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Excerpt from “A Radical Critique of the Platonic Foundations of Liberal Education, or ‘The Soul Wants What It Wants,’” Liberal Education LXIX.1 (Spring, 1983):  19-32

The optimism of liberal education is primarily a product of Plato’s doctrine of human nature, which claims that human beings are first and foremost rational creatures. Humans are humans because they can reason. When they go wrong, when they do wrong, when they give in to greed and aggression or indulge themselves in brutality and deceit, they do so not because they're intrinsically bad, not in any innate sense, anyway; it’s just that they are ignorant. They’re bad because their rational capacities have not been developed sufficiently for them to have the knowledge they need to be good. Depend on it: When human beings know enough, when they are able to reason well enough, to conduct inquiry well enough, and to track down a logical sequence of ideas well enough, then they’ll be good.

This view assumes that human beings are basically dualistic creatures, and that each of us has a rational self that is intrinsically a higher, better self than the lower, non-rational self out of which all our evil behavior derives. It is not difficult to see what common view of education grows out of this view of human nature. Liberal academicians have often, indeed usually, defined their educational role in the following way. “Look,” they say, “since human beings are basically rational, and since rationality is fundamentally good, then the role of education is to train, develop, sensitize, enhance, expand, or enrich those rational capacities.” (We have a whole raft load of honorific verbs for what we do as teachers.) This common view takes it for granted . . . that if people are made more rational as a consequence of our training them in the ways and means of rationality, then they will be morally improved. The optimistic heart of this position is the assumption that when people are rational enough, then they will like the things they should like. When they learn to think critically enough, then they will argue themselves out of being mean, aggressive, brutal, or deceitful. They will be able to reason well enough about interests to see that evil behavior leads, at the social level, to injustice, and, at the personal level, to misery.

© 2005 Copyright Marshall Gregory