under, you know, these works and lights and, you know, obviously it's a great caricature of that. I'm not sure if it is a vocation, actually. I wonder if he's using the word vocation, I wonder if he does mean something, he does your right, he doesn't talk about it in this regard, but he says you need a vocational education, which for somebody's mind, I mean, tasks, do you actually, a would you call a vocation, a would you need something like an education to do it?
So I think maybe one angle to sort of one question here is, one difference between then and now is he gets the impression that the sort of common opinion is everybody should have a liberal education. Everybody, by that we need reading people like Aristotle, right? And I'm like, damn, that would be nice. Can we think that anymore?
Yeah, so you wouldn't say that anymore. And so part of me was like, well, you got to ask for a man. Nobody's a little bit, nobody wants to learn this stuff, except I think that's where the civic education part is important, right? Which is when you start, if you had people who are civically educated, he says this towards the end, when he's, you know, he raises the question, well, okay, civic education, that means becoming sort of educated in the virtues of being an American citizen, right?
Isn't that just indoctrination? He raises the subjection and then he says he ultimately concludes one cannot indoctrinate an American citizen without leading him to think about nature and nature's God, self-evident truths and unalienable rights. So I think the case he makes here pretty persuasive is that a good proper civic education and the basic terms should provoke the biggest sort of liberal education that fills off the questions, right? Well, it's connected to them.
You're going to go off and read Locke and Hobbes and all this sort of stuff. But you just think that these important terms, these key philosophic, modern philosophic concepts are going to become a matter of concern to you. And so in a way, I think he would respond to my objection, which is, well, you know, you say a little education, you sideline, well, sideline to the point of near death. I think he would say, yeah, but you didn't do the other part, right?
Which is push for a civic education, which would actually be something that's accessible to the common man. And in turn, actually raise these big issues in a way that's far more relevant to their ordinary lives. And that's useful to them as citizens. I don't know.
That was my way of thinking through how he might respond to some more contemporary words. So you're saying that for him, something like a civic education in the United States, at least is somehow compatible with, or maybe even in some slight way points to a more serious education, or at least doesn't obstruct that? Yeah. Or yeah, it's one path to it.
That's both healthy for the regime and potentially sort of leads you to a larger question. And it's different from being, you know, raised in a, I mean, here I'm going to run into trouble I think because I think you can make this case without many laws, right? There are many sort of ways of life, but you can imagine a sort of non philosophic sort of regime, right? One that doesn't have any sort of invocation of nature, for example, that it wouldn't lead to destruction, but rather actively oppose it.
Right. You guys ever looked into any of the university plans that some of our founding fathers had? Jefferson, I did. Jefferson, I did.
Jefferson, George Washington in particular. I think George Washington, what a lot of us are. I don't know if that's what we turned into GW or what. And I always confused Jefferson and George Washington's plan.
One of them, I think it was Washington prescribed that the students would, for half the day, they would, I think, work in Congress. And for the other half of the day, it would be a theoretical study of, you know, the great books or the reverse. I forgot how they did beat up their day, but there was always a practical set of component that was really the underlying bedrock over which theoretical stuff would rest. Yeah.
Is that Jefferson? You're saying? I can't recall. One of the two.
Yeah. I think it's very explicit bookstation reading this kind of thing. And to be clear here, by the way, you mentioned Jefferson, who was clearly alluded to in what Alex read. I don't know if he caught it.
He's on page 438 where you're reading from. But the things, therefore, that he has in mind that storing has in mind for us to read that would sort of comprise our civic education, our Jefferson, right? He talks about self-evident truths, that means the Declaration of Independence. Go up here, we have a study that talks about Lincoln.
So I mean, he does have a pretty clear idea about precisely those greatest American writings that are civic minded, but that could actually point you to something deeper. And I think that's, I mean, we know, we all know, we know, and our listeners probably know what those would be, right? I mean, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, those are the things that are going to teach us at the Constitution. These kinds of like the anti-Federalists, the Federalist Papers, those are the things that can point you.
I mean, the Federalist Papers might be the greatest American reflection on government that's ever been written. And so that simultaneously civics because it's teaching us about America, but probably also pointing us to potential truths of political science. They draw upon Montesquieu and probably Politias and others. So, I don't know.
Yeah. Another thing he has in mind is just the page before. And I think this stuff tells within another book that he doesn't mention it, but I think it fits this, which is the autobiography of Franklin. One thing, for example, the autobiographies of Theodore Roosevelt, to a book of T.
Washington, both quite explicitly directed to teaching the ordinary man how to make the most of himself as an individual and as a citizen. As models of individual life, as well as of high citizenship, these American heroes are more limited than some of the models available in the Great Western tradition. So he's saying, like who? Like the Sea of the Opera.
See the Apology of Socrates. Right. Right. But they are immediately relevant.
They are harmonious with the principles of the American polity and they are elevating and broadening. So there's in a way almost a kind of socratic approach he's arguing here, which is, you can't just take some kid who's been educated through middle school and then they go into high school and they say, let's read Socrates' apology and let's read whatever sort of some Plutarks different, but you can't just go to these exalted sort of things. Start with great examples of Americans and that will elevate. It will broaden in relation to the position that they are, that they're in and it can possibly be beyond that.
It's interesting you mentioned examples he gives or tell you, Roosevelt and P Franklin and we just did record an episode on that. And one of the interesting things there is I think Franklin does point you to Socrates. And so far as remember the two models for his life are Socrates and Jesus. And so, and as we discussed with our guests, Weinberger, the idea that maybe Franklin might have written necessarily.
So there's interesting as you work through these American autobiographies, there might even be a gradation. I would say Douglas's autobiography is already a little more nuanced than but with Washington's, for example, and I can't speak to Roosevelt's kind of Reddit. If I ever read it, is autobiography? No.
Right. I'm a little bit bad American. I was weaned on the Apology since birth. No, I think there's something to this that these kind of these autobiographies, I think Douglas is a wonderful example, but these autobiographies that show you a sort of excellence that's obviously regime dependent.
Yet by virtue of that, it gets you above the mere sort of cog in the wheel thing. And then you start to look at the regime and say, no, I shouldn't lament so much or I'm trying to understand his position. You can lament the decline of liberal education, right? But you should also really lament the fact that these books aren't read.
When you look at young people sort of sitting around and dissatisfied with the current state of affairs that they might just be stuck in an office somewhere, being middle management at some large corporation detached from their local communities and sort of homogenized suburbia, right? And buying the same sort of particle board furniture that everybody has and everything is disposable, everything is manufactured. It's all, and then what do they do? They end up reading Nietzsche or something like that, right?
What if they just read, you know, Franklin? Yeah. Right. What if they read these books about individual ingenuity, self-reliance and sort of real sort of American virtue that gets them back in touch with something in their national way of life without jumping to these sort of way to universal, you know, philosophic attempts to wrestle with nihilism as such rather than, you know, nihilism as a quote-unquote, nihilism American style, right?
You know, I teach in the Ashford's fellow program as you guys mentioned a little bit ago and we're for college students, obviously, and they really do. Their education really is, I would say, princely folks down American founding documents. So I'm a little bit of a weirdo in the program, right? I do a bunch of great stuff, but I'm confident to teach.
Yeah. But I'm confident to teach these things. And so, you know, I struggle with this. What is the proper place of civic education?
Because it strikes me as something that as a country we should be doing at the secondary. Like, this should be happening in high school. But I think it's not happening. And so I do think that the mission of Ashford is quite good.
Like, we're providing these young people with a place to come and get this civic education that they're not getting. Buying large-most education that is reading Douglas' biography, reading Lincoln's speeches, right? And sort of leaning something of the higher in these particular regime-based examples. So hopefully forming a greater attachment for what it's worth.
I don't know. Do you guys do the same thing in Claremont, too? We don't get them as young as high school. So I think what you're doing at Ashford is wonderful.
Yeah. And I think that's the way that we should do this to elementary school kids. We should have around them up. Well, I mean, this happened to our parents, of course.
I'm curious whether the North Carolina public schools, how they will indoctrinate my children in elementary school. Yeah. I mean, that's the problem. I mean, he does elude to this.
The problem is indoctrination being the problem. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, I meant that in a good way, just to describe a kind of civic. I mean, civics was something that our parents' generation- I took civics.
You guys know how civic is talking? No, no, no, no, absolutely. Now it's morphed into something different. I don't think they even call it that.
Social studies. Social studies. I remember in my social studies class, in the AP history American class, in my school, we were given Howard Zinn in high school. Yeah.
It was on. You met Zinn, and then who's the- Howard Zinn. He's the sort of counterpart. I forget his name.
Becker. Maybe it was Becker. I forget. Well, you read both, which I thought was very difficult class, but it was also, it felt like a lot.
You know, this is where I think storing is right. And he just says, look, you know, stop expecting, like it was almost like they expected scholarly engagement of us. Right. But, you know, just the little bit that we read, you know, and discussed about Franklin, like meeting it with one book, right?
Yeah. Money diagrams, interesting little stories. Instead, we're having tests on like, you know, cattle famines and stuff like that. Oh my gosh.
And, you know, that's history. So you got to cover certain things that matter. But yeah, this sort of edifying, and this is something we've lost, you know, with the tendency of the social sciences and the humanities, especially, you know, history among the humanities to become more empirical and trying to become more scientific. It's kind of so dead, right?
And so emploring. Yeah. And whereas you read, you know this because you've been preparing for your history guys, you read Herodotas, right? Oh my God.
So much fun. And so, you know, it's even up until like the into the 19th century, and they knew how to tell you about great individuals, what made them great. But you know, historicism has wanted us to reduce great individuals to their circumstances. So the mere mechanics of like economics, if you're going to do like a Marxist history, right?
Or any whatever kind of history you're going to do, all that reduction robs the history of that sort of thing. There's another problem I see that I mean, in colleges, so I think our students aren't getting young people aren't getting that positive edifying civic education at the high school level, which would then prepare them for a meaningful critical account of their regime. All they're getting is the critical kind of the regime. And so you end up with cynical young people who don't see what's good about the regime, which like the best education would be one where it's sort of at a young age is very edifying and lifting and teaching you what's good about your regime and then qualifying that perhaps once you're a little more mature, just like I think just in the same way that one looks at one's parents.
Like when you're young, you should look up to your parents and only later should you begin to realize that you're dad's good for an alcoholic. But then you still love him despite that, right? Because you look past, you see what is good and bad about your father and you take a more even handed view. My impression of young people that most of the colleges I taught is that they have a very low view of their country and that just strikes me as not healthy.
You know, the historians that do write this kind of history like David McCulloch. Yes, and who are good at popularizing it, right? The their peers write unkind things about it's McDonald's Asian of history and right now. And so some of that is obviously jealousy.
But besides all of this, the popularity of these accounts, it's so his, it was a McCollod that wrote Hamilton or the other guy. That was the other guy. That was the other guy. I can't recall his name.
You know, so this is what the Lin-Manuel Miranda writes guy reads and then it turns it into a Broadway play. So this is the captivates people. But there's still an audience for this kind of yearning. Right.
But that was based on the chair of the book. Turn out. He's the other one, right? So these guys are to write it in before that there was a woman who is.
Oh, um, curbs. Yeah. And then Bando, uh, yeah, rivals her. I'm thinking of the guns of August.
Never heard of her on the show. She did not return her invitation. So, but that's I think great. Your comparison to parents is really good because I got it from a protagonist.
So I still from Socrates. Do you know what I'm talking about? The passage of the protagonist was sort of chastised the protagonist for like, of course your parents have issues, but a good person should publicly praise his parents. And anyway, sorry.
Yeah, no, no, for sure. There's, but I think there's also one of the things he mentions towards the end discussing Lincoln, which above such a good, uh, how fashionable it is to just call Lincoln self serving. Right. He says, uh, the tendency today is to see Lincoln in terms of a rather sharp alternative.
Either as the great enancipator or as a self seeking politician, since the former is not simply true, we tend to assume that it is simply false. Uh, thus arises the enthusiastic debunking of the myths of the old civics books that seem to be a favorite occupation of American historians. So he brings up this historical citizen and then he goes on to discuss, right? He says Lincoln was not altogether above ordinary politics.
He was a shrewd ambitious politician. Of course, you're somehow beholden to necessity in the mechanics of politics, right? Um, and so you look at appreciation, I'm thinking now, you know, now that I have kids and trying to figure out how to raise them, you know, a whole new appreciation for, I think your parents, uh, had to, had to deal with it and their own sort of trying to, you know, you see it all the time. And you're just like, yeah, I can see why they took this short cut or why they did this out of the other.
And cause even with a young child, you're already sort of self aware, likewise, part of being a mature adult citizen is having autonomy, dealing with real problems, making difficult decisions, thinking about your own interests and the interests of other people in the community at large. And sometimes having to do the wrong thing, the right thing or the right thing sometimes looks wrong and, and, and understand that to advance your position might require, right? You know, just, we all know the story of Lincoln. I think there's, there's something to this that I think what he's trying to be suggesting here kind of subtly is the reason you have that historians is because they don't understand this.
Right. That's actually right. Because they haven't been educated. That's exactly right.
And that's part of being an adult citizen. Just above where you read a country, a story says a country without heroes is a country without principles or aspirations. And I'll just say like, what are two things? It's a really good line.
But I mean, like, have you seen the Lincoln movie? I think the Lincoln movie does this. It's very well. It shows simultaneously that Lincoln was committed to a principle of, you know, emancipation and the, you know, but it also shows him doing very shady political machinations.
Like he hires these three guys. I think they were actually based on real people and they're wheeling and dealing and bribing and blackmailing and, and it's, but it's, I thought the movie does a really good job of showing that like, that's just kind of how politics works. And there's this great speech that Lincoln gives to, Oh gosh, what's the famous guy who wanted to abolish labor from the North is played by Tommy Lee Jones in the movie. Ah shoot.
Anyway, it's a game. It's really good. But you know, the guys like, how are we not committed enough to abolitionism and link it's like, look, you know, you're like someone who sees true North and just bear straightforward. Like when you're headed, the true North can give you the Russian.
You're going, but it can't teach you anything about the swamps and the logs and all the things you have to go around and get there. So that's it. And the only other thing I want to say on this point was I think the greatest primary document that shows this, this sort of ambiguity of these heroes is Frederick Douglass's oration in memory of Abraham Lincoln. Because it, it simultaneously brings out a criticism of Lincoln, but also still shows that he's in fact a hero in even a statesman.
And so it's a nuanced account. And the same thing of Douglass is, you know, what's the slave is the fourth of July, right? Like showing you what's to be admired, what's great, but not shying away from the problems. And I think that you're a little point there about how most of our contemporary historians only focus on the problems.
They want to just be mythbusters. They want to be, you know, iconic classes to be frank. I mean, I have colleagues like this, not in my department, mind you, of course. You know who's really good on this is Churchill because he writes, distinctively writes his history of his actions from over to, it's like seven or ten volumes, whatever that whole set is.
And he makes it clear, look, I'm going to explain to you what I knew at the time, what I was trying to figure out and why I made the decision and you see him saying, oh, I see a swamp over here. You know, I see a really there. There's a little bit of a clearing maybe that'll work. And trying to show you, and I was trying to think about why he spent so much time and effort on doing this.
And I think for his own legacy, but also for the education of future states, he wanted to show that if you're going to judge me and what I did, you're going to have to wrestle with my words and you're going to have to get something of an education of what it means to make decisions on the fly, right? And to wrestle with imperfect data and still manage somehow to pull it out through chance and do your own ingenuity. That's a real education state graph. But again, historians tend to focus on the raw data and empiricism and history and history in the sense of reducing individuals to it, rather than to introduce individuals to certain qualities.
I think Churchill remarkably forces you to wrestle with that. I'm sure interesting how autobiography works in that way. If you become somebody of consequence, in a way, this is true of Rousseau in a different way where you understand Rousseau's life, you have to read his confessions. And so you're already involved in a kind of sort of understanding of the philosopher as Chanias Turner.
Okay. So what's here? I'll ask you David and Alex and I can turn around as well. But if we're persuaded by storing that, I mean, we have to lean out the ways in which liberal education is harmful to the common man.
But by the way, by the common man, storing just as I mean, most people, like the majority. Yeah, you could be on Wall Street. Right. Right.
And he's like most people. I think he over loaned over 80%, right? Is that right? I mean, yeah.
He says 70 to 80% of what he says. 75 to 85%. Yeah. By the common man, I mean most people.
Here I'm thinking the bulk of men, women, children perhaps 75 to 85%. So I mean, we're also here all of us are dancing themselves. No, of course I'm in this top 10, 50%. But I mean, like, it's undeniable, at least for me and Alex, that we're not, I mean, we're teaching the common man.
Like, I'm not at Harvard or Yale or MIT or, you know, declare my institute, right? I'm teaching like 75 to 85% of the people and I know Colorado is a very exceptional one. The same is the same as true Colorado, right? I mean, I, I, I, it's a public school.
This paper really, uh, in home for me because I am teaching people who are a vaudeville vocational, right? Yeah, exactly. Very technical. I was thinking about, you know, what I'm storing puts you and said, Alex, you are harming these people.
I mean, that's, that's what he's saying here, right? Like not just you're not benefiting them. Like you're actively harming them. Yeah.
You know, I try in some of my classes, I felt this especially in the, you know, the events of the past couple of years and riots and things like that to include documents I wouldn't otherwise teach like the Declaration, like, you know, and I don't listen to Douglas and, and federalist papers, you know, I'm usually like history philosophy guy, ancient sky. That's what I would love to do is just do the Republic. But I get a sense that, you know, when we read founding documents, there's, there's something much more viscerally connected to their natural lives in a way. And he's right.
I think he's absolutely right that you need to, and to the extent that, you know, your students don't come up with some of them do very strong civic education, it's the extent that most of them don't, it's almost feels like a duty incumbent upon you as an educator. That said, you know, I have some students who they read the Republic and they're like, this is one of the coolest things I've ever read. And I don't think you get that from the federalist papers, right? No, no.
So, but Douglas, I've had really good, I mean, that narrative has really inspired people for the past. Yeah. Yes. That is, I think all the books I teach the one that most students are like, I'm going to definitely keep this book like that.
Yeah. Same. Yeah. I've structured some of my political philosophy classes.
I've known, you guys have seen something I've done in the past. A lot of times what I'll do is if I'm devoting a class of topic, I'll begin with an American writing and work my way backwards to the ancient. So like the class I did on ambition, I began with Lincoln's life to the M address and move my way back to Tocquill and then Machiavelli and then Zenithon and Plato. I'm part of the famous, like, stole this class and made it popular by the way.
But I've done the same thing with law of arguments, right? I did King's letter concerning letter from Birmingham City Jail and then you go to Quinas and even Plato and Hobbes, for example, right? Like, should one fall along. And so I do, I have used American documents as a stepping stone to liberal education, but I will confess, like I taught it, you know, the fifth best regional school in Kentucky, right?
So this is not exactly, this is the common man. And I will confess, one of my chairs there actually got onto me a little bit because I said this in a meeting. I sort of put storing thesis, not having read at the time on the table. I was like, are we sure we're actually doing these kids to benefit?
These are kids who are coming from poverty and what they really need is, they probably need a specific education, but they also need like, you know, they need to break this generational poverty gap. I don't think some of the kids from Harvard might need it more. They probably, I don't know if they need it more, but I think you're right. They probably do.
I'm the same. They need an auto. Sure. Thank you.
The auto correct. Oh, no, definitely the civic part. But I mean, as far as vocational, I think most of those kids are fine. They're never going to have to worry about a job in their life, right?
But you're right, the civic education, sure. But these were kids who like, you know, like they're the first kid in their family ever to go to college and I'm like, I'm pretty homeroom for them. You know, I mean, I was always torn because, I mean, I mean, I actually, right, wouldn't you, wouldn't you hate it if, you know, some asshole teacher had the same thought and tried to deprive you ahead of time. I was, I mean, I am a virtual student myself.
I'm a virtual student. I'm a federal judgment that you're giving yourself. So how do you know, I mean, like, so I'm actually going to my former students from Eastern Kentucky and over Labor Day weekend and their good students, their good people and single family be there? Yes, yes.
And so like, you know, they learned, I mean, and it clearly benefited them. But there were others that I thought, I'm not, it's just mex and it's you're right. You're right, David. I mean, I was in that same boat.
Like I don't, I am the common man with what rights I have to a little education. What if you structured something like this, right? Take the example of Franklin, right? You do Douglas's Audubark.
That's how I did. And then I think, you know, from there, you can, so I, for instance, I'm reading Douglas's autobiography as narrative of his life. And, and it's really, I thought you talked about this on that episode, it's really about what does it mean to be a human being? Right.
It's an all right. From the lowest drugs and slavery to the most freedom as a free citizen able to hold, represent his community and hold others accountable, right? So that's sort of full American citizenship. I'm teaching at alongside Plato's also by these where you see all the bodies take a lot of different positions, right?
You know, I'll talk about, you know, I'll have selections. They might go well with the, you know, to, by the way. Yeah, probably. Yeah.
Anyway, sorry. And I think, you know, I'll have selections from Aristotle, like, you know, the relationship between a good person simply and good citizen, right? And so I think you can mix it up. You can, you can offer them that edifying work while also drawing them to the deep.
I mean, Franklin talks about Socrates. You could share those collections from the. And then our public library system. He also talks about veracity and when one should lie.
I mean, like, right? I mean, I mean, for instance, to a French maiden who, who you coming back here soon? Yeah, baby, my ship, my ship will be back. Shame.
You will care for your children. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All Americans care for their children. Yeah.
So I think you're right. You can do it. And I will say, like, I've always tried to walk the line between a civic educational liberal education. It's more obvious that the place we're currently teaching where there's more of a, I mean, a greed, a shared sense of duty to do civic education.
I mean, one thing you could do, Greg, is, you know, like, you guys teach your baseline with the class. And then for those, it's always just one or two students. That's right. You're right.
That are real seekers and the extra reading. That's right. And I mentioned before my reluctance to teach in nature, for example, I've not, I've decided not to, but I'm very reluctant to for reasons we talked about before. Yeah, I don't, I hardly ever teach him.
And I mean, it presupposes too much knowledge of the education. Plus it's also so, uh, a bastock that it's a little, um, I don't know. Do you have anything left? I don't know.
We already asked what we're teaching. I mean, just as the backslope. So I was actually, I thought this was kind of a fun, freewling conversation. We probably weren't as grounded in the text as we should be.
Maybe we should have a storing, um, student on at some point and maybe we should. I would really like to say, well, I mean, Joseph was that edited the, yeah, or the more perfect union. He said, Claire, mom, McKenna, I don't know him, but we should reach out to him. See if we have one show.
Yeah. It's in point because I was a really uplifting story. Maybe we should do that his autobiography. It's some.
Can I give a couple of things that I'm going to talk about? I want to talk about a cabbage line. The cabbage line. Oh, that was great.
Yeah. Um, that was it's in reference to Washington, right? Yeah. Yeah.
And bottom four 36. Yeah, he says, uh, quoting Washington good, vocational education can be a form of liberal education, the best form for most people rather than in opposition to it. I think a lot is going right on his body. This is something we did clients, I say, one of his essays on liberal education.
Yeah. But I think, okay. So I think that's right. any sort of vocation freely, right?
Right, right, right. And he says describing a commencement oration on cabbages by one of his Tuskegee students, Washington said, Booker T. Washington said, quote, as a matter of fact, there's just as much that is interesting, strange, mysterious, and wonderful, just as much to be learned that is edifying, broadening, and refining in a cabbage as there is in a page of land. It depends on which page of land we have.
And then Storing says. Doring says the difference is that education in cabbages is also useful. Right. Now, we should have Eric, was he write that about Eric Adler in his Latin 101 class?
He actually wrote that. Well, that's another one thing I want, and I thought we could write on Eric Loeff. Oh, yeah, the orange juice. But just the orange juice-ification of the great books.
He rails against Adler for sort of popularizing literal education, which does, we haven't touched it all on how storing things this does damage to liberal education. But maybe we should talk about the orange juice-cation. Go ahead, sorry. Well, yeah, so the cabbage is there.
I thought, OK, yeah, I get it. You could be working on a cabbage farm, and you could really explore the mysteries of cabbage. Like, why does it probably keep eating this tasteless crap? I'm like, grandma, let's raise the cabbage ton.
You jerk. So I guess, look, OK, fine. You can learn that there's mysteries and strange things. OK, most of the time, if you're working with cabbage, you're not exploring the minutiae of the cabbage.
Most of the time, you're managing your business. You're doing hard back-breaking work, right? So I'm sure you'll find some sort of interesting stuff. Second, do you think that I don't think that one could wonder about, I mean, like, the whole example?
Absolutely. OK, I think a lot of it is routine, right? A lot of it is familiar. Just one is, and then on top of that, just because cabbage is interesting doesn't mean you'll find it interesting, right?
Sure. Most people probably won't. And most people, when they get into a line of work, it's because there's an opportunity there, right? They can manage.
Now, you can learn to love your work, absolutely. But the idea that, I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm just projecting here, but I feel like if I worked in cabbage, I could get very sick of it and be like, kind of work cabbage. I'd keep this stuff away from me. So there's a kind of optimistic portrait that he paints at times that I'm just like, yeah, it can be pursued freely.
But freely pursuing the study of cabbage is different from understanding cabbage in such a way that it is economically useful for you. Right. And there's a difference between the scientific students of cabbage and he was just pursuing how to trans-acknowledge and the person who was trying to make a buck off, right? Sure.
So I thought at times he's a little too rosy on the hybrid. That said, I think he does craft a kind of mindset that is worth considering in contrast to the overly pessimistic view you often see, right? Yeah. Can I ask one question before we call it a day?
We didn't touch on it, so I'd like you to do it. Maybe the Mortimer Adler is about to go, how is we talked about how this could be harmful to the student? How could liberal educating the common man be bad for liberal education? I mean, the Mortimer Adler, yeah, the Mortimer Adler is the greatest best, right?
Somebody says I'm having a lover's quarrel. He says they write into Mortimer Adler. He writes a 750 word column where he goes through six different thinkers and it's like, well, six different thinkers and 750 words, we're talking about 125 words each, something like that. Why the hell am I going to read the 60 page symposium where you can give it to me in a short paragraph, right?
I thought that was a really good point that. Yeah, he's being a little unfair to Adler. I mean, Adler tried to bring the classics to a lot of people. It just seems.
So let me just read the line. I'm telling you what you think of the series says. All right. It was never clear to me why.
So he says, if you write in this letter and he surveys them in 750 words, you then send you a complete set of the great books, right? Whatever that full shelf is. And then he'll show us that. But it was never clear to me why anyone should bother reading these long and difficult books when he could apparently get the gist of their thoughts in a daily newspaper column.
So I think he's tweeted about this at People Game A Lot of shit because I tweeted about great books, which are 144, 288 characters. And you're like the hyper Adler. Yeah, yeah, but I maintain my tweets are erotic and point you beyond themselves. But I think he makes a good point, which is look, what happens when you teach the great books to the common man, you make the great books too common.
You reduce them to quotes and sort of boilerplate versions of it. And it's not clear that this is now, I think the response to this would be like the Rose Vomontos story, right? Rose Vomontos picks up the Plato volume of the great books, reads it, and then he goes on to study and all that. So it is a kind of planting of the seed, right?
So I think he's a little unfair to Adler the way that you describe David. But he does have a point, right, that you do vulgarize it, right? And you do oversimplify. Yeah, I guess the most terrible thing I can say is if you do that, you can give people the sense that wisdom is cheaply won.
Or yeah, exactly, there is no need. If it can be presented in such a pity way, then there's no reason to pick up the real thing. Yeah, right. And it's irritating.
I mean, you all have these experiences where someone says, oh, you study Plato. It doesn't play to a thing, that blah, blah, blah, blah. He's like, ah, I wish I didn't have to talk about this. And try to either nod your head to something you think is plainly false or you try to distribute.