Some ancient educational theorists, like Plato and Aristotle, have argued that only a select few should be qualified to participate in a liberal education. Even modern theorists, like Jacques Barzun and Albert Nock, agree with them. But others disagree. Mortimer Adler and Martin Van Doren believed that a liberal education would benefit everyone.

Adler's ideas about classical education and its universal applicability are extensively discussed in his book, The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto, published in 1982. In this work, Adler argued that all children, regardless of their socioeconomic background or future career paths, should receive the same quality of education, one which develops an understanding of the great ideas through the study of classical literature and the liberal arts.

Adler believed that a rigorous, thought-provoking education should not be reserved only for the elite but should be available to all students as a means to prepare them for lifelong learning and active citizenship.

What do you think? 

When the question of whether a classical, liberal arts education will benefit one set of students or another is asked, the underlying query at the heart of the question is really “Is this a good use of their time?” This question is particularly poignant in the case of children with disabilities, or for children who struggle in the system that constitutes modern primary classical schooling. Those who work in and operate these classical schools, perhaps more pointedly, implicitly ask: “Is this a good use of our time?”

It is a relevant, if fraught, question. The provision of modern education, especially in the United States, is marked by choice brought on by scarcity and competition. Many classical schools, public and private alike, wrestle with tough decisions at the hands of their resources—some financial, some human—and their fortunes are made or lost based on the outcomes they achieve with their students. For public classical schools, there is federal and state accountability. For private schools, there is the satisfaction of their parent base and their donors.

Under these pressures, and regardless of a school’s resources, every classical school must make decisions about how to use their (and their students’) time. As much as those who lead in classical education would prefer to eschew it, the question of the utility of classical, liberal arts becomes front-and-center when the challenge is accessibility for those who have historically been excluded.

The question of whether a classical, liberal arts education is a good use of time for a child who will struggle immeasurably within it is highly relevant because if it is not, then it is likewise a poor use of time, energy, and resources by the classical school to extend themselves to provide it.

So, is it a good use of their time?

To answer any question regarding the utility of an education (any education) to a human being, it’s necessary to first sort through the purpose of an education in the eye of the beholder. Those harkened to in the framing of this question (Plato, Aristotle, Barzun, Nock, Adler, and Van Doren) are all theorists who shared a view of the purpose of education, even if their conclusions regarding who it was meant for differed. Any education, they agree, should prepare a person to discharge their duty as a free citizen and to engage in the pursuit of high-minded leisure, especially continued learning. To all these thinkers, the liberal arts education is most situated to accomplish this purpose.

This is because the goal of a liberal arts education is to cultivate free human beings. Not free in the sense of independence of the individual will from all restraints, but free in the sense of choosing to live in harmony with others and with the ordered world. At its core, a liberal arts education is about the pursuit of knowledge of the world, the pursuit of virtue, and the discovery of the nexus of these transcendentals with ourselves and that which we find around us. In other words, its core is to come to know the ordered world and to act in light of this vision. This forms the telos, or purpose, of a human life.

This is where Nock, Barzun, Adler, and Van Doren find their difference of opinion. Although all agree that there is a fundamental equality inherent in human beings to the degree that they are equally worthy of dignity, Nock and Barzun highlight differing capacities in each human being as limiting their ability to attain the goal of a liberal arts education. Their argument, as far as I can tell, is that if a human’s capacity limits their ability to engage in the study of classical literature, mathematics, history, philosophy, and science, then this limited capacity renders them unable to become liberally educated. They are not educable in the same way as others with a greater capacity for study, and thus should not engage in the pursuit.

By contrast, Adler and Van Doren assert that any human being can engage in the habits of intellectual, moral, and physical excellence, and maintain that a classical, liberal arts education remains the best way to do so. Regardless of individual capacity, every person should be surrounded by and engaged with the best of what has been thought and said, and supported in that engagement so they may know the ordered world and discover their place in it. Adler asserts powerfully that until a massive and sustained effort has been dedicated to discovering how this may be done for all it is presumptuous to assert that it cannot be done. To Adler, no such massive and sustained effort has yet been undertaken.

For Adler, this effort is absolutely a good use of our time, and his belief is held by many others in contemporary classical education. The belief is also not solely rooted in the question of whether a classical, liberal arts education will unilaterally benefit persons with disabilities. If one understands the purpose of a classical education in this way, and perhaps equally importantly the means by which that purpose is pursued, it should be clear that any human being would benefit from—nay, every human being should dedicate their time to—the pursuit of virtue and an understanding of the ordered world. An education that provides this is an education in being rather than an education in doing. Furthermore, shared participation in these pursuits with the broadest spectrum of humanity presents a fuller view of the possibilities of humanity. As Amy Richards (one of our contemporaries) recently wrote in a book about classical education and students with disabilities:

“When we exclude persons with disabilities from our learning communities, we offer a curriculum that implies that people with disabilities are a burden, a problem best left to experts to be solved elsewhere. In other words, we offer a curriculum grounded in a misleading understanding of truth, an incomplete narrative of the possibilities of goodness, and a picture of beauty that fails to witness to the ultimate beauty of shared vulnerability. Such a curriculum fails to present the human telos in its fullness, and thus is bereft of the very purpose it is designed to serve.”

In sum, not only is a classical, liberal arts education of great benefit to any human being, the integration and participation of all humans in the classical, liberal arts classroom cultivates a more enriching education for all.

Tom Doebler is the Senior National Director of Exceptional Student Services with Great Hearts in Phoenix, Arizona, where he leads the Special Education and other student support programs.



Tom Doebler
Senior National Director of Exceptional Student Services
Great Hearts

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