Excellence in most any interesting or worthy human undertaking requires years of discipline and training. To perform at the highest levels of sports, the arts, law, medicine, commerce, teaching, scholarship, writing, military service, statesmanship, and virtually every useful, honorable, or intrinsically rewarding pursuit typically depends on extensive discipline and training.
It would be odd, therefore, if excellence as a citizen and human being called for anything less. Indeed, down through the ages a liberal education, an education to foster flourishing as a free person, was understood as essential to the achievement of civic and human excellence.
Yet rights-protecting democracies also dispose citizens to see threats to freedom and equality lurking behind every claim to promote excellence, including the excellence involved in respecting the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and in exercising the qualities of mind and character central to living a good life. Many progressive educators, who dominate in our schools and universities, reason that imposing structure, establishing priorities, and supposing that teachers know better than students what should be taught and learned impairs students’ freedom and undercuts democratic equality.
Other progressive educators adopt a more radical approach. They implicitly acknowledge that American education requires structure, should establish priorities, and properly supposes that teachers know best. But they aim to instill disgust with America. They organize education around the claim that the evil institution of slavery and the abhorrent practice of racial discrimination reflect the fundamental substratum of American politics. They concentrate on spotlighting America’s flaws and mistakes while sweeping under the rug America’s extraordinary accomplishments. And, insisting that their account of the facts is beyond dispute, they stifle dissent, exclude countervailing evidence, vilify opposing views, constrict students’ moral imagination, and truncate intellectual exploration.
Consequently, American education frequently provides a training ground for illiberal and antidemocratic dispositions.
To make matters worse, American education does poorly at teaching the literacy and numeracy on which liberal education depends.
A recent University of California San Diego report illuminates the problem. “Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school standards grew nearly thirtyfold, despite almost all of these students having taken beyond the minimum UCOP [University of California Office of the President]-required math curriculum, and many with high grades,” according to UCSD’s Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions. “In the 2025 incoming class, this group constitutes roughly one-eighth of our entire entering cohort. A similarly large share of students must take additional writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates, though this is a figure that has not varied much over the same time span” (emphasis in the original). Substantial remedial education brings high costs: “Admitting large numbers of students who are profoundly underprepared risks harming the very students we hope to support, by setting them up for failure,” the UCSD report states. “It also puts significant strain on faculty who work to maintain rigorous instructional standards.”
Two main systemwide factors set back student preparedness and hampered the admissions office’s ability to identify qualified candidates, observes the UCSD report. One was COVID restrictions on in-class instruction. The other was the UC Board of Regents’ elimination of standardized testing – SAT and ACT –as an admissions criterion; this gave more weight to high-school grades despite grade inflation making grades less reliable.
Accordingly, the UCSD report urges reconsideration of the use of standardized testing in admissions and exploration of ways to diminish the effect of grade inflation on the assessment of candidates.
While better than nothing, the UCSD report’s narrow concerns and lackluster remedies drastically understate the problems afflicting American education.
In contrast, the London-based think tank Civitas released on November 20 an ambitious report that identifies fundamental defects of British K-12 education and proposes far-reaching reforms. The defects afflict American education as well, and the proposed reforms are pertinent on this side of the Atlantic.
In “Renewing Classical Liberal Education: What it is and its history,” Briar Lipson and Daniel Dieppe observe that “it is widely assumed by educators, policymakers and parents, and even more widely communicated to children, that the purpose of schooling is preparation for work; schools exist now to boost incomes and gross domestic product (GDP).” This, Lipson, an educator and education expert, and Dieppe, a Civitas researcher, recognize as one of contemporary education’s proper purposes. Welcoming recent reforms, they note that “England’s 15-year-olds now outperform their peers in almost all other Western countries” in reading, science, and math skills.
But education, they insist, should go beyond imparting technical proficiency to encompassing larger questions about ethics, justice, and the variety of ways of being human. “It is still perfectly possible to pass through school, including with flying colours, having never picked up a work of classical literature, having never considered the nature of truth, without the basics of Western chronology, with not one line of poetry committed to memory,” they lament. “Modern schooling has become a gateway to riches but not our full humanity.”
The gateway to our full humanity, they maintain, is liberal education. Such an education involves “the cultivation of the human spirit; the grounding of a child into a lifelong adventure through ideas and ideals, that they might enter, through the gradual cultivation of wisdom, style and virtue, into the fullness of humanity, ‘the good life’ as we might call it.” Liberal education originated in classical Greece and Rome. Variants flourished in Christendom and during the Enlightenment. In all its forms, liberal education furnished knowledge of the tradition into which students had been born, developed skills for participating effectively in civic life, and refined appreciation of justice, beauty, and the good.
Liberal education typically involves Socratic inquiry. Teachers put forward observations and raise questions about conventional and controversial opinions, and about the interpretation of great books and enduring ideas. Students offer answers while sharing their own observations and posing their own questions. In response, teachers provide additional observations and ask more questions, which stimulates fresh observations and questions from students. And so the conversation goes, sparking curiosity, enlivening inquiry, and replacing thoughtless certitudes with tempered judgments. Done well, Socratic inquiry opens students’ minds to the intricacies and depths of ethics, politics, and religion.
Contemporary liberal education combines the humanities and sciences because human beings are part of nature while also transcending nature by virtue of our capacity to speak and reason about right and wrong. The humanities – literature and the arts, history, philosophy, and theology – take precedence not least because they equip us to assess the right and wrong uses of the fruits of science.
In the 20th century, Lipson and Dieppe argue, three powerful forces operated to substantially erode classical liberal education.
First, “scientific materialism or scientism” weakened the humanities’ appeal. Dazzled by modern science’s great achievements in describing the physical world and spurring the production of civilization-changing technologies, many succumbed to scientism, the belief that all the world is reducible to the operations of physical nature, and therefore science alone yields genuine knowledge. Scientism disparages as pettifoggery the study of old books, inherited ideas, and venerable disputes. It claims the prerogative to address questions of justice, nobility, and love but only at the expense of reducing them to issues of matter in motion and nothing more. Since science describes how the world really is but cannot determine how it ought to be, scientism paved the way to moral relativism, or the belief that all moral judgments are equally valid, none more reasonable or binding than any other.
Second, moral relativism combined with the postmodern conceit that individuals are the self-originating source of value to encourage “rejection of past authorities.” Moral relativism cuts the ground from under the belief that the past is a storehouse of wisdom about civic and human affairs. Furthermore, viewing morality as the expression of subjective experiences and preferences, none better or worse than any other, suggests that education should set aside what others have thought and said down through the ages, regardless of how influentially and profoundly, to concentrate on fashioning students’ own perspectives and priorities. Progressive education has championed versions of this approach for a century.
Third, an “expanding state,” with its bureaucratic demands for objective assessments and quantifiable outcomes, distanced schools “from their ancient and humane calling.” Democratic imperatives propelled the movement from education as a private affair and the privilege of aristocrats to public education as a civic entitlement. But “viewed in the only way the state can measure it, of everyone getting the same materially, rather than every child fulfilling his/her highest human potential, it has brought the unintended consequence of narrowing schools’ focus onto a subset of measurable skills that are rewarded in the job market.”
The Civitas report illuminates a core difficulty: Scientism, scorn for the past, and statism subvert the liberal education that provides the moral compass and intellectual furnishings to grasp the urgency of, and the obstacles to, reclaiming liberal education.
This vexing dilemma only heightens the interest that friends of freedom and democracy in Britain and the United States should have in reintroducing – or introducing – liberal education into their nation’s schools and universities.