On the Origins of Liberal Education

Excellence and virtue, beginning with courage and poetry, in a flourishing community

Update - Parts two and three of this series may be found here and here.

Despite being a well-recognized term, “classical education” is rather difficult to define. Broadly speaking, classical education is a decentralized movement, with many different points of origin, perspectives, and definitions. You can find a great many books and authors advancing their own pedagogies and theories as to what classical education is, and while most are in a broadly loose alliance, there is no universally accepted definition. Instead, classical education is one of those terms that most people have a rough intuitive understanding of. It’s old, traditional, and humanistic. It’s fond of Greco-Roman antiquity and literature, timeless philosophy and the Great Books, and it extolls the virtues. It is above all reverent for and in pursuit of the three transcendentals of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. I think the majority of self-identified classical educators would align themselves with all or most of this description.

“Liberal education,” however, is sometimes used almost interchangeably with “classical education” even though these aren’t necessarily the same thing. Classical education refers more to the content of education, the subjects taught and wisdom to be pursued. Liberal education, on the other hand, refers more to the student, and what he or she ought to become. “Liberal” in this sense is entirely incidental to the current political label in America, and a teacher of classical education ought to hope that students of any ideological leaning might profit from studying the liberal arts. Many non-technical colleges and universities are called “liberal arts” schools, but for the most part, these schools are almost indistinguishable from your average public state university, except that the private ones are mostly smaller and more expensive. It’s not far-fetched for a student to receive an excellent liberal education at a school such as Texas A&M. 

“Liberal education” has changed a great deal over the centuries, and a Greco-Roman aristocrat was not educated exactly the same way as an Italian renaissance humanist, or an Enlightenment philosophe, much less a 21st century suburban teenager. The original meaning of the word “liberal,” and the historical origins of its usage, can illuminate its meaning and worth even for us today. Properly understood and pursued, a liberal arts education cultivates excellent human souls who are capable of self-mastery. A liberal education can make you free. 

Popular stereotypes about “liberal arts majors” can be unflattering, evoking images of indolent aesthetes spouting off obscure poetry or philosophical jargon, often without practical or monetary value. The starving liberal arts major who can quote Plato (or more likely today, Foucault) is an old trope, and many liberal arts students and teachers even lean into the notion of “book smarts” instead of “street smarts.” At extremes, you can always find a few intellectuals who hold up their poverty as proof of the purity of their spirit of inquiry. 

This attitude is, generally, wrong, and I will argue that the majority of liberally-educated individuals throughout history did not resemble a starving liberal-artist-turned-coffee-barista. If anything, most of those individuals would consider our starving liberal artist stunted and half-formed. To understand why and to understand the origins of liberal education, we should first talk a bit about farming and warfare. 

The Agricultural Life and Servile Education

The average human being throughout history has been a subsistence farmer, working either on behalf of a lord or aristocrat, or for themselves on a family or communal plot. Depending on time and place, this could easily constitute anywhere from two-thirds to over 90% of a given population. Only over the last 150 years or so has farming stopped (in the developed world) being the default human occupation. A great many of these subsistence farmers throughout history lived in various legal degrees of “unfree” status, such as outright chattel slavery, or feudal serfs. 

Physically tied to the land and often unable to move freely, a subsistence farmer’s life was heavily constrained. Most of their consumption came from what an immediate family could grow, make, or barter for from neighbors; goods that came from more than a few miles away could be a rarity or luxury. While men and women specialized in certain tasks, both were equally important to a farm’s economic well-being (failure to properly understand this continues to distort all sides of our contemporary culture-war debates about family and gender). While small farming communities were usually close-knit, with dense networks of friends and family that we might envy today, they were also physically demanding, and frequently precarious, as a bad harvest, severe winter, plague, or war could wipe a family out.

And then there was the taxman. A peasant farmer tied to the land was unable to move, unable to practice warfare full time, and had a vulnerable asset that everybody else wanted. This meant that farmers were generally subject to extortion from both enemies and rulers, although a farmer might at least hope that the local lord would follow through on his promise of protection and justice in exchange for demanding his cut of the produce. One theory for the development of the first complex state societies is that sedentary farming offered a more efficient means for rulers (often not much different from predatory bandits) to extract resources to use in the development of governments. Fishermen, merchants, shepherds, and nomads all had ways of hiding their goods or fleeing, unlike farmers who were tied to their wheat and rice-fields. 

Formal education, in our sense of the term, was almost non-existent, or even counterproductive to this life, as even very young children could meaningfully contribute to the work of the farm. Children weren’t entirely “free” labor, as they had to be fed, but they were both work-force and retirement-plan for parents. One can easily imagine a farmer considering book-learning a pointless waste of time for his children, who had crops to plant and animals to husband. Farmers certainly possessed strong oral traditions and poems; stories, songs, mythologies, and folk-culture often contain great wisdom and meaning. But these types of knowledge don’t lend themselves easily to formal education as we know it. 

To this broad group of subsistence farmers, we can add the smaller proportion of artisan workers and craftsmen – blacksmiths, potters, weavers, etc., as having roughly similar lives (though in some cases, wealthier and more mobile). While we might find plenty of local variation across time and place, most of this pattern would hold true for ancient Sumeria, Medieval Europe, and pre-modern China, India, and pre-Columbian Native America.

Most humans have lived this way, and as such have had very little agency over their lives beyond the immediate scope of subsistence and village life. For slaves and various classes of serfdom, this lack of freedom was legal, and many societies bound peasants to the land by force of law. Sumerian kings considered their farmers subjects not far removed from slaves, and Aristotle and Plato both assumed that the majority of people were essentially born only fit to be commanded and ordered about by “better souls.” In medieval England, an escaped serf could be hunted down and returned to his plot, although if he escaped to a town or city and lived at large for a year and a day, he could acquire legal free-status. We can also talk about farmers as “unfree” beyond the legal sense of the word. Consider how few options and choices were available in such a life, with everything from diet, to clothes, to occupation, to marriage partners all heavily constrained to a degree that we moderns have a difficult time imagining. Modern stories have tropes where a rebelling son rejects his father’s occupation and sets out to make himself anew, choosing a new life and identity for himself. Such a story hardly makes sense outside a world of widespread specialization, commerce, and opportunity. A pre-modern version of the same story would likely end with the wayward son obediently learning his lesson and returning to the family trade (if he ever even imagined rebelling from it in the first place). A subsistence farmer might easily spend his or her entire life within fifty miles of their place of birth, and barely know a thousand people. In this context, education fit for a slave or any sort of manual worker, was dubbed a “servile education.” 

Liberal education, then, began with that tiny group of people outside the historical norm. These were the small class of elite landholders and noblemen who possessed even the potential for freedom and agency over their lives. Liberal education was literally training in “how to be free,” although, as we shall see, this did not at all mean an unconstrained liberality free from purpose or definition. 

“Classical” liberal arts education as we understand it, can trace a through-line back to ancient Greece and Rome, although other civilizations had similar forms of elite training and education, such as in Confucian China, Hindu India, or the medieval Islamic world. Classical education in the Western sense need not carry with it exclusive airs of superiority, as if no other culture developed an excellent tradition of education. Greco-Roman classical education is simply the broad starting point for a tradition that still carries down to today in the West (and which, in rebelling against, non-classical theories of education are still somewhat defined by). Even in the Mediterranean world, Greece and Rome did not invent this type of education; Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt, Phoenicia, and Persia, all developed arts and sciences to a high degree, and many Greek philosophers explicitly learned from such “older” civilizations. Much of Herodotus’ account of Egypt is a gentle lesson to his fellow Greeks that Egypt was old and sophisticated long before Hellas. 

So even if elite education, and systematic philosophy and science didn’t start ex nihilo in Greece and Rome, we have to start somewhere, and we’ve already spent a while just talking about farming and servile education. But we needed to start with agriculture and a world based on manual labor, because only with that baseline can we begin to understand why “liberal education” was something different.

Aristocratic Training and the Origins of Liberal Education

In the ancient Mediterranean, where most individuals were slaves or small-holding farmers, a small segment of society accumulated the greatest portions of land, wealth, and influence, either through war, land acquisition, skilled diplomacy, marriage alliances and inheritance, or just luck. These noblemen owned their own land and had enough slaves or tenant farmers to work the land for them, freeing them up to spend more time engaged in warfare and politics. Depending on the time and place, small property owners and farmers might have political rights and responsibilities as well, but generally speaking, it was aristocrats who possessed the means and ability to wield military and political influence.¹ In addition to being physically stronger (from a better diet) and owning the best weapons and land, these aristocrats possessed a rare commodity that their social inferiors lacked; they had free time. 

A man freed from the immediate pressures of feeding a family, or even directing slaves in the fields (by hiring an overseer) found himself with leisure time. As with any scarce resource, this needed to be spent wisely, especially in a small world where one’s social peers were watching and (implicitly) judging each other. Initially, this time was probably urgently spent training for war; only as society gained wealth and stability could genuinely “leisurely” arts replace it. For a young Greek nobleman, this education began in the gymnasium. 

The first gymnasiums were probably just open fields where the citizen men of a community met to train and exercise, especially for war. As with farming, sons at first learned by watching their fathers and the older men of the community, and receiving direct mentoring and instruction. Over time, and especially as wealth and status-competition increased, this would have expanded to include notions of “correct behavior,” in the same sense that most aristocracies generate norms, habits, and rituals, to mark out “polite society” from those without it. If given enough time, such customs can become faintly ridiculous and silly, as with Victorian table manners about knowing which fork to use at a fancy dinner party, but when new, such habits are an important part of building a healthy culture (from the Latin cultus, from which we also get “cult,” and the sense of marking out group identity). 

After a few generations, a wealthy father might hope for his son to be tutored by one of the most respected elders of the community, and taught not just how to hold his shield in the line, but also how to speak well and make wise decisions in pursuit of Arete (excellence). Unlike in Egypt or Mesopotamia, where autocratic God-Kings ruled like absolute monarchs, aristocrats and oligarchs tended to wield the most influence in Greek city states (even in democratic Athens). As an elite body of citizens, aristocrats needed to negotiate as heads of clans and tribes, persuade each other towards a preferred course of action, and of course, compete for status and popularity at social gatherings and festivals. Consequently, speaking well, with a polished turn of phrase or clever quote, was a real political skill. And above all else, this meant poetry. 

As education took shape in the acculturation of young noblemen, memorizing and learning from poetry became a prized skill. Just as groups of friends today communicate via song lyrics, movie quotes, and memes, poetic references demonstrated a command of language, memory, and wit. What could take a paragraph of clunky prose could be ineffably expressed with one line from Homer or Hesiod. In a mostly pre-literate world, where books were a rarity, poems also served as vast storehouses of memory and knowledge that could transmit cultural history, practical examples for moral virtue, and philosophical insight. Poems explained how the gods created the world; they served as scientific and legal textbooks, computer hard-drives with records of data, and had the cultural resonance of cinema and music, all rolled into one. The Iliad and Odyssey are but two stories that have survived from a vast mythological canonical universe (imagine future historians reconstructing the entire Marvel cinematic universe from just two movies). Plato feared that literacy would destroy memory and the ability to quote poetry the same way that we fear smart-phones and online-memes are destroying literacy today. From the initial tutoring of young noblemen in war, poetry, and speech, later sprang the formal studies of pure philosophy, history, theater, and the sciences. 

In Greece, Homer stood above all poets as a model for instruction and proper living, and his influence upon the Greeks has often been likened to that of the Hebrew Bible as a cultural font. But in Homer’s emphasis on war, and the heroic/hubristic figure of Achilles, we can backtrack a moment and pick up an important theme we almost passed over, that of physical courage.

We ought to dwell on the fact that a great many elite traditions of education began with a military component, and provided models for how warriors ought to behave, fight, and die. Beyond just in Homer, we can see the same thing in Anglo-Saxon Huscarls listening to Beowulf, and Hindi Kshatriya and Brahmins listening to the Mahabharata. The extraordinary nerve and courage needed by a medieval knight to charge home at a full gallop to break a lance, while also bracing for the return hit, was only later rounded and softened into the gentility of a Renaissance gentleman, who could sing, dance, woo, and compose, as well as duel. 

On the field of the gymnasium, education began with physical training. In the Greek phalanx, a hoplite needed to stand in a line, protect his neighbor, and march in steady rhythm towards the opponent. While physical strength and stamina were important, the absolute necessary skill was mental self-control and discipline. In a line with hundreds of men battering metal upon metal, screaming curses, and slipping in blood and mud, minds almost always broke before bodies, and so bodies were taught first to toughen minds. In Screwtape, C.S. Lewis said that “courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” Physical strength and conditioning, and physical courage, were the starting point of liberal education, and courage was the virtue needed to support every other virtue in action. Temperance becomes gluttony without courage in the face of temptation, and cowardice before the mob surrenders to injustice. Long before stubbornly refusing to bend before the mob of Athens, Socrates was a war-hero twice over. The mind seeks wisdom, but requires the heart to sustain its quest. 

The physical origins of education and the importance of courage open many avenues for further exploration, but at the moment would take us too far afield. For now, let’s return to the distinction between liberal and servile education. 

As mentioned earlier, in the ancient world, the vast majority of individuals were unfree, either in a legal sense, or in the practical sense of having their lives severely constrained and limited by diet, environment, and occupation. “Liberal” education in Greece and Rome (and then later, Europe) came to refer to the training and cultivation given to that small subset of the population that was legally free, and exercised power and agency in the community. It came to mean “how to be free,” both in the sense of cultures and manners, but also as a civic participant in politics and society. But it also was “liberal” in one further, philosophical sense. It was not just “how a free person ought to live,” but how one truly became free, even over oneself. A free man was not just free from a foreign ruler, but free from fear and temptation. Just as a Greek polis was a free city whose  (male, property-owning) citizens ruled themselves, so too did a free man rule himself. He had mastered his passions, and was free to pursue a life of excellence. For Aristotle, such eudaimonia (flourishing) was the telos of human life, and happiness.

One of the great virtues of this system of values was channeling the intense spirit of aristocratic competition and thirst for honor and glory into productive civic ends. In the Iliad, Achilles’ pride and regard only for his own honor almost destroyed the Greek coalition, and early Roman patricians fought private wars at the head of their clans against rivals. But civic virtue on behalf of the polis and res publica redirected martial prowess (virtus) towards the service of the state, and in Livy’s histories, the selfish honor of Achilles was transformed into the civic self-sacrifice of Horatius at the Gate, and Cincinnatus at the plow. Personal vendettas and feuds over honor were discouraged and taken over by civic law courts, and aristocratic competition was given an outlet for prize-seeking on behalf of the entire city. Greco-Roman aristocrats sought elected magistracies where, rather than receive salaries, they were expected to pay vast sums from their own pockets towards public festivals and the maintenance of temples, roads, and bathhouses. Aristotle’s Magnanimous Man exercised his generosity on behalf of the community, and Cicero’s noble rhetorician was the helmsman of the state, using his position to persuade his fellow citizens on behalf of the Common Good. This ideal often fell far short in reality, but it continued to at least curb and incentivize ambitious nobles towards civic ends. Even as Tacitus lamented the Senate’s loss of liberty under the Roman emperors, aristocratic councils continued to dominate the public life of cities all over the Mediterranean.

With the rise of Christianity, the civic-minded aristocrat traded toga for mitre, and turned bishop, endowing churches and monasteries instead of temples and bathhouses, and giving alms to the poor, while using his rhetorical training to orate sermons. Even monks and martyrs got in on the act of virtuous competition, trading athletic laurel wreaths and military honors for ascetic mortifications of the flesh, and crowns of victory in heaven. Augustine explicitly compared the heroic deaths of martyrs in the arena to the Republican heroes of early Rome; new patron saints of the civitas dei. In classical Greece, membership in the Ekklesia gave citizens the right to speak and vote. Under Christianity, the Ekklesia became the assembly of the polis of heaven.

We could continue to trace the development and changes in education and the pursuit of arete-turned-virtus-turned-holiness. It was in the middle ages that the liberal arts were finally codified as the three arts of the Trivium and four of the Quadrivium. Later, in the Renaissance, they gained new secular expression once again in the studio humanitas of Petrarch and Machiavelli, and the revival of republicanism in Florence. But for our purposes here, it is enough to point out that the liberal and classical education have always been somewhat culturally-defined by the spirit of the day, and the concerns of the time. This may be why classical education escapes one easy definition. There is a chain of causation and ideas running back to ancient Greece, and that “great conversation” is strengthened by the wisdom of tradition, even as it continually finds new expression. Even as the 18th century Enlightenment took a very optimistic attitude towards reason and science, the classical tradition continued to exert a powerful influence on both the French and American Revolutions. Greek and Latin literature were staples of Victorian high society, and many of the major allied leaders during the Second World War, from Churchill to MacArthur to Patton, were classically educated. The World War II generation of leaders were the last to be educated before the First World War which, along with much of the crises of the 20th century, existentially shook the civilizational confidence of Europe and America. My tongue and cheek answer to the question of “what is a liberal education good for?” is to point out that the Roman Empire and World War II were respectively ruled and won, by liberal arts majors. 

So much then, for the origins of liberal education and some of its historical development. In a follow-on essay, I’ll make a case for the value and worth of a liberal education in today’s society. 

1. We shouldn’t apply the Athenian democratic model of citizenship too broadly on the rest of the Ancient world; most city-states were generally dominated by their aristocracies, and Athens’ large commercial base and maritime economy supported an unusually large middle class. Even in Athens, the Hoplite class of citizens, which 19th century British historians lauded as a forerunner of later parliamentary democracy, was more of a wealthy landed gentry.