Liberty For All
The more time that I spend learning, the more that I am convinced that story is the best way to learn. There is something infectious about it. Stories get into the bones of a person that just won’t let go. The younger that a person can hear the right stories and be infected by them, the deeper it goes.
A key portion of all education should be stories. I am working on an argument that all education should be story but that is for another time. The story of mathematics is out there, just working on putting it together for everyday people. Stories have run through all histories and people passed them down through generations. Some cultures have done it better than others, and some stories are stickier. The stickier stories are those that have lasted through time and that we still have today. One collection of these stories is the Western Canon.
The Western Canon spans the earliest of stories that were the most influential throughout western human history. It was used as the building blocks of education and shows the progression of man, for good or ill. As is the case now, progress, for the sake of progress, is terrible. Studying the Western Canon gives a road map to understand where humanity was and how it got to where it is today. It makes it easier to point back to a point in time, to trace a system of thought, and say, “This! This right here is where things went wrong.” It also shows hints on how to make things better. It shows the conversation that has been taking place between men for the past 2500 years.
The more time I spend in the river of western thought, the more I come to understand that there is nothing new. The same conversations that were taking place in ancient Greece are still the conversations that are being had today. The conversations are merely repackaged to look different.
This is what makes the Western Canon relevant today. We can look back to see how things were thought about in the past to better understand the future. We must start with the past though. We must start with our old stories. If things are only looked at from the perspective of today, it is very easy to get lost. If history is ignored, then man in left to wander without a guide. The Western Canon is the map that humanity should use to know where to go. Maps only have so much detail. It can’t tell us how to live our lives today, but it can give us the general idea on the direction to go.
This is the glory of a liberal arts education. A true liberal arts education must be steeped in the Western Canon. Liberty is the idea of freedom under law. A person who has liberty knows where they are bound in order to give them true freedom. The arts go beyond the mere skill of an action but shows a masterful playfulness of the skill. It is a mastery that breeds freedom of expression. When put together, the liberal arts are the playful mastery of how to live under law. This assumes a deep understanding of the law that begets a playful, free life. The law shows the boundaries of what is acceptable while the artistry allows an expression of life. The liberal arts education shows the guidelines for life while empowering the individual to work out their own expression of life.
This grounds each person. It will set them as a stone in the river that is not easily shifted. As the waves of thought flow around them, trying to change and influence them, they will understand their place in it all to not be easily shaken. This education should not beget stubbornness but rather self-differentiation. Each person will know their place and how they fit.
This kind of education is my desire for each person. A populace that understands where they come from and where it is good to go from here is a populace that is free to explore their worlds in ways that bring new life. Life is a positive sum game, and it should be played in that way. This is why I am working on building a liberal arts college in Marysville. I hope to bring this kind of education to our home for generations to come. I hope to train up free people who know who they are and how to think. I don’t need to give them the answers. Rather I need to tell them their stories. I want to remind them of where they come from in order to free them to go where they ought to go. I need to show them Christ and what He did for them. We are no longer slaves to sin but slaves to Christ. We are bound, yet free. Free in Christ. This is what we need in the world. A community based upon liberty, liberty for all.