If you think that a college education is just a ticket you have to get punched before you find a cozy cubicle, there is no reason to purchase one of ISI’s college guides—or any other, really. For a high-paying job, get a technological or research-oriented degree, preferably at a prestigious university; to get access to power, go to one of the top 20 or so liberal arts schools in the U.S. News & World Report rankings; for soft relativism, thoroughgoing multiculturalism, and the “freedom” to pick your own courses at random, go virtually anywhere.

But if you want to get a little more out of the four most expensive years of your life, if you’re inclined to grow as a person and tap into the wisdom of the ages, sages, and saints, then please read on. And be forewarned: the New York Times, with its usual perceptiveness, has called our guides “biased.” What they mean is that we don’t pretend to neutrality about what constitutes a serious education for an adult in Western society. We agree with what Newman wrote in 1852, describing a university this way:

quote:

An assemblage of learned men, zealous for their own sciences, and rivals of each other, are brought, by familiar intercourse and for the sake of intellectual peace, to adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation. They learn to respect, to consult, to aid each other. Thus is created a pure and clear atmosphere of thought, which the student also breathes, though in his own case he only pursues a few sciences out of the multitude. He profits by an intellectual tradition, which is independent of particular teachers, which guides him in his choice of subjects, and duly interprets for him those which he chooses. He apprehends the great outline of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts, its lights and its shades, its great points and its little, as he otherwise cannot apprehend them. Hence it is that this education is called “Liberal.”

One good test of a college is whether it teaches all its graduates—not just its English or philosophy majors—how to read and comprehend such a paragraph. Another is whether its curriculum partakes in this broadly traditional vision of the mission of education as something which forms the self, trains the mind, disciplines the habits, and connects the student as one more link in a chain of civilized liberty that ties us to the ancient citizens of Athens, the prophets of Israel, and the Fathers of the Church.

Cardinal Newman had a great deal to say about liberal education—in fact, he wrote a book about it, which we consider the classic text about education for modern men and women. It’s called The Idea of a University. Conservatives and Christians cite it often today, in defense of what we call a traditional liberal arts education. He wrote it in response not to secularizing leftists who tried to turn the classroom into a forum for indoctrination. No, Cardinal Newman had been appointed by Pope Leo XIII to start a university in Ireland—where education among Catholics had almost been wiped out by centuries of British persecution. Eventually Newman succeeded, founding what is now called University College, Dublin. As he planned this university, Newman looked to the obvious source—Trinity College, the school in Dublin which had been Protestant since the Reformation, and which had maintained high standards of excellence for centuries. Newman was willing to look to other churches for models because he’d belonged to another church himself; he was a convert from the Anglican (in America, the Episcopal) church. Trinity, like its sister schools at Oxford and Cambridge, wouldn’t admit Catholics. But it did offer a comprehensive liberal arts education, based on the curricula developed at the University of Paris in the Middle Ages, as delineated (for instance) by St. Thomas Aquinas—that is, by the theologians and philosophers of the Catholic Church.

As Newman undertook this task, however, he hit a great deal of resistance. The new middle class of Irish Catholics who were just beginning to enjoy a certain prosperity in the wake of the Great Famine, weren’t interested in the liberal arts. They wanted a college which would train their children in professions, prepare them for making money or getting into politics—and by the way, teach them about religion. Essentially a vocational school, with some catechism classes. Cardinal Newman, one of the most learned men of the 19th century, knew that this was a disastrous model for education—that if adopted, it would turn out students who were narrow-minded, easily manipulated and intellectually truncated. What is more, because such an education would not develop and attempt to baptize their God-given intellects, it would create graduates whose religious faith was cut off from their intellects—who couldn’t refine and defend their faith when it was challenged by sophisticated scoffers, or called into question by new trends in science or intellectual life. Ironically, these Catholics were rejecting their own intellectual heritage, which was being carried on by English Protestants.

Newman wrote The Idea of a University in order to point out to his fellow-believers—and to the world at large—the goals of education which everyone in Christendom could agree on. We still think it serves as the proper blueprint for education in the West (that’s the new, politically correct word for Christendom…hey nobody here has a tape recorder, do they?).

Here’s another sample of what Cardinal Newman said about education, which I find really quite beautiful and inspiring:

quote:

“Every thing has its own perfection, be it higher or lower in the scale of things; and the perfection of one is not the perfection of another. Things animate, inanimate, visible, invisible, all are good in their kind, and have a best of themselves, which is an object of pursuit. Why do you take such pains with your garden or your park? You see to your walks and turf and shrubberies; to your trees and drives; not as if you meant to make an orchard of the one, or corn or pasture land of the other, but because there is a special beauty in all that is goodly in wood, water, plain, and slope, brought all together by art into one shape, and grouped into one whole. Your cities are beautiful, your palaces, your public buildings, your territorial mansions, your churches; and their beauty leads to nothing beyond itself. There is a physical beauty and a moral: there is a beauty of person, there is a beauty of our moral being, which is natural virtue; and in like manner there is a beauty, there is a perfection, of the intellect…. The heroes, of whom history tells, Alexander, or Cæsar, or Scipio, or Saladin, are the representatives of that magnanimity or self-mastery which is the greatness of human nature. Christianity too has its heroes, and in the supernatural order, and we call them Saints. The artist puts before him beauty of feature and form; the poet, beauty of mind; the preacher, the beauty of grace: then intellect too, I repeat, has its beauty, and it has those who aim at it. To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression….

This passage sums up the goals of the great tradition of liberal (i.e., liberating) education in the West, which in one form or another guided the foundation of the first universities in the Middle Ages, the labors of the Renaissance humanists, the research of scientists from Newton to Einstein, and which should continue to govern universities today.

This is the kind of education designed to liberate a student—to make him or her a thinking adult, able and ready to make intelligent, informed choices among the dazzling array of options which come with adulthood. Such an education is grounded in a vision of the person, a notion of what is a “good” and “free” man or woman. It is from the word “liberty” that we derive the term the “liberal arts,” the proper study of someone we hope will choose to pursue the Good. Such an education must be formative as well as informative, and build up one’s character as well as his resumé.