What does it mean to be an educated person? Today, Carolina Journal Radio’s Mitch Kokai discusses that question with Richard Gamble, a Professor of History and Political Science at Hillsdale College, and editor of the recent book, The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What it Means to Be an Educated Human Being. (Go to http://www.carolinajournal.com/cjradio/ to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)

Kokai: You call this book The Great Tradition, an anthology addressed to students, parents and administrators not interested in making students fit for the modern world. What did you mean by that?

Gamble: That phrase comes from the British satirical novelist Evelyn Waugh in one of his short stories that I have come to love. And he says that it would be a great crime — or one of his characters says — that it would be a great crime to make students fit for the modern world. So students today are under all sorts of pressure, sometimes from their own parents, sometimes from themselves, from their teachers, from administrators, from the business world, from politicians, who say, well, you need to be fit for the world of tomorrow. But we haven’t asked the more important question. The more fundamental question is, what is the world like, and what is the world of tomorrow likely to be like? Would I want to be conformed to the standards of that world? What are its standards? What does it value most? Does it value mere money making? Does it value power, fame? And ought I to want those things to shape my soul? So that’s what I am addressing —those students who are maybe frustrated by that and realize there is something wrong with being too much in conformity with the standards of our age.

Kokai: You make the point also that education has always aimed to be useful, but the question is, useful to what end?

Gamble: I’m glad you picked up on that because it is a little bit of a red herring sometimes. People say, well, don’t you want a useful education? Absolutely. Everyone wants a useful education. For what purpose, though? It’s a means to what end? And if we go back to someone like Aristotle, let’s say in the Politics and books seven and eight near the end of the Politics. Well, sure, we are always going to ask the question: education for the sake of what? What’s at the other end there? It is going to be for the sake of something. But Aristotle and The Great Tradition call us to something larger than the world of mere necessity, larger than the world of making a living, because we are more than our careers. We are human beings. We are fathers and mothers and husbands and wives and sons and daughters and brothers and sisters. We are neighbors. We are parts of a larger community. So The Great Tradition asks us to think about education that forms us for the fullness of life, not narrow specialization for a career. That is a worthy thing to do. Earning a living is necessary for all of us to meet our physical needs. But, as human beings, we also have a capacity for a world beyond our needs. The world of delight, the world of wonder and awe, the world that can engage in the imaginative world of fiction, and that rich life of the mind that is beyond the day-to-day world of getting and spending that we are all caught in.

Kokai: When I see reports about education and the focus on this proficiency score here, that score here, the number of points that have gone up or down, sometimes I say, well, is this really telling us what we need to know about whether kids are being educated?

Gamble: That’s right. We fail to make a distinction between the measurable and the unmeasurable. Tragically, we live in an age that has come to think — and this has been underway for a couple of hundred years now — but we have gotten into the habit of thinking that the only thing that matters is what can be measured. In fact, in its worse manifestations, we have ended up thinking that the only thing that is real is that which can be measured. But The Great Tradition calls us to consider that maybe the unmeasurable is what matters most. How do you measure wisdom? How do you measure fidelity? How do you measure the other virtues? How do you measure love? We need to stop long enough in our busy lives to reflect that the most important things in life are simply the unmeasurable. And Burkhardt, the great historian, once referred to the “terrible simplifiers,” and I think among the terrible simplifiers of our age are the terrible quantifiers. This is what’s driving educational policy, this is what’s driving legislation on the state level and on the national level — quantify, quantify. I hope that people will be inspired, will take courage by reading The Great Tradition and say — enough. The real task of education is beyond the realm of weighing and counting and measuring. It can’t be done.

Kokai: You mention that some of the writings in here span 24 centuries. What kinds of things would people find in The Great Tradition? Some, as you mentioned before we started, they might not have seen in print for centuries.

Gamble: Some of these, in fact, are very familiar names — sort of the celebrities of Western civilization, celebrities of philosophy. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, Aquinas. Some of the reformers — Luther, Calvin — down to the modern age — C.S. Lewis, Irving Babbitt —may be familiar to some people. But then, there are others who have fallen into the cracks. They have vanished from our memory. And I am most proud of the fact that I have been able to collect these voices of the conversation, some obscure figures from the renaissance, even from antiquity. Probably someone like Seneca, the 1st century stoic philosopher who was tutor to the notorious young emperor, Nero. He was not exactly a success on his student evaluations, I don’t think, but he is a marvelous voice, a very wise voice, getting us to think about our values in education. And there are other figures. About 200 years ago there was a provost at Oriol College Oxford by the name of Cobblestone, and he sort of has vanished from our memory. But he was a formative influence on John Henry Newman. And later, some of his ideas appear in Newman’s Idea of a University. So they are worth listening to, even though we haven’t talked to them in a couple hundred years, in some cases.

Kokai: One of the points that you make also in introducing these selections that I thought was very interesting, was the fact that The Great Tradition has no desire to escape from the past.

Gamble: Since the enlightenment at least, we have lived under the false advertising that the past is something we have to be rescued from. The Enlightenment, 200, 250 years ago, at least the most radical Enlightenment, portrayed the past as a prison house — chains, darkness, pick your metaphor. And they presented themselves as the great liberators, that man needed to get into the future, to get in tune with the future as rapidly as possible, and they thought they had a very clear idea of what that future was going to look like and how progressive and peaceful and prosperous it was going to be. How liberated and equal everything was going to be in the future. But we ended up jettisoning the wonderful legacy of the past, the wisdom of the past. And I happen to affirm, along with Edmund Burke and many others, that there is a cumulative wisdom, that we are species wise and individual foolish. The Great Tradition, I believe, speaks to that wisdom of the species that has been handed down from generation to generation. And we are fools if we don’t avail ourselves of that.

Kokai: The book is called The Great Tradition: Classic Readings On What it Means to Be an Educated Human Being.