Jacob Klein's The Idea of Liberal Education | The New Thinkery Ep. 26

Welcome back to New Thinkery. My name is David Barr and with me as always is my good friend, Alex Prio. How are you, Alex? I'm ready.

How are you? Doing well. Doing well. And Greg McBrayer.

How's it going, Greg? Pretty good. Pretty good. How about you?

Good. It's midday on a Sunday and with daylight savings, I'm already at 3 p.m. Sun appears to be going down. So it's somewhat depressing.

But being here with you guys makes it all worth it, you know. It's kind of you to say life. Today, we have an interesting episode. Not like usual.

Yeah. Yeah. Cause that's right. It'll, reading, we're discussing an essay, which I encourage listeners to pause the show right now and read it.

It's available online. You can find it quickly before listening to the show. I can look at the most out of the show if they do it. But it's entitled, you can listen.

You don't need to go read 15 pages. That's right. Yeah. It's really good.

Yeah. You can just listen. I mean, we're going to lay out the ideas. Yeah.

It's called the idea of liberal education. It was an essay written in 1960 by the then Dean of St. John's College in Annapolis, Jacob Klein. Jacob was a wonderful educator, best friend of Leo Strauss, a philosopher in his own right.

Alex will talk a little bit about his background. But today we're just going to kind of talk about his essay and then use it as a stocking horse to discuss our experiences in the world of liberal education and Greg and Alex continue on as teachers. So I mean, as we'll learn liberal education requires leisure and leisure requires a freedom from necessity. So please donate so that we can continue educating you liberally and like and subscribe and read and review us and all that.

Can I? Before we, yeah, you got it right. Don't get comfort. Don't get comfort.

Before we jump in, I just want to say we were going to intersperse this episode with some sort of discussion of our own education. And I will say that the first time, you know, I was a kid at high school in rural Georgia, I was a son of a military grad. First time I heard somebody speak about liberal education. Oh, your dad was an old say Brad as well.

You know what I mean? He was actually, but yes. But what I mean is the first time I heard about liberal education in college, I thought, I don't want any part of this. And so I just, you know, my complete novice understanding was that it meant political indoctrination become a liberal, which I was not the least bit interested in.

So we don't mean that. I think most people will know that probably. But if you're like 18 year old me, I thought this meant the partisan or political education, we'll come back to how this is different from that kind of education. Yeah, liberal, just to be clear up front, I think that's a good point to make Greg liberal means the sense of liberal education is that education received in freedom, right?

And freedom and leisure, you're able to educate yourself as you see fit. Should we get into it? Let's do it. Who was Jacob Klein?

All right. So Jacob Klein is one of Russia, educated in Germany. He studied with some of the biggest names of 20th century thought. Some of them will be really familiar.

He studied physics in Berlin with Max Planck, he was for Planck's constant. And Edwin Schrodinger, who was famous for his cat, not as noteworthy an achievement to have a cat, but he happened to get famous off of that. And so was no cat. Well, we don't know.

I think that's the thing. Maybe killed it while his sister was on vacation. That's true. I mean, the cats in the bag.

This is a good question. So Schrodinger's cat, the cat is in a bag. Is it or is it not? You don't know.

Well, it's going to be dead, right? If you don't open the bag. So that's the way Greg kills cats. He's seriously, by the way, one cat, but be seriously, I didn't know that the client had these sort of luminaries as people with whom he studied.

Yeah, he was briefly, he was just for about a year, I think. But he studied with some of the biggest names, you know, in physics, as well as in philosophy and philosophy. So he's typically in the phenomenological school of philosophy. He studied with Nikolai Hartmann, who's a lesser known phenomenologist compared to the other two who are Martin Heidegger and Edmund Cusro.

Both Heidegger and Cusro were deeply influential on his thinking, though perhaps Cusro Moore, his first and most influential work, Greek mathematical thong, the origin of algebra, can be read and has been read as a continuation of Cusro's own work. This is a great book by Bert C Hopkins on the subject that I recommend if you're interested in this sort of thing. And you can also see this many years after client emigrated to the United States. And in fact, in this essay itself, when, for example, he speaks of sedimentation of the sciences into sort of strict doctrines, that's a very hercirlean idea.

He was also friends with a hystral family. This is evident from the fact that at the bookstore at St. John's College in Annapolis, you can, or at least you could, when I was a student there, get a copy of Mrs. Hysterl's baking recipes as preserved by Mrs.

Klein. So if you want old school Germans, that's the place to go. So as I alluded to just now, he immigrated to the United States largely due to, well, I mean, exclusively due to the Holocaust, and Klein took a position eventually on the faculty at St. John's College in 1937.

Now in 1937 at St. John's College, they had adopted a kind of modern, more Adler influence great books, Education, and it was referred to as the new program. This program was instituted initially by Stringfellow Bar and Scop Buchanan, but it was later deeply influenced by Klein, especially during his decade or so as Dean. I like to think of Bar and Buchanan as the college's Romulus, but Klein as its Nuva.

In any case, they had the emphasis on math and science and some of the text focused on their those are O2 clients influence. So it's first major work. I should also mention on the host role connection, he wrote an essay for hystral's Feschrift. So he was obviously quite close with him.

So already mentioned. What's a feschrift for the folks at home there? It's the celebratory writing essays in honor of so and so. So I mentioned his work, Week of Mathematical, the origin of algebra was originally published in two parts in 1934 and 36 under the title, degree, Geshe logistic, undi, and Stégung der algebra.

I was in a prestigious journal at the time for various reasons. It really didn't get much attention for many years. So 30 years later, his next major work was a commentary on Plato's Mino, that's 1965. And a few years thereafter, the first book, the math book was translated into English by Eva Brand, also of St.

John's College, herself the author of a number of books, she's translated a few atomic dialogues. His last major work is a very difficult but rewarding one. It's called Plato's Trilogy, the Antitius, the Sophist, and the Statesman. So 1977.

I learned a lot from this while studying the trilogy. It's really worth careful attention. And then the next year, 1970, he died. 1985, a collection of his shorter works were collected.

The collection of his short works was published under the title, title Lectures and Essays, and was edited by two St. John's tutors, Elliot Zuckerman and Robert Williamson. And that's where this essay that we're going to talk about today, the idea of liberal education comes from. And now these are all great accomplishments.

But obviously, I think he's greatest service to learning generally has been his influence on the program at St. John's College, through which he's formed the Small but Steady stream of students that make their way through the institution. So his writings, yeah, sorry, both you and David are products of the same. Right.

That's right. Right. So he's writing to do continue to stand, I think, as a model of rigorous into investigation to fundamental problems. I do think they serve as an essential guide to them as well.

But the few hundred students who graduate every year from St. John's two campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe are, I think, his continuing contribution to our polity. Of course, like all legacies, clients is not without its dark and painful shames as good as the program is, if you have to do much with my co-host David Barr. So that's a kind of overview of his background and his dark influence.

I think it's a matter of time. Just a matter of time before the statues have climbed and the whole the bench of Klein is torn down at St. John's. I'll tell you.

Oh, yeah. Oh, I hope not. When we were graduate students at St. John's, Alex and I, we had a few beers, got a buzz going, and we decided to find Leo Strauss's grave.

And so we got to a cemetery and his cemetery at four corners of these crossroads. It's like a gas station and a 7-11 noisy intersection. Not too far away from downtown Annapolis. And the cemetery was locked.

He's an old cemetery, and there's this gate, and Alex and I approached the gate. Left because it was locked and you followed the law. Right. Well, I did.

I refused to jump the fence because something told me that was transgressed, but Alex jumped the fence and he just ran through the graveyard and he found Strauss's grave and buried right next to Strauss's client. That's true. I didn't know it was right next to him. You took a picture.

I didn't know it was a good way to memorialize Strauss's grave. Yeah, the whole point was to kind of visit his grave in a respectful way. We just had to hop the fence. I thought you told me that they were next to one another.

I hope I'm remembering it was one time ago. Okay. Did you want to give us an overview of this essay? Yeah, so quickly.

I think the first thing to note about this 1960 essay, The Idea of Liberal Education, is the simplicity with which Klein writes on a subject matter. It's entirely free from the jargon laid in texts that you, anybody that's studied modern trends in education or educational theory is used to reading. For a German, he really doesn't employ anything like long German words and bizarre concepts that don't really mean anything but very popular in modern education today. So it's a text that you can read and anybody can read rather and learn from.

In fact, Alex, you mentioned that you still teach this today. How do students, I mean, students, it may land a little bit differently, but at least they can understand it. Is that correct? I think the plain language is a great service he's done because this was published in 1960 originally.

This essay in a collection of words, it's called The Goals of Higher Education, it has reprinted in this lectures in essays book. But it's from 1960. This is a 60 year old piece of writing and it doesn't feel like it because it's not focused on contemporary events or contemporary problems. It's trying to articulate an idea in a kind of purest form or abstract form.

And so my students still find it relatable. They find it challenging in places, but they don't find any event dated per se. Right, right. So just I'll try and debrief.

The title is The Idea of Liberal Education. When one reads this essay, one is struck that a client seems to be after something deeper. And so it's not simply the presentation of a ready-made concept. The idea reads as a kind of, I mean, as it's this kind of journey for the reader discovering the steps of liberal education or rather retracing the steps of liberal education in his or her own soul.

And so it's kind of the movement of what a good liberal education ought to resemble. Is that fair? Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

The sort of necessary structure of human life and thinking out of which liberal education may or may not actually emerge. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing that struck me about the essay is it's also free from, I was thinking a little bit of what I've read from Alan Bloom just on the state of, other than state of higher education and liberal education simply.

He was such a fabulous writer, but he was more vitriol in his writing. And client's essay is free from that. So he doesn't really attack other schools of thought or anything like this. It's this essay is it kind of invites all readers to see for him or herself what liberal education has to offer to try and attempt it.

They would think that that's because in 1960, there wasn't the need to be so polemical that the sort of thing, Bloom's closing America mind. It is highly polemical, as you mentioned, it's very defensive. It attacks certain schools of thought that become dominant in the United States, but he says all that happened in the 60s. So his clients speech here in 1960, we just haven't seen the kinds of hostility to liberal education yet in the United States that Bloom is reacting to, or is it, or do you think that there's something that this reveals something about the character of the speaker or about the audience, or just the purpose of the piece?

You may be right, Greg, that's a great point. I mean, the the campuses hadn't been radicalized. Cornell hadn't been taken over by undergraduates with guns. And so maybe there was no need for that.

But at the same time, I think that client in his own life, but I think by 1960, we had witnessed the takeover of the humanities departments by like the positivist school. So I think that he would have been aware of who, I think that the client wanted to, he could have postulated quote unquote enemies of liberal education from within or without the academy. Yeah, I do think he he is aware of those things in other essays that he writes. I mean, he's also not in Bloom's position, right?

Bloom was at Cornell, when all this has happened, right? Cline was in a school that's committed to a liberal education degree, books education. So he could, I think, afford to have a bit more of a removed stance in his other side. But Greg has a good point.

I think who's the audience then Alex? Who do you take the audience I mean, if we take seriously where he published it, initially, it seems like it would be people simply concerned with the goals of higher education, what they should be. And he puts it in, I think he tries to put it in the plainest language possible so that it's most relatable. He has another essay from 1965, 66 on liberal education, which isn't polemical, obviously, in the sense that Bloom is, but he is obviously concerned with the decline much more than he is, you know, here he is than in the ideal of liberal education book.

So what is he doing this essay as a whole David? I don't know. He does so many things with you. Let's just start talking about it.

Yeah, yeah. So I thought, I mean, how does he begin to section one, elemental versus formal education? Do I do that? Okay.

So just to give an idea of, I thought yours is going to go over the structure of the essay. The first thing he talks about is about elemental and formal education. And he wants to kind of lay out basically two strata from the way that we, about the way that we are educated. One of the main differences, so elemental education and formal education seem to be distinct in that formal education is a kind of active pursuit as to a kind of passive reception.

But that's not exactly right. Elemental education has a passive element. He says this comes from all the smaller or larger communities to which we belong. He lists a few kinds of institutions.

He talks about families and he talks about clans. But I think he would mean also anything like a political community as well. Through this, this, this sort of just living in these communities, we start to, you know, gain opinions and start to have notions of how we're not to live and all those sorts of things. He's more concerned when he initially lays it out to distinguish education as such and specifically elemental education from our kind of natural maturation.

We obviously grow up. We develop new capacities as we get older. We become more capable, right, and able to do different things. But ultimately, it's education is a second kind of nourishment or ripening as he puts it or growth.

That leads to another kind of flourishing. Now, I think this, this detail of elemental education, these different communities that give us our customs, beliefs and opinions as he puts it, our ways of behavior and feeling and reacting, that's an important feature because by the end of this essay, he's going to talk about the obstacles to education and one of them, and they're going to become increasingly more institutional in nature and eventually become political. So I think he's setting the stage, right, that elemental education belongs, starts with a community, right, just passively accepting all these beliefs and behaviors. But ultimately, it might culminate in something that in a kind of activity that doesn't necessarily jive with these communities, right, or there's exist some kind of tension in them.

So the first question, yeah. One thing that struck me about section one, in this discussion of element, this elemental phase, is he doesn't specify an ideal type of community environment under which one needs to be raised. So it's almost like you could have an inner city kid with tough experiences, and you could have a kid that grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and that they're both, they both, they'll have accrued different experiences. But what I don't understand is it seems that the child from Greenwich with, let's assume proper education is going to be kind of be better positioned to receive a formal education than a child in the inner city, who maybe has not had access to the best type of teachers, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, I mean, there's nothing like an ideal here, as far as like an institutional or communal ideal, if that's what you mean. You're right that that, you know, a student who's not had access to the right kind of, you know, elementary education in the sense of the right institutions being around that might not be able to achieve that, whereas a, you know, another kid from, I don't know, Kensington Maryland or something like that would. But I do think that there is, there's definitely a kind of stratification here that could, could emerge. But again, he's not trying to say there's one best community for this.

In fact, the idea of a liberal education points you in the direction of a kind of learning that requires freedom from the necessity that deeply informs these institutions, right? That, you know, transcends those institutions. I think Greg wanted to jump in though. Just a small point.

So I think what I take a client to be doing here in the first section is we're building for an account of liberal education. We're not talking about liberal education yet. We're talking about elemental education. So we're, the idea here is ultimately we're going to distinguish whatever we're learning here from what we learn in liberal education.

So I'm just not clear. I mean, if I were listening to this podcast or if I had read this, I would assume we're talking about an elementary school education. But I took it to be even more elemental or even more primary than that. What are we, what are we talking about?

What's the content of this elemental education? Is it languages that learning where to go potty? Is it learning, you know, what kind of clothes we wear in our society? You know, I think elementary school is an interesting example, because part of it is obviously not elemental.

And so let me finish laying out the types and then then we'll try that. So that's a really good, I think we to think about these distinctions. So one part of elemental is kind of passively received. Another one is through experience.

And this comes mainly through difficult experience, different obstacles that you come into or where sufferings or catastrophes, which give us the opportunity to become wise to reflect on our lives and to figure out how to live better in the world. And that's a bit more active when we confront these experiences. But he says that if you go a little further, and if you take these experiential obstacles or troubles, and you formalize them, or make them theoretical and turn them into problems as he puts it, then you get to what he refers to as, as formal education, right? And this is a little bit different, right?

It's obviously more theoretical. Now, if we to go back to your example of elementary school, right, obviously learning your ABCs and how to write, right, and learning, you know, basic, you know, mathematics and stuff, I think that falls into formal education. Those are examples that he uses later formal education. We want to say, there's a ton of stuff you learn in elementary school that has to do with customs, right?

Waiting in line, right, cleaning up after yourself, you know, if you're from if you're going to a public school in this kind of community, you're going to be expect to clean up your lunch. But if you're, I don't know, from Kensington, Maryland, you might have your maid come and clean up your lunch and you just leave it there. You know, that's how you deal with it. I have a story.

I have a story about acculturation in the Montessori school. Yeah, let's hear this. This is a great example, because Montessori school was right, elementary school. That's correct.

Right. That's nice. You learned a hard lesson. It did.

But maybe it was the school that learned a lesson now, like in their admissions process. So when we were living in Texas, mom and dad enrolled me in Montessori school. And I recall that we had rules. Everybody had to follow the regulations of the, I mean, you had this incredible freedom to play.

But when it was time to clean up, you know, the rules you had to get in line, et cetera. And so one of the rules was if you wanted to take a drink from this water fountain that I remember this big spout of water, it was this wonderful water fountain for a little person, because it shot really high up and we were enamored with it. You had to wash your brush in the basin. And I was waiting in line, I'm still angry about this today, I was waiting in line that dutifully, like a citizen of the school.

And I noticed, other kids were just throwing their brushes into the basin. And so I bit this girl really, really hard. I mean, really hard. And I was kicked out of the Montessori school.

And so we tell that story around the dinner table from time to time. And I asked my parents once, I said that that seems awfully like strict to the school to kick a child out for one, just for one outburst of aggression. And mom and dad told me that I like would buy kids all the time. I mean, I just bit everybody.

Like I just enjoyed biting. And that's gone away to greater or lesser extents. But I still carry the memory with me. Can I ask a question about elementary or elemental education?

So I'm often reflected on this in my own case, a great degree of luck went into, I think, my own having upon a liberal education. But you guys in either your case, can you think back to the way back when and think there was some antecedent early on that was either by your parents intentionally doing something or just by accident, or maybe your natural disposition, you did something early on that you thought, oh, this looking back, this is now a sign that I was already scratching at liberal education. Yeah, I have this distinct memory when I was drawing lines in circles as a kid, I think I was just learning shapes or something and then points, right? And I asked my mom, what's a point?

Because I was kind of confused because I had a sense it was nothing, but yet it had to be something because it's there on the page, right? You guys can see it. And she's always just a dot and I was like a little kid. So I was like, okay, but then I realized that if I had taken this kind of initial head scratching wonder, and we'll get to the experience of wonder later, and I pushed it a bit, right?

I might have, you know, by a good teacher, I might have been brought to some kind of reflection similar to Euclid's definition, that which has no part, that which so it's something has no part, therefore it seems almost nothing at all, right? So there are these moments, I think little children have them, if you receptive to them as a parent or a teacher, you realize that they're taking something from experience, it's become a problem, and it can lead to a kind of formal investigation or definition of that. Do you have one too Greg? I feel like you were asking that question, so you can answer it.

No, I was generally curious or interested. By the way, also, hope that listeners point noticed you called your mother a bad educator in that story. I'm happy to say it. I'm calling around on the podcast.

By the way, this actually brings up, I should have started with this. My mother was like, why do your friends keep saying you're related to the Ayatollah Khomeini? Why did you keep saying that family secret? That's not true.

It was an entirely different Ayatollah. It was not me not Khomeini, my bad. I think there was something else we said about it. I can't remember what it was.

I mean, you're talking in finance. That's also true. But that's also true. She asked me about that story I told where I'm on my dad's 60th or 70th birthday.

She's like, I can't believe I'm kissing a 60 year old man. It was one of our recent episodes. It's a, but anyways, yeah. My mother listens to every podcast where she hasn't donated yet, but I'm on the list of every podcast.

She's an avid listener. So you guys should be careful. My mom doesn't listen. I don't blame her, but I remember when I, let's carry on.

Yeah, let's move on. Yeah. So we should go on. I think that's the other thing.

I mean, the main thing he wants to be one, he uses this distinction between elemental formal education to pose the basic question. You're right. We're not talking about liberal education there. What he wants to talk about is how do you get from elemental to formal?

How do you, how does this process in which a kind of experiential problem is sort of transformer lifted to the theoretical level work? What's going on there? That's really the question. And that's going to be the sort of basic question out of which he gets to the question or the idea of liberal education.

So the next section, which is our question I think Greg will talk to us about, is meant to sort of discuss this transformation process. Yeah. So it seems as though as we move from sort of elemental education and formal education, what moves us toward a liberal education seems to be this emphasis on questioning. Right.

And so it's more exploratory. It's more inquisitive. It's asking big questions, especially why. But in the second part of the essay, Klein just basically outlines different types of questions.

Most questions he says are of a practical nature. Sort of what time are we going to record the podcast today? Who's doing section one? Who's doing section three?

Who's your daddy? And what does he do? Who's your daddy? And what does he do?

That might be more gossipy. I was going to say that sounds like more gossipy, which is the second kind of question he talks about. And we've already besmirched gossip on the show with our Plutarch episode. So we don't need to go further down that line.

The more interesting questions, at least the questions that seem to be more conducive to liberal education are the third and fourth kinds of questions that he raises. But one is just idle questions of idle curiosity, which seems to be divided into not serious and serious questions. At the end of the section, two, he mentions also there are other kinds of questions that he's not going to treat. So polite questions.

How was your day today? That's for stuff affectionate. How was your day today? Sweetie and rhetorical.

Was your day good or was it bad? Anyway, what's your day good today? Exactly. Today was it good or bad to discuss?

And so the central ones are these idle curiosity and serious curiosity ones. This seems to be stuff where we're looking for it's pointing toward liberal education. I actually want to turn this over to David and Alex. I'm going to raise a question.

I was wondering what a question of idle curiosity is. Can we come up with some examples? Why? Sorry, go ahead.

No, go ahead. I think this question should be rhetorical. So you have to answer Greg. Alex is an example of asking his mother what a point a point was on a piece of paper.

I think the beauty of this section for me is what Klein is doing is kind of whole holding up a mirror to the reader and saying, look, in your everyday motive existence, you go, they're all these little jumping off points for deeper forays into knowledge or wisdom. And that he's trying to get you, I think, to see or recalibrate your life so that your motive is existence is directed toward something meaningful. So I think you're right. I guess my question is maybe it was just idle curiosity that let Alex ask his mom about the dot.

But I guess the question, or at least I'm trying to think this through, is he says that idle curiosity can be changed into serious curiosity. And so maybe it's the same question as just the passion or the seriousness with which one asked the question. So maybe it's that, hey, why is this dot? What is a dot can lead to a serious investigation of mathematical things?

Yeah. And yes, and this kind of goes in, I don't want to jump the gun. Why does it rain or something like this? Or why was your thunder when there's lightning or sky blue, why is water wet?

Why is David not returning my love? Oh, that's more of a gossipy, probably kind of question. What is an exploratory question? But I was going to say there's a section later where he talks about leisure and freedom.

But again, the thing that I was caused to reflect upon is you can't do, they are ask oneself these types of questions, these jumping off points to a deeper wisdom dives if you're leading a life of just like head down headphones on, like getting to the job, working at the job, coming back home, working at the factory. But really it's not that it was the old example of working at the factory now it's just working anywhere. And so you have to be receptive to the world. I think that's a big key thing for Klein is that the world has to has to talk, you have to be willing to listen to what's going on around you in the broadest sense.

One way to talk about, I want to say just other questions that they're not actually really easy to distinguish. I think practical and gossipy questions are pretty easy to distinguish. It's not too tough. And even gossipy and idle curiosity, because he distinguishes, he says gossipy questions have to do with our passions, right?

And the anger, whatever it is. Idle curiosity is more dispassionate as no malevolent or benevolent feelings, he says. But it's characterized by kind of wonder to it. I think so.

Now what gets difficult for me is separating idle curiosity from serious curiosity, because a question of idle curiosity, as I think we've noted in a couple of these questions, right? Can't become a question of serious curiosity. So I always like to use the example, remember when you were a kid, you used to play two games in the pool. One is throw something down and swim to the bottom and pick it up, right?

The other is, is these are games you play by yourself. There's Marco Polo and stuff, but I was a very lonely kid. And the other one is you take like a ball or something, right? He tried to push it down as far as you can.

And I always thought that was weird as a kid. I had a kind of nascent set of wonder. Now, that's a kind of question of idle curiosity. Why does this go up when everything else goes down?

And why does it get harder to push down the, you know, deeper you go, you can then start talking about density and stuff, make it a question of serious curiosity. So it's hard to know exactly where the breaking point from one to the other is. Obviously exploratory when you're actually formalizing it and thinking about it more, I don't know, let's say mathematical way, give me that example. That's going to be a sort of obvious line.

But I find the move from idle to serious curiosity to exploratory kind of fuzzy. So a bit difficult I think to get. I'm putting words into the mouth here, but I mean, he does talk about being transformed or changed. But I wonder if it gets changed when the idea is now I'm going to really set it out trying to figure it out.

Right. Oh, I wonder why this versus, okay, I wonder why this and now let's figure it out or something like that. Because the examples he gives are some examples we just talked about. Why is this guy blue or why did it snow yesterday and not today, these kinds of things.

Yeah. I guess before we move on to the next section, if you guys have anything else about questions, let me know. But one of the things I found particularly interesting is on page 161 of his talk. He talks about these two ways to know the two paths to knowledge as it were.

One is toward that which is not yet known. And one, the other path to knowledge is a kind of recovery of knowledge. He sets up this bifurcation, which I think is really interesting. So there are two paths I'll just state them again to knowledge.

One is to the not yet known and the other path to knowledge is recovery of knowledge, which regard to the former, the not yet known, there are again two paths, prophecy or divination and science. So it's weird to hear a guy speaking about liberal education saying that science and prophecy are on the same path to knowledge. On the other side, recovery of knowledge, he says, again, there's a bifurcation, one way to the recovery of knowledge is history. There's another path to the recovery of knowledge.

And at least in my reading, he leaves that path unnamed for its worth. And so you have this bifurcation, which by the way, strangely enough, Alex talked about formalized education before. The sciences and history are formal education. So on the other axis, you have a not yet known way that's formalized and recovery way that's formalized.

So science is the formalized way pursuing that, which is not yet known. History is the formalized way to pursue the recovery of knowledge. But this informal way to the not yet known is prophecy or divination. What then is the informal path to recovery of knowledge?

I suspect the answer is something like philosophy. I think he said, so there's knowledge of the future knowledge of the past. That's the knowledge of the not yet known and of the ones known, right? The primordial.

And I think it's not just this, so it's primordial. It's the more fundamental in terms of time. Knowledge of the future is usually had primordial through prophecy and divination. While knowledge of the past, what used to be known, but it might have been forgotten, is myth-making, right?

So this would be the difference between, let's say, the book of Revelation and the book of Genesis, right? What's going to happen and what's going to happen in the past. And it needs to correspond to science as knowledge of the future, where you can make a predictive science, right? And history, which is a kind of inquiry into the past, which could be natural history, political history, all those sorts of things.

Is that fair, do you think? Yeah, I think that's right. But those are the primordial forms, right? So you get significant history.

So what is? So to science, it would be prophecy and divination. Oh, I see, got you got you. All right, very good.

So, and I think it's important to know that the prophecy of divination, which we like to think of as like maybe crude or something like that, that's what would be a sort of vulgar characterization of it, he calls primordial and the other one's derivative. You need these things first, right? Otherwise, you're going to get it. And so I think there's obviously, I think this is where Greg is maybe pushing a little bit.

There's a question of whether the derivative is, understands itself properly, if it doesn't pay attention to that from which it's derived, right? Yeah, very good. I want to read one passage from 161.61 that I really like on his nature, on the nature of questioning. He talks about the familiar and the unfamiliar.

He says, the unexpected is still woven out of the texture of the expected. And it is this frame of the fundamentally familiar that actually allows us to formulate our questions. That is, they can be put into words. Our questioning is guided by language itself, which is oriented toward the world around us as we know it, including those parts or elements or factors that in some way remain hidden to us.

There are usually some dark corners behind or beneath pieces of furniture in a room full of light. The world has many such dark corners. Questions of the kind I've mentioned are like flashlights, the beam of which we direct towards those dark corners. This beam is our language.

I think that's really, I find that to be just a really beautiful passage, but also a really, I think, wonderful image that can be really reflected on for a long time. Should we move on to section three? No, I want to hear your reflect on that image. Well, I think in a way, it shows that the ultimately, the main thing is that as illuminated as a room might be or as much science as we might possess, they always remain dark corners.

That's the very nature of illumination, right? And we might think that we can look around and we have to use our language and we have to start talking about it. We have to try to formulate our experience into these words. But every time we shine light, we're obscuring things and we're accepting a kind of temporary perspective.

And we have very refined sciences. But one of the problems with the proliferation of the sciences and all of these searches, nobody knows how to put a Humpty Dumpty back together, because everywhere you turn, there's another obfuscation, depending on what it is you're looking at. And I just find this image to really be helpful with thinking about the fact that as much as you figure out one thing, and I have this experience reading Plato, Greg, you can probably back me up on this. You read one dialogue, you feel like you've got a good grip on it.

You read another one, you go back to it, it looks completely different, because you've seen something new in this other, and you didn't realize that all the light you were shining was actually obscuring things from you. I think we have experiences like this all the time. I guess that's kind of a dark example then, that we flow through life, like mostly in the cave. Maybe, right?

The flashlight also is a human artifact, and if it's like the language, I mean, we only have the tools of our own making to try to see our way around. And so, in that similarly distorting thing that Alice was talking about, if we had natural light, to look around, that might be more helpful, or even supernatural light. But wait, so you think he's so he's if you read his exam, you think his example then is excluding, let's say, lightning bolts, illuminating, you know, part of our world, if you stick with me and me, flashlight. It's essentially a question.

I mean, language is at least partly conventional, or it has a strong conventional component to it, right? So it's weird to say that English is natural, or French is natural. And so it is, I mean, if for the Greeks, they had this word logo, which means sort of sound simultaneously speaking and thinking, or thought and word. And it is weird that it's difficult to think without words, but then those words themselves are conventional.

So it's, it is like, we are aiming the flashlight where we're trying to look. And so yeah, I guess I didn't pay enough attention to this metaphor about how distorting or investigating can be even as we're trying to figure things out, or very trying to figure things out can be a distortion in a serious way. Yeah, but he ends by saying ultimately that the most fundamental use of language is questioning. So maybe in questioning, instead of saying this is, you know, just, we say, what is justice, maybe in so doing, we take that conventional aspect, or conventional divisions, and we start trying to look for where the light, you know, meets the darkness or something like that.

That might be one way to think about that. Yeah. We should probably move on. Section three, your other question is good.

I like that about the lightning bolts and section very, yeah. Sorry. And just on that passage, one last thing, for on the client host role connection, this sounds very hirr surly. And if you read us early talks about looking at objects and from there, and this is a kind of way to think about knowledge.

So I think there's a bit of that influence there. So now that he gives you elements of formal education in one, section two, he gives you the type of questions, right, in the transformation. And it's when, basically when the familiar starts to seem unfamiliar. And now in section three, he can talk about how we transform elemental education into formal education.

And this section is to me just so mysterious, such trouble really trying to figure out exactly what he's trying to lay out. But I think, so he talks about metastrophic reflection in the last section, he talked about two words from Plato, Metastrophian, and Periagogy, which just, speaking to the mic, Al. Sorry, Metastrophian, Periagogy, which means something like Turnabout or conversion, both of them. And now he talks about metastrophic reflection or a converting reflection, which happens in conjunction with our exploratory questioning.

He says, it leads us to establish the formal disciplines, such as he had listed before. The main experience ends up being wonder, right? When we wonder at the world, we tend to detach ourselves from our experience, from our kind of rigid experience and from our opinions. I think we're starting to see a little bit about how formal education, when you really engage in this questioning starts to lead to a tension between your elemental education.

If the familiar or the usual or the customary and conventional starts to become seems strange to you and open to questioning, you start engaging in a kind of activity that that I wouldn't want to say necessarily so far undermines, but at least runs into some kind of tension with your elemental education. But when you try to go to the roots of your experience, as he puts it and explore what's not yet known or what was once known, this kind of wonder leads you into a kind of an tendency to formalize things, right? To try to get at the roots and put it into language. And this needs you to divide it up, right?

And to give it a kind of structure using language and language being connected as he points out to counting, right? When you term something, you're dividing it off into a kind of monad or a unit, right? That serves as the basis of counting. And you can start computing when you do this.

But this is taking something that's very unreflective and passive and making a subject to reflection and to a kind of formal discussion, right? Which is maybe something that hadn't happened before. That's the best I can do to try to understand what's going on here when we transform them. Maybe Greg or David has something to say here.

I was at one small part in this connect to what David was saying. I'm only on the bottom page 164. Klein says, it is only when we dedicate ourselves to the radical, metastropic, or turning questioning that you mentioned, when we free ourselves from the ever present concern that the burden of life imposes upon us, the formal education, that formal education becomes a liberal education, that the formal disciplines become a liberal discipline or liberal arts. So it's only after you become freed from a kind of necessity or a burden of life, which seems to have given rise to the formal education in the first place.

So the part of the transformation is the formalization of education seems to come about as a kind, as a result of a kind of necessity or human necessity in your head. We need people who are experts in X, Y, or Z. But it's only once you liberate from that that you can begin to pursue these studies as liberal arts or liberal studies. And I know you were talking about that freedom business earlier.

One question I had is if after that process of liberation has been complete, if there's no going back, and what that means for people that really devote their lives to being liberally educated. If it makes flowing back into, or if it makes existing in one's older community before kind of the process of liberal education is matured in one soul, it makes that return difficult. Do you see what I'm saying? Well, I mean, one thing I'll say is he makes clear that this formalization can be practically motivated on one level, right?

So I can investigate, you know, Newtonian mechanics, right, because I want to actually do ballistics, right? Because I want to fight battle. In that case, and this is related to a point he'll say about our communities at the end, in that case, I think it can be integrated very well within the political community and liberal education is not in every respect I think intention. Yet there is a tendency where we can free ourselves from those kinds of concerns, and I can just read Newton for its own sake, right, just to understand it because I find it interesting.

And that's a kind of liberal education. We tend to think of liberal education, especially when it comes to calling as something like great books education. But I do think he means ultimately something that's taken up for its own sake, any kind of study that you do in your freedom and leisure, as a writer head of ourselves. Surprisingly, very little mention of great books at all, as sort of the vehicle for this, which was kind of surprising to me the first time I read it for it's worth, especially in the audience.

There's no content here. No, I mean, he talks about the formal disciplines and how formal disciplines can or cannot be pursued in a little manner. But yeah, I mean, I would have expected Homer, the Bible, Plato, that kind of stuff. And you just don't get it.

Hey, can I read a quote from section four on this subject. I'm getting into now David was going to talk about this. I want to read this. He says, foremost among the formal liberal disciplines are, of course, the mathematical disciplines, physical sciences, the science of life, the sciences of language that is grammar rhetoric and logic, and also the great works of literature, those incoperable mirrors of man, it's about the closest we can to great books.

And then he says, but it is a rather fantastic idea to create liberal studies with the so called humanities, as if mathematical and scientific disciplines were less human than historical or poetic or philosophical studies. And do we not know that philosophy itself can be studied in the most illiberal way? Amen, brother, I think that's a great indictment of those who try to say, well, I'm getting a liberal education, you know, because I'm, you know, studying philosophy or something like that. No, that's not how it's a jig at Heidegger.

It could be. But I think it might be a dig at modernity, right, a kind of a servo philosophy that's in the service of the human passions or something. Yeah. One thing we're practice.

Do you want to be guys never take a bad philosophy class? I just thought he meant sort of the way that philosophy can be pursued. I only teach bad philosophy classes. Yeah.

The way that it's sort of dogmatically, I mean, I know how we all teach and you guys, we're saying John's education try to teach, but some of the most boring classes I've had, it's going to be bad, but some of the most boring classes I've had my entire life, one was a class on Plato. It was awful. It was the worst class. It was probably the most boring class I'd ever taken.

My undergraduate age and philosophy class was like that as well. Yeah. And I don't want to name names or anything like that. But I mean, well, I mean, I think I've already thought that's what he has in mind that even there's an unphylistic way to approach these things and just the fact that you're reading Shakespeare or or or Cont or Plato or whomever, it doesn't necessarily mean you're actually engaging in liberal education.

If you're learning it as a sort of formalization, just sort of knowledge to have content knowledge to have to sound smart at doctoral part of the educated, that's not a liberal education. I think he's saying, but I do like, again, I mean, you just read the passage, but his emphasis that math and science and grammar and rhetoric and logic are also liberal arts and are just as important of not more important than humanities and literature. Yeah, that's something I've gotten from reading Frederick Douglass, actually, where he talks about how learning how to read allowed him to give voice to his thoughts that would have died otherwise. And one of the books he read was the order, somebody the order.

Yeah, the Columbia order. Yeah, the Columbia order. That's it. And so learning grammar and logic and rhetoric and all that sort of stuff helps you articulate, you know, your passions, your feelings, your experiences.

And so make them a thing of studying. You can't have a kind of liberal education without these basic elements. I've been teaching rhetoric this semester and it has been, I did not take I've never taken class in my course students. I've never taken a classroom rhetoric.

So it's all self taught before this semester. But it's amazing how much I've learned and how much I realized this seems to be contributing immensely to their liberal education, even though it's we're not necessarily working through great books with the exception of aerosols rhetoric. We're just looking at different speeches and trying to figure out how they work and how it plays on grammar and how it plays on the passions. And yeah, I think that this is a really I mean, one of the things that's done one of the fun things is my students have a healthy appreciation for America.

And they sort of look up to the Frederick Douglas of the world and the Abraham Lincoln's that you just mentioned. But now that they're reading these speeches with a with a view to having had a little bit of rhetorical education, they're realizing what great skill when introducing these speeches and paradoxically, it's making them admire the speeches less in some cases like oh, they're just using these devices. And it's less impressive. Gettysburg address is less impressive when you realize he's using icicle and or something like this.

And like it when it seems extemporaneous, it just seems so much more impressive. Anyway, yeah, that was a digression that wasn't very helpful. So let's let's get back to this. doesn't matter, right?

Education, liberal education is done in freedom that requires leisure. He talks about the word scolay, which is where we get the word school school is something you would take in your leisure because you don't have to do any servile or menial tasks. But that means also that there are obstacles to liberal education. Do you want to jump into that, Greg?

Yeah, I'm happy to talk about the obstacles to liberal education. So this is the last section, section five of his of his piece here. Look, the first is the learning situation itself. And so this is going to be to encounter intuitive to most listeners because we think the place most hospitable to liberal education is school.

And here Klein strangely enough says, actually the school setting with its rigid rules and lack of flexibility and sort of routinization and the way that everything's scheduled for you is not necessarily conducive to liberal education because the best education will be, you know, you get to sit down with an Alex pre-u as a student and talk and see where the conversation goes. And if you have more to talk about, keep going. If you don't, you stop and move on the next thing, maybe meet the next day. Whereas sort of the rigors of school when their learn starts and the bell goes off, you start and you stop.

There's 20 or 30 people in the classroom. So the size is not conducive. The regimen does not conducive. And so as I've been teaching online, actually now that thanks to the COVID virus, I've done a lot of teaching via Zoom.

And there it's very, very clear to me how limiting the situation is for genuine learning. And it makes me long for it to be back in the classroom. But having read this client piece, I thought, wow, even the classroom is not conducive in the best case of liberal education. And I'll just, you know, as I reflected on it, having read it, you know, David Barr and I were in a reading group 15, 20 years ago at University of Maryland.

And I've run reading groups at most places I've worked. I've been part of them as students. I've run them as a professor. And in a lot of cases, those have been where some of the more genuine learning has happened because there is greater freedom and we can sort of pursue things until we've decided to move on or not move on.

In other words, we don't have the constraints that being in a classroom with student learning outcomes, for example, sort of imposes upon the learning process. That's just one. Another is the fact that strangely enough, and this may be actually will tie to the idea of our bad classes before, that we're sort of heirs to the liberal arts tradition and the liberal education. And so in a way, to the extent that these things can become routinized and traditional, the fact that the very objects of our liberation can become traditional undermines a liberty that can be.

If you're learning a canon for the sake of learning a canon, I think then therefore, you're probably not going to be liberated to the same degree, right? You learn Shakespeare because you speak English as opposed to turning to Shakespeare to try to understand something about the human condition, which then leads to the third major obstacle, which is about the political community in which you happen to reside. All political communities, all regimes are going to try to impose an education on its citizens. They're going to try to provide students or the young with a political or civic education.

And in some cases, that civic education, maybe in all cases, that civic or political education can be in some tension with a liberal education. Those are the three that I see, and if you want to expand upon one or if I've missed something, just go for you. So can I give an illustration of this? I really love this section.

Okay, so you imagine a young student, right? Says, okay, you know, they're finishing up high school and I say, well, I'd like to be, you know, I like to be an engineer. Seems like a good living, right? Seems engaging, whatever.

And they go on, they start taking their classes. It's really rigorous. It's difficult. And they start saying, this doesn't seem like I'm going to be happy, right?

I don't think I'm going to be happy doing this. Now, our society, our political regime needs engineers, right? So those practical concerns makes makes us forms an education so that it produces people of use to the regime, right? Of use to society, great.

Be useful. And that's a common and much lauded goal of education. But then you might go there and say, this doesn't fit me. I don't think this is good.

And you might start asking questions, well, what is the good life, right? That's a kind of question, philosophic, good, liberal education that you might want to think about, right? But then you say, well, where do I study this? You say, well, I can go into political theory and go to philosophy and start taking classes there.

Now, you have to meet at a certain point. You have to wait till next semester and finish up your engineering classes and do decently well with them, right? You then have to go to whatever departments there, take your intro classes. You might not like the teacher.

You might be eager to take another class. You might want to shift around. And so what starts as like a political contingency, then leads to a kind of intellectual tradition. Maybe you don't like the way that they approach the questions.

And then hopefully you can find one teacher along the way and you could maybe or a couple teachers that you connect to. And you can have a real education experience. But you see how the obstacles, mountain, mountain, mountain, and it's not clear that you're ever going to actually pose that question. That's at the heart of all of our educational experiences, which is, you know, how do I be happier?

What is the good life? It's going to maybe take you forever and even get to the point of leisure, right? And so I think after laying this out, it seems very rudimentary. He shows you how much is working against you, right?

How the regime, the tradition, and even the environment, even if you're in the right class, you might not jive with the teacher. That could be the ultimate end to it, right? Was this just blatant self-promotion for students at the University Colorado engineering to come study with the one professor there who might be able to liberate their- There's a lot of my colleagues that you all liberate them. It's a shame because if any student actually gets interested in a little hours, they go to the other departments, they believe, so I'll never see them again.

You know, it's funny you chose engineering, by the way, because I don't know if you have- I just chose it as a very practical and I've experienced what they've done. No, I actually put my deposit down to go to Georgia Tech. I'd been a very, you know, probably modest, but I thought it was a very nice scholarship to become an engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology. And I had the exact same experience you were talking about.

I mean, I was, I paid my money to go. My only justification was, I was 18. I had no idea what college was about. It was the best, highest ranked school I'd gotten into.

And they'd offer me some money. And so I thought, okay, I'll- but then I thought about it more and more with the summer. I thought, what? I don't- I just couldn't imagine what life as an engineer looked like.

And it sounded- it sounded really uninspiring to me. But I had no idea what the alternatives were. And so just by luck, I happened to have gone somewhere outside and decided to change up. And I'd been admitted- I'd been waitlisted at the school.

I'd wanted to go to Emory University. But not because of any reason, just because it was ranked higher, silly, silly reason like that. But I had no idea what one would go to study to become at Emory University. I knew that if I went to Georgia Tech, I'd be an engineer.

I knew that it was a path to middle class prosperity, if not even upper middle class prosperity. But as an 18 year old kid, as I got to think in more and more about it, I just thought, by the way, it might help some of my cousin's engineers, friends are engineers. It seems like a pretty lucrative career path, very safe. We need them as you mentioned society needs to be- I just couldn't imagine what life would look like.

And it didn't take what would make me happy. And it's amazing how much freedom you now have, right? In comparison. We think of financial freedom through a successful career that successful career can be really demanding.

And what's ultimately important for liberal education and Greg continues to educate himself liberally today, right, is to have that freedom, right? You get to teach things that you're interested in, right? You get to- write on things or work on things that you find interesting in your time off. I think it's not just the freedom, but also the other point that Klein makes in the panelts of its section on leisure is that you have to know what to do with the freedom.

So we have examples, each of us know people that have a lot of quote-unquote time on their hands. And what do they do with all that time? You know what I mean? Are they educating themselves, or are they watching skateboard videos on YouTube like me?

And right? So Klein would scoff at me as he should. It's a pandemic, right? That's a great example.

People of this time, and they've watched the office all seven, whatever seasons five times. And it's like an ad-usement, right? You can see Aristotle on amusement and entertainment, right, rather than sort of serious inquiry. So knowing what to do with one's freedom and how to be at leisure, what it means for a human being to be at leisure in like the highest sense, that's a very important thing for all of us to think about.

How did you guys know that you wanted to- I happened upon a liberal education entirely by accident. How did you guys have it upon it? It seems to be more intentional in each of your cases. I was put into it.

I mean, I went to a prep school, right, where I had to learn a second language. My father insisted to be Latin. I did Latin in middle school and high school, and I learned rigorous education in grammar through Latin and English as well that stuck with me. And I think through those things, I just- and we read classics and stuff, but through those, that basic sort of education and language and grammar and how to write and formulate your thoughts gave me the basic sort of enjoyment of learning, right?

Mathematics and things. What about you? David? I can tell you it happened at a young age.

So starting in kindergarten, dad took us to the library every single weekend and he said that we could check out two serious books. Especially in like third grade, because I know how to read. This is when the memory starts, I know how to read. And one comic book.

Remember how those Garfield comic books used to come in the rectangular shape? Sure. So his ad or like Dunesbury or whatever I would read. You are reading Dunesbury's.

Oh yeah, definitely. Definitely. I didn't understand the political jokes. I mean, there was a guy named Zonker that smoked heat all day and was a hippie and so like there were funny little things.

That probably is my earliest political, called Culturation in retrospect. But dad would take us and he did this from third grade to sixth grade and then it started on its own momentum. So I just constant reading and I just got psyched to go to the library. And so he was like the inducing a child to take medicine with a little bit of honey around the perimeter of the cup.

So the honey was the comic books. I get so excited. But then I would always finish my serious books, which were just like the Hardy Boys or something. Something that wasn't a comic book.