Jenna Silber Storey of the American Enterprise Institute explores one factor contributing to today’s government dysfunction: the decline of liberal education.
Thinking about the problems we’re having in higher education from the perspective of a teacher, scholar, and educational reformer has led me to see that there is an essential connection between the problems we’re having in liberal education and the problems we’re having holding a liberal political order together. So I’ll suggest an answer to the question of what conservatives should stand for in liberal education to keep our liberal democratic republic viable. …
… A liberal democratic republic involves its citizens in self-government, Alexis de Tocqueville argues, in part by restricting the exercise of central power to make room for the vigorous activity of smaller-scale politics and the growth of social institutions such as businesses, churches, newspapers, and universities.
What does a good citizen of a liberal democratic republic look like? What kind of person is necessary to make this political system work? One of the key character traits such a citizen must have is the capacity to devote him or herself to local politics and particular social institutions while being able to listen to groups that have different interests or ideas—sometimes to learn from them and other times to compromise with them about those things that we must decide together as a country. Good liberal citizens have to be energetically engaged, yet also tolerant of other people’s different engagements; they have to be definite and articulate about their own ways of life, yet interested in and able to listen to others who follow different ways; they have to be assertive about their own rights, yet protective of the rights of others. …
… [L]iberal democratic politics asks a lot of a person, a lot that doesn’t come naturally. It’s an achievement to become such a person. And it often requires a particular kind of education.
