• Welcome
    • Curriculum Vitae
    • About Me
  • Publications
    • Work in Progress
  • Blog
  • Provocations

September 19th, 2013

9/19/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
LIBERAL EDUCATION AS PALIMPSEST 



 

The Archimedes palimpsest owned by  the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore MD.  The 10th century copy of a treatise by Archimedes was overwritten in the 13th century  with a religious text.

My last blog posting left unstated its premise –that liberal education is a palimpsest.  Underneath many of the texts and documents we study is another narrative  -- the story of gradually emerging,  two steps forward one step back human freedom. The texts sometimes seem difficult for us to comprehend, and what’s below them is often hard to detect.  But we won’t fully understand either unless we keep both in view.  That’s most obviously true of the texts I mentioned in the “Not So Innocent Abroad” blog post -- classical texts relating to the emergence of western political thought, Solon, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato ..

Yes, Plato, too. I had some fun with Plato and freedom in a piece called “Liberal Education: Liberating Education”. It’s at http://www.wrobertconnor.com/liberal-education-liberating-education.html 

Now let me come back to that theme and put it more bluntly: We won’t fully understand these classical texts and their modern successors unless we bring into focus the struggle for political freedom – and vice versa:  That still unfolding story of human freedom can’t be fully understood without these texts.  

More broadly, classical texts in general are best seen, I believe, within a narrative that comprises different types of freedom, political, intellectual, theological, economic, racial, sexual. And an education based on the classical tradition, a true liberal education, is a liberating education.  It has freedom at its core and as its goal.

That’s why statist regimes in China and elsewhere  will distrust liberal education, and why it is so important that their citizens – and ours –have access to it.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    June 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    January 2014
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013

    RSS Feed

    Picture