In a world of endless distractions, how do we form minds that are genuinely free? What constitutes an authentic education? In this faculty dialogue, two scholars from different disciplines — yet united by a shared passion for the Western tradition — explore what makes a liberal arts curriculum not just relevant, but essential for today’s students.
The following is an edited version of the conversation Dave Hazen had with V. Bradley Lewis (professor and dean of the School of Philosophy) and Anika Prather (assistant professor of education and elementary education coordinator).
Defining Education
Anika Prather: To define education, I take inspiration from the Roman orator and educator, Quintilian. He basically looked at Cicero and others who used speaking as a way to change society and realized that if we could train children from infancy to do that, they would be better prepared to make a difference. So he created this manual, Institutio Oratoria, which encourages teaching children how to speak, write, think, synthesize and share their thoughts in a way that moves people, and you teach them that from infancy. It’s also, as Dorothy Sayers says, about cultivating the “lost tools for learning.” We were all created to think, so education is that process of engagement in the classroom that nurtures the tools for learning that God has placed in every one of us.
Brad Lewis: I start from a particular philosophical tradition, that is the Aristotelian Thomistic tradition. In this line of thinking, there are powers or capacities that are latent in human nature. Education is a process of developing and actualizing those capacities in such a way as to allow agents to act in pursuit of the ends that are natural to them as a function of their created natures. St. Thomas says, in a particularly important place, that human beings are images of God, insofar as they have free will or the power of free deliberate choice and intellect. And so human beings are acting beings that make free choices in pursuit of certain goods. And some of those goods are common goods, in addition to being goods simply for individuals. So education should help them to develop and actualize those powers and capacities so as to act for those goods (both individual and common) and to fit them to be both independent, practical reasoners and reflective individuals and members of various communities.
The Approach
Lewis: Catholic University has a liberal arts curriculum that all undergraduate students participate in; this includes three courses in philosophy, two of which are historical introductions. In the first two courses, students read particularly important texts that provide them with a framework and foundation on the basis of which, when they take other courses and decide their major, they can see something about the integration of the various things — particularly the integration of knowledge. Once you set an integrated framework, with God as creator of the universe and everything having a common source, all other disciplines can have a basis for relating to one another.
Prather: In my field, it can be hard because sometimes preparing future teachers is done as if preparing people for a trade, but I don’t believe in that approach. From my own experience, I’m very new to liberal arts; I did not grow up classically educated, but in my family, we read a lot. My initial training in education was great, but it was very much focused on lesson-planning, behavior management, and specific skills. But when you train teachers that way, they teach to the test and kids are not learning to think critically, to have conversations, to form their own worldviews, or to go through this process of the Trivium.
The Trivium approach (grammar, logic, and rhetoric phases) teaches children how to see connections and form their own worldviews so they can engage the great questions of life. And so when we think about the “great conversation,” as Mortimer Adler talked about, that’s what’s happening, people constantly building on the information before them. This was important enough for me to go back after I had my undergraduate degree and get a master’s in liberal arts from St. John’s College, so I could relearn how to teach. When I went on to get my doctorate in education, my St. John’s experience kept haunting me so I made that the focus of my research.
Lewis: For students beginning college, studying philosophy is one of the least familiar things because they don’t, by and large, have it in high school. They’ve all had English, some kind of natural science, and mathematics, but the approach of philosophical inquiry can be very new. They start introductory philosophy courses freshman year.
The point of those freshman courses, however, is to try to be accessible in such a way as for those students to get a sense of the core questions that these texts are dealing with — Platonic dialogues (whether or not I should try to live an ethical life, or whether I should reject that and live only for pleasure). Or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which is really about virtue and vice and happiness, and friendship, or St. Augustine’s Confessions, about the possibility of having a kind of personal relationship with God and how that changes one’s life.
And hopefully, reflecting on those things, you can appreciate the somewhat more abstract kind of philosophical and theological discussions that you get into with Aquinas, where you’ve got a set of questions that you’re trying to work through. The key is to try to show them that the questions that philosophers ask in the great, central tradition of Western philosophy are really everybody’s questions.
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What Makes a Book “Great”?
Lewis: The Great Texts cite one another, so that’s one indicator that it is a Great Book. But I always tell students that there are three kinds of books: the kind you read once and only need to read once; the second kind, you read more than once but there’s a point that you get to the bottom of it and don’t need to read it again. And then there’s the third kind, which you’re never finished reading. A truly great book you could read 1,000 times, and you never get to the bottom of it.
Prather: I agree, these great books cite one another, they talk to one another. When I founded a classical school about 10 years ago, the books that we selected had one rule: they had to show some type of conversation with the tradition.
Which Five Books Should Everyone Read?
Lewis: If I had to choose the top five books I would put on a list that I would want every graduate of Catholic University of America to have read, this is it:
The Bible. If God has revealed things, one would be a fool not to want to know what they are.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. It’s the best book ever written about education and the best book ever written about ethics.
Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War because there’s more concentrated wisdom about human affairs there than any other history book that I know of, and war is important partly because of what it reveals about humanity.
Dante’s Divine Comedy. There’s no book ever written where you can get more of the Christian view of the human condition and even what transcends it.
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which is the best book ever written about America and the best book ever written about democracy.
BONUS: Plato’s Republic because, as one of my friends says, it’s the greatest book ever written not directly inspired by God. I have a hard time disagreeing with that.
Prather: It’s so hard to pick only five! But here’s my attempt:
The Bible, first and foremost, because that’s the seat of all wisdom.
Aristotle’s Parts of Animals.
Sophocles’ Antigone.
Shakespeare’s plays— all of them.
W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk, a really good treatise on why especially African Americans should read the classical tradition.
BONUS: Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy.
I met Boethius in my darkest hour and reading that book really helped me find and see God.
Reflecting on Boethius, I love the way he introduces the concept of Lady Philosophy. When we’re teaching our kids beyond just “fill in the blank,” we’re teaching them to look to this great tradition and store up this armor within themselves. So when they find themselves in their darkest hour, they have something to draw from that will give them strength and perseverance.
