Liberal Education: What Is It and What Is It Good For?

Marsha Enright: Good morning, and I’m happy to be here with friend and longtime Great Connections advisor Stephen Hicks. This is Marsha Enright from the Great Connections. We’re an organization that offers innovative educational programs. To help young people build lives of creative achievement and adventure. Please visit our website at the GreatConnections.org.  Stephen’s been a longtime friend and an advisor of our organization. And he’s a professor of philosophy at Rockford University. For how many years, Stephen?

Stephen Hicks: I finished my Ph.D. work in 1992 and so was eligible for tenure-track positions. That’s when I came, so 28 years.

Marsha Enright: Yeah, I was guessing 30. So I guess it was pretty close. And he’s quite famous in the intellectual world. And even beyond that for his book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. And many articles on an entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial education, including a Wall Street Journal article called “What Entrepreneurship Can Teach Us About Life.” His philosophy of education course, which is available free online at YouTube, and is now being turned into a book called Eight Philosophies of Education. With him with him and his co author, Andrew Colgan. It’s going to come out soon, you know when?

Stephen Hicks: No. I just finished the manuscript. It’s in complete draft form. The next step will be publisher contacts.

Marsha Enright: Very good. Well, I look forward to it. Because I know that I’ve seen some of the work online and it’s superb, as always, Stephen can’t be beat for being a great explainer of history, intellectual history, and analyzing what’s going on with ideas. Highly recommend him and his podcast, Open College.

Stephen Hicks: Open College is produced out of my hometown, Toronto, by very fine production team up there. So they make my job easy.

Marsha Enright: They do a wonderful job with it. But your content is superb. Half an hour, you’re going to learn a lot. If you listen to him. I will put all the information about his books, his YouTube channel, his podcast in the notes to this conversation. So if you want to look at that, viewers, hope you do. Okay, so I’ve asked you here today, Stephen, because you’ve been a philosophy professor in the Midwest at Rockford University for many, many years, as we said, I guess 30 but you said 28 What good students do you teach and what changes have you seen in them over time?

Stephen Hicks: Well, my university comes out of the liberal arts college tradition. So Rockford was founded in the 1840s. 1847 the college was was founded. So it’s a long tradition of small classes and intensive relationships between the professors and the students. So we’re a private institution, and we are not affiliated with any religious institution. So we get students who are serious about their education because we’re charging them a significant amount of money. So they come with strong motivation to get a good education. And they know there’s something about the liberal arts. They don’t want a narrow technical education, as valuable as that can be.

At the same time, Rockford University, I think of it as a solid middle-of-the-pack university. We are not an elite institution. So we tend to get students who are intelligent and solid, but they’re not the kinds of students who are going to go to Harvard or Stanford, and so on. Although we do tend to get a significant minority of students who could perform well at Harvard or Stanford or any university but they tend to be the ones who were screw-ups in in high school. (That might be too strong.) They weren’t serious about their education, they’re smart, but they were out partying and so on. So their grades are not strong, but nonetheless they have that native intelligence and then they end up in Rockford University for whatever reason, so it’s a real mix.

Marsha Enright: And there’s a lot of very intelligent students who, for one reason or another, haven’t done the extra-curriculars or taken all the AP courses, or they didn’t have good advice that makes it difficult for to get into these elite schools.

Stephen Hicks: Another constituent is students who are in the area but tied here geographically. They have elderly parents or they have a job, and they’re going to university at the same time. So a very hard working, intelligent and so on. So they’re a good group. Of course, there’s always students who do end up it’s a small minority. Fortunately for us, we’re not really sure why they’re at university. And I think Yeah, right away, they don’t perform very well. But I think that’s a much smaller percentage than standard state schools.

Marsha Enright: Have you seen a change of the students over the years?

Stephen Hicks: I think so. I’m trying not to turn into one of those curmudgeonly older professors talking about the younger generation, right? I’m noticing a resilience difference. Among the students, there’s a lot of failure that is built into good education, you have to try stuff, and it doesn’t work out and you come back. But I’ve noticed that students more frequently now give up sooner. Some speculations about why that why that might be. So one of the things I’ve always done is, with my students, when they write essays is I will send them feedback on their essays and always give them an opportunity. If you want to work on revising your essay, as many times as you want, I will work with it. And we will take it as far as you go. And students would more frequently take me up on that offer 20 years ago, and to multiple iterations. And now it’s a rarer phenomenon of students who will do that. And they might do it one time. So that’s an interesting evolution.

I’ve noticed an increasing gap between international students and homegrown American students. Almost always, the rate of re-doing work and improving work among the international students is much higher than Native American students. So I think it speaks not to intelligence, but to motivation and seriousness levels.  And then the other side of the resilience is a kind of self-responsibility. You know, the idea you come to university, you think that it’s really up to you to learn the system and to figure out what you need to do successfully to navigate the university in general, in your courses in particular — in contrast to a student who comes and says, What can you do for me? Overstating it, but: Can you hold my hand and guide me through everything? So it does seem to be shifting in a more hand-holding direction.

Marsha Enright: And then that goes along with the lack of resilience, because people who are more confident that they can take care of things themselves don’t feel like they need that.

Stephen Hicks: Right. Or they don’t want that.

Marsha Enright: Do you have any evidence about what’s causing this or any ideas about it?

Stephen Hicks: Well, I have ideas, but I haven’t documented the evidence. A lot of it is helicopter parenting and the safe spaces phenomenon in university, but there does seem to have been over the last 20 years. A lack of letting students when they are children go off and do their own thing. To the extent that we are shifting in the direction of cocooning children, and that’s going to show up 10 years, 20 years later in university. So I think that’s a real social phenomenon.  Inside the schools, I think there has been a shift to a much more scripted kind of education. Students are following a recipe. They’re following directions. And the extent that you go further down that road, and by the time one gets to university, particularly in I think, a liberal arts context where it’s supposed to be about you are a free self-responsible agent and we’re going to treat you as an adult. That’s a more difficult transition or for students as well.

Marsha Enright: It reminds me of something that happened to me about 40 years ago, which was I was working for a pharmacology professor at a medical school. And the president of the medical school class came in to ask: what should they study for the final? And the professor gave a beautiful explanation in principle of what they should study for the final. At the end of the conversation, the president of the class said, What doctrinaire What should we study. He wanted the formula, he wanted the exact directions about what to do. And I guess, attitude has gone down into lower school.

Stephen Hicks: We can have one example I’ve noticed over many years, now, I come out of the philosophy, tradition. And we like to pat ourselves on the back as being the queen of all of the humanities, or the king, whichever metaphor you like. What was drilled into you in philosophy is that all of the issues are complicated, and all of the issues are controversial. And you drill yourself in looking at the best arguments for any position, as well as then the best counter arguments against that position, seeking out what the alternatives are. And so that methodology becomes second nature. And then, of course, if you’re a decent philosopher, your ultimate judgment call is your own judgment call. I am a philosopher in my own right, I’m not just a scribe for other people’s answers. So that becomes second nature.

But I do remember, early in my teaching career, I was teaching some Biomedical Ethics courses, and we have a very strong nursing program. And this will be partly a criticism of nursing education, but also a testament to the nursing students. That is, we would be doing Biomedical Ethics, all of these controversial, very controversial, complicated issues about euthanasia, abortion, informed consent, and so on. And the first tests would come along, and I would give them philosophy-type questions for them to answer. And they almost always did very poorly on the first test: they weren’t used to that style of thinking — that there are arguments and counter arguments, and then having looked at both of those, what do you think, and work it out for yourself?

The best explanation was because their education had been up to that point, very scripted — for example, your 200 or 208 bones in the human body and memorize them and regurgitate them as much more mechanical rubric-oriented education. So this style of thinking humanistically and philosophically was quite alien to them.

But then to their credit, what I found is almost always the nursing students would treat it as a science experiment. Okay, we didn’t do very well on the science experiment, what are we doing wrong? What do we need to do? And then they would come and sit down and you could see their eyes opens. Okay, yes, now we understand it. And they were getting together in their study groups. And they would start saying: Okay, you’re going to argue this side, we’re going to argue this side, and we’re going to have this little debate, and then we’re going to be ready. And they almost all did very well on subsequent tests.

I think that’s ideal. And that’s in large part what liberal education should be doing.

But to go back to the first question about resilience. I’m finding aside from the nursing students, for lots of students coming out of high school that way of thinking still is very alien to them, for various reasons. They don’t have the resources to be able to take on that project.

Marsha Enright: And it’s such a contrast. I mean, it’s the reason why organizations like let grow, started to inform parents about all the ways in which children and you know, teenagers can be so much more resilient and how to encourage them in that. I remember reading an article on there about two kids, it was a celebratory article to kids in 1905, who traveled five years old and 13 years old, who traveled from the Midwest to Washington, DC by themselves. And the papers thought this was a great thing. And then they later traveled to San Francisco by themselves. And this was just wonderful. I mean, can you imagine today? Oh, my gosh —

Stephen Hicks: Reminds me of an anecdote about Richard Branson, the you know, the famous —

Marsha Enright: British entrepreneur Virgin Atlantic. Yeah.

Stephen Hicks: Yes. Apparently, his parents and especially his mother in this particular case thought he was at the same time a disciplinary problem and a little too sheltered. So she took him far from home, basically dropped him off and said — he was only like, six years old — Find your own way home. And he did. He says this is one of the great learning experiences.

Marsha Enright: Right, exactly, exactly.

Stephen Hicks: Now in our times we’d be more likely to be locked up for doing that.

Marsha Enright: Yes. And no, the parents would be arrested away.

For me that happened a few years ago with some parents who had their eleven-year old and an eight-year year old at a park, walk home by themselves. They got turned in by some neighbor, and got in trouble. So it’s ridiculous.

Stephen Hicks: It’s hard to quantify a lot of these things. But the general question you’re asking is there does seem to be a generational shift. Now, there are some greater awareness of the problems and the long term consequences. And there’s some pushback and other organizations, including some European organizations, especially in Finland, and Germany that are trying to work on more, more resilience, and exposure getting away from the helicopter parenting.

Marsha Enright: Mm hmm. For parents from teachers to them. Yeah. And but it almost seems like an opportunity for the colleges to have some classes or activity. I mean, really activities about it would be best, you know?

Stephen Hicks: I think colleges, some of them, will see it as an opportunity. My sense right now is that most colleges and universities see it all as a threat. They’re following the classic pattern of being an entrenched in the institution, locked into certain ways of doing things. And it’s very hard for hide-bound conservative institutions to think outside the box. So only a minority will reinvent themselves. What will be more likely to happen is new kinds of educational institutions will be developed and replace a lot of traditional colleges and universities.

Marsha Enright: That’s to be hoped.

Stephen Hicks: Yes.

Marsha Enright: The students have been educated, they’re missing out on resilience? Is there anything else they’re missing out in their education?

Stephen Hicks: Resilience is part of it. I think another element is that education has become more politicized in a certain direction, but politicized is too narrow, because it’s a broader set of values and ideological elements of which politics is a component. Students are not getting as much the sense that the world is complicated, and that on all of the big normative issues, especially, there is legitimate controversy, and that they need to be exposed to many or all sides of an argument. Instead, they are they’re taught a script. And that script is typically one or a very narrow range of viewpoints within that script. And they are in many cases actively discouraged from seeking out alternative viewpoints. So then students do not develop any critical thinking skills. And then to the extent that it becomes a dominant viewpoint – the only one they’re hearing from their teachers and from their peers who do who imbibed that view — then fear comes to be a dominant part of their education. Because it’s hard to go against the crowd or against your teachers at the best of times, but especially when you’re developing your mind. Often it’s a soft fear, but it can cripple a person’s cognitive development to the point that they are unwilling to challenge, in addition to not having developed the cognitive skills to challenge

Marsha Enright: What about the content of what they’re learning?

Stephen Hicks: I don’t have very good numbers to it, because I’m a university teacher. So I’m seeing students who are coming out of the pipeline later, so to speak. But yes, the content does seem to both be scripted and narrower. More important to me is the cognitive style. Students who are aware that there is controversy, who are aware that might while we do know a lot of stuff there’s still a huge amount of stuff that we don’t yet know. So having that attitude of curiosity and being willing to seek out new and unknown, and being comfortable with the idea that there’s just a huge amount that’s not known. Knowing that there is not anybody out there who teaches the settled answer. Or that I can’t just look in the back of the book to find what the answer is. That I’m an intellectual seeker or an intellectual entrepreneur. That cognitive style, I think is the more important thing.

So for example, one thing I notice is that at my university we have Bachelor of Science degrees and Bachelor of Arts degrees. Bachelor of Arts degrees have a foreign language requirement. The foreign language requirement was a hard sell 20 years ago, but it’s become an increasingly hard sell. So the ambitious idea that I want to learn more than one language, for all of the obvious benefits of another language — fewer students seem interested in doing so 20 years later. That is one thing that we can document, as the number of students who take the Bachelor of Arts degree has gone down. Instead, they’re looking for the easier requirement without the foreign languages.

The other thing is math education. At liberal arts universities we want students to be Renaissance men and now Renaissance woman — knowing at least a little about a lot of things — from math and science to the arts and humanities and history and languages and culture and more, in order to consider oneself as having a solid education. Yes, it sounds like a lot of work. And math is hard. And history might not be very interesting. And foreign languages are another kind of challenge.

But it seems to be students don’t even see the need to learn math. It’s not just that they came to believe, say, in 9th or 10th grade and math went up a level of abstraction. “I’m not a math person. But I still think math is important.” And I’m going to stick it out and learn something about statistics and algebra and so on. Whereas the more common attitude — again, I’m not putting numbers to this — is that I just don’t need to know math. I don’t need to know foreign languages, I can just get this narrower education, and that’s fine.

Marsha Enright: It’s just a getting through, let me just find the easiest way to get through.

Stephen Hicks: For them, a kind of credentialism seems to have replaced the idea of a liberal arts education.

Marsha Enright: What knowledge do you think is missing? Are they not as knowledgeable about certain things as students used to be?

Stephen Hicks: Well, yes. I do think foreign language counts as a kind of knowledge, and it is typically comes with a lot of literature, history, geography, and so on. And the same thing for math. While math can be taught — I think badly — as just a series of formal systems, math is about solving real world problems. Using math you work on biology and physics and statistics in social sciences, so the content is always integrated. So there is a an impoverishment of content that goes along with that lessening of languages and math.

The other I would cite is history. History can be badly taught as just a bunch of names and dates and so on. Instead of history as all these stories about incredibly interesting human beings doing all sorts of things. This comes closer to a philosophical issue — a lot of history education has become impoverished because even many in the history profession have come to believe that it’s irrelevant. So the cliché, but absolutely true cliché, is that we need to learn from history and if you don’t learn from history, you’re doomed to repeat it. Built into that is that there are some human constants: that despite all of the cultural differences, human beings share a common identity, a biological identity, a psychological identity, that manifests itself in certain constants about values and in the kinds of cooperations and conflicts that can arise. So we can learn from the Egyptians, the Greeks, the ancient Chinese, and so on. And aside from the interesting exotic elements, we can relate and apply the lessons of Chinese history or Greek history to our time.

But one of the philosophical fashions — that’s to trivialize it too much — has been the idea that people are just fundamentally different. And human beings are more like plasticine, born into completely different cultures and so people come to think completely differently with completely different values. So we can’t really even understand other people. So the only thing we need to do is learn our own culture so that we can navigate within our own culture. But then if you believe that, then studying the Greeks or Romans or Charlemagne seems pointless; there’s nothing that we can possibly learn. So history becomes irrelevant, and students don’t learn as much history. And that is a content impoverishment.

Marsha Enright: What is ironically paradoxical about the philosophical position that we can’t understand people of other cultures is: How did the people who came up with that theory conclude that if they can’t understand the other cultures?

Stephen Hicks: Yes. There’s always the internal self-contradictions of relativistic positions. They are making a kind of knowledge claim: So I know these other cultures well enough to know these things can’t be understood.

Marsha Enright: Exactly. Why do you think studying the liberal arts is valuable for students? And what works should they be studying?

Stephen Hicks: The idea of the liberal arts goes back to the root concept of freedom — that the liberal arts are to free your mind.

Marsha Enright: They’re both coming from the same root as liberty. Yes, a lot of people don’t realize that.

Stephen Hicks: Yes. The contrast — when the idea of Liberal Arts was being developed, there was a Greek version and a Roman version that were then lost through much of the Middle Ages — was against the idea that there is one truth, that all of the important truths are known, and that they are held in the minds of authoritative individuals or written in an authoritative scripture book. If so, then you don’t need any sort of intellectual freedom. Instead, all you need to do is be obedient: to listen to your teacher and literally regurgitate what your teacher has said, or memorize the textbook, and on your tests and essay regurgitate. The idea of Liberal Arts rose against that to say, You know what? While there may be many truths and important things that the ancients have learned, there still is a huge amount to be discovered. And only a certain kind of mind — one that is open to new experiences, new data, is willing to look at that data from multiple perspectives — is going to acquire new knowledge.

Also part of that was that even to the extent that the traditional views are correct, it really doesn’t do you any good if you are merely parroting those views. You really have to be free to challenge that view, and to ask all of the kinds of questions that intelligent people are going to ask about the received view, so that you freely in your own mind can see why that traditional view is true, if it is true. So you need to have freedom intellectually — to be able to challenge the received views, and the freedom to look at alternative views, and the freedom to go out and explore new territories, in order to become the kind of person who can function well in the world. And that works with a content claim: that the world is very complicated.

And so disciplines have developed in law, in medicine, in theology, in philosophy in history, and in languages and culture, and in the emerging sciences. So if you’re going to really be interested in the truth about the world, you need to know all of those disciplines. And so our broad-ranging content education as well as that open-minded act of inquiry, criticism and debate, method comes to be characteristic of liberal education.

Why do I think that is important? Well, because that is the constant human condition. We’re now 600 or 700 years past the Renaissance, and again it’s a cliché but we say things like, The more books I read, the more books I know I need to read. I realize how much more there is to learn out there. So being the kind of person who is interested in the whole world and is actively seeking out the interesting and knowledgeable from the whole world, and who has the cognitive habits of mind, to be able to think critically about everything that’s going on — that is a human constant. It’s not set in stone, as we are adding new sciences all the time. I wish that the arts were more innovative than they are. But we have all of these wonderful new artistic media. It’s all an open-ended potential. And we know also our relationships are complicated. And there are lots of types of human relationships, and now more are available to us. A liberally educated person is going to be the kind of person who can lead the most flourishing life. So that’s the general pitch.

Now, then you ask the second part of your question: What works should students be reading?

I think it’s very hard because there’s two things. One is to say that we’re all human beings. And so there’s a set of core knowledge that we might all want to be exposed to. We all need to know how to read, how to write, how to speak well. If you’re going to be functional in your culture, to know your culture’s basic institutions and basic beliefs. It’s not that you have to agree with all of them, but just to be able to operate with the people in your cultural group. And to the extent that we are in a more global culture, that cliché is true and increasingly true as the modern world develops, knowing something about the different cultures out there.

So I think then we can say: reading, writing, speaking, thinking skills, methodologically, those are the common universal part of anyone’s education. So logic, math, and all of the communication skills.

Then I would say, some understanding of the different political systems, the economic systems, the different religious and philosophical systems. That should be a common part of anyone’s heritage.

Beyond that I think it’s difficult to say, because the other thing that education needs to pay attention to is not the ways in which we are all the same but the ways in which we are all unique individuals. At a young age students start to have their own values, their own preferences, and finding their own paths and following their own paths through the life. So some students are clearly more of an engineering mindset, they like taking things apart. Some are more musical, some are more artistic, some are more scientific, some are more just interested in reading, some are interested in writing.

Education well done needs to be customized to let each individual pursue his or her own path. And my default position is to have parents and teachers work as individually as possible with students. I do think that wherever your path is, if you follow music or history, you’re going to end up doing all of the other stuff anyway. Because music takes you into mathematics. It takes you into emotional expression. There’s a whole history of music, and all the different cultural traditions in music. There’s all of the science and engineering that goes into making musical instruments. So anybody who’s passionate about music is going to end up getting a full liberal arts education. And I think the same thing happens wherever you start, because it’s all connected.

Marsha Enright: Very, very interesting. You know, we have, we still have thousand of brilliant, creative people working in the US on technology and business on sports. How is their lack of education in the liberal arts affecting them?

Stephen Hicks: Yes. I would parse that question out a little bit. Despite all of the flaws of contemporary systems, students still do get a good education. What do they do not get is good schooling. Despite the very rigid, narrow education, actually demotivating and in many cases dehumanizing education that students are exposed to in formal schooling — outside of school, American culture and broadly Western and now global culture is very rich with opportunities.

A stereotype again, but the stereotype is true. What does school mean to you when I say that word? For the majority of us the image that comes to mind is rows of desks. And students then sit in place and they typically sit in the same seat, day-in and day-out for the entire school year. And all of the students and listen to the teacher, and they make their notes, and they do what the teacher tells them to do. And the teacher might lecture to them — I’m not opposed to lectures; there can be great lectures, but it’s only one tool. But the stereotype is teacher has the answers. And your job as student is to learn what the teacher tells you. Or everybody’s working on the textbook, but they’re all doing the same problem at the same time, in the same way, and have to finish at the same time.

All of that communicates a model of passivity. Even to the point where, suppose you want to go to the bathroom — you have to ask permission to go to the bathroom — that mildly dehumanizing sort of thing.

But then you think, what’s that like, for a young child, day-in day-out for whole school year, to sit in rows and do the same thing that everybody else is doing? And you’d better pass the test — if you fail, then we will come down hard on you. And you do that for a year, another year, another year, another year, another year?

That is not education. That is that is the opposite of education. So my heart goes out to all of those students who rebel as they’re going through adolescence and find various ways to subvert the system.

Marsha Enright: Ferris Bueller?

Stephen Hicks: That’s right. Did you keep some flame alive inside? Ferris Bueller should be the role model. Now I wanted to watch that movie again.

Despite all of that, outside of formal schooling, culture is rich, partly because we’re a rich culture. Kids are taking all sorts of music lessons and sports lessons. And they do learn a huge amount from video games and from television. And they teach each other with all of the social media tools. I’m a big fan of pretty much all of those things. The benefits of them vastly outweigh the downsides.

And we do still have a culture that broadly celebrates the hero’s journey, finding great work, and so on. So despite the dehumanizing, in many cases, mis-education or anti-education of formal schooling, we still do have a rich educational culture, and we’re still able to have a significant minority of students who are very innovative.

Another thing is the — despite recent years — steady stream of, of immigrants who come in. We do have an entrepreneurial, generally immigration-friendly culture. And some documentation that the people who tend to be the most creative and innovative, a very high percentage of them are immigrants. But to the extent that we succeed in attracting the them from around the world, we can assimilate them.

Marsha Enright: Let’s hope that we can keep the culture to be as thriving and full of information and learning opportunities as possible. To help counteract this other trend,

Stephen Hicks: Another anecdote I would throw out. An overstatement but beautifully stated. It was a remark from some German and European entrepreneurs who were very cosmopolitan. They were doing business in the United States and all over the world. And their comment was that America has the worst 18-year-olds in the world, due to their formal schooling, but America has the best 30-year-olds in the world.

They were basically saying the American school system is crap. But once the student is out of the American school system and into the business world, America has the best business culture in the world. So they get their education in their 20s and they become great.

Marsha Enright: The market and normalizing them in that respect.

Stephen Hicks 

Yes, that’s right.

Marsha Enright 

Michael Barone wrote a book about that called Hard America, Soft America, about 15 years ago, so it struck me as completely true. But that was interesting about the Germans observing it. One of the things you hear from immigrants who come here is that there’s no place like the US for being able to start wherever you are, doesn’t matter what social position you have, what connections you have. And if you work hard, being able to rise to whatever heights. And you’ll hear that over and over from people from all kinds of different countries who say it’s not possible in another country, it’s not possible in my home country.

Stephen Hicks: I’m big on the immigrants. They’re genuinely recognize why America still is an exceptional place.

To come back to formal education and your earlier question, I’m reminded of another anecdote.

I will frequently, aside from offering students rewrites of their essays and working with them, makeup tests on exams, and every year I teach a logic course. And the logic course, for some reason, is almost always 50% homegrown American kids and 50% foreign students. Typically, on the first logic test nobody does that well on it. So I always offer a makeup test. And almost always 100% of the foreign students will take the makeup tests. But it’s rare that an American student will take the makeup test. So you take your first logic test, and you get a C grade on it. So if your mindset is: “Oh, I got a C, I guess I’m okay with that C,” that’s one, one thing. It’s disturbing, that that level of complacency. Yet the foreign students, even if they are not geniuses they have the work ethic. They got a C: “Oh, I’m not happy with that. I’m taking the makeup test.”

Marsha Enright: It’s partly, I think the point of view of the American student is: I’m just trying to get through to get my credential of having a college degree, I’m not really interested in that material. They’ve learned from earlier education that they don’t really care if you actually know the stuff or you’re interested in learning, only if you’re giving them back what they want to hear from you. If you’ve learned enough of the information that you can give it back to them the way they want to hear it. I’ve seen this where if you take it or essay test, and if you paraphrase whatever the subject is about in the in the essay test, often the person will be marked down; what the what the person correcting the test is looking for is certain terms that were said in the course, instead of understanding of those terms.

Stephen Hicks: Yes, absolutely. So the first part of what you’re saying is the compliance mindset that feeds into the credential: there’s a set of expectations that other people have for me — my parents, my teachers, my future bosses and so on. My job just is to satisfy them, whatever I need to do to comply. Instead of the entrepreneurial mindset where I want to be the best person I can be. And live the fullest life I can, so I see my education as an opportunity to grow as a human being. That’s a huge gulf.

Marsha Enright: Yes. And they’ve often been punished in a certain way. If they try to do things their own way or try to be do things out of the box, they’re basically getting in the way the lower educational system has worked, you know?

Stephen Hicks: Yes, that’s a dehumanization. There is a certain number of teachers who are not really teachers. They are ideologists in various or political, religious, environmental ways. Whatever it is, they have their point. And any deviant student they will punish.

Part of the problem, though, is institutional. Where it’s very hard for various institutional reasons to get rid of bad teachers. And the many teachers who are really just there because it’s a pretty good financial lifestyle, you get the summers off, and there’s very little accountability. That kind of teacher just wants to teach a recipe and doesn’t want to deal with the creative-thinking students. So they will find ways to punish students who are not following the script.

Marsha Enright: There’s another practical reason why it happens, which is that the schools are given money by the federal government depending on how many kids pass certain standardized tests. That puts the pressure on the teacher to get kids to do well on standardized tests. And that disincentivizes teachers, even the ones who want to, from teaching outside of that framework or having the students do anything outside of that framework. That’s a big problem.

Stephen Hicks: Unfortunately.

I teach philosophy of education, a course for students who are ambitious about their teaching careers. A number of students stay in touch over the years. They come out of university aged 22 or so, and they’re very ambitious and idealistic about their teaching careers. In some cases, they’re back five years later to get different degree because they’ve been so demoralized by the education system. They don’t want to be teachers anymore, and it’s for exactly the reasons that you are talking about.

Marsha Enright: I want to move on, because I don’t want to take up too much of your time, to a last question I had for you.

I think you’ve been a shining example of objectivity and teaching. And one evidence of this everybody can know about is that you taught a course on Marxism and you had recordings of it online. And some years ago, a reporter from Breitbart saw it and then wrote about you as if you were a Marxist. But you had to straighten them out about that, because you’re a classical liberal. And in terms of your own view, what

Stephen Hicks: That is a fun anecdote.

Marsha Enright: You did such a wonderful job of presenting Marxism in a balanced and objective way that he was absolutely fooled about that. So what do you think we as teachers can do to help students against teaching that lacks that kind of objectivity or is purposely slanted?

Stephen Hicks: The way I do it, particularly with my first-year students, is to affirm that when they go to university they will have many kinds of professors. They will have some professors who are ideologists and just interested in indoctrination. And to learn to recognize when they are dealing with that kind of teacher. I recommend as a matter of self-defense to plug into the student grapevine, as soon as they can, to get all of the information about the about professors. To learn that, say, if I make an argument for another kind of view, am I going to be downgraded by this professor or that professor. Then to actively avoid the indoctrinating professors and seek out the professors who are genuinely interested in education.

Then I tell them the mantra that by the time you are getting to higher education, higher education does mean something. All of the controversial and complicated issues are controversial and complicated for a reason. In university and beyond, people who are the experts in whatever field have disagreements with each other. And good professors will expose you to what those disagreements are. And whatever the professor’s viewpoint, good professors will welcome the criticisms and themselves points out what the criticisms are of their viewpoints.

So as a student become a savvy consumer.

The other thing I say to students is that if you’re not getting that at university, make sure that you go and actively seek out what the alternatives are, because you can find out what the alternatives are. Almost any position can be given a good gloss and seem like a reasonable position. So to realize for yourself and develop your own strength of mind, for whatever position you are hearing from your professor there is criticism out there and another way of framing that data that’s worth looking at. Actively seek that out before you make up your own mind.

There always are ideological teachers in any generation. And we have a lot more of them in this generation for various reasons. But to the extent that students are aware that there are alternatives, that gets reinforced by at least some of their liberal-arts-oriented professors, they will get the message.

Marsha Enright: I had a thought to go along with it. But it fled.

Stephen Hicks: The other thing I do in my first-years classes is never letting the students know what my views are. Because they don’t know me yet. I could say that if you argue something well, you’ll get a good grade;  but they don’t know whether I’m lying about that or not. Also that they’re not in a position to know what my views on an issue are until they’re up to speed — on what the issues are, what the complicated solutions are, what the range of positions are, and so on.

So the way I always teach my first two-years courses is, whatever the issue is we’re always reading two or more people from different perspectives. Here’s the argument, here are the counter-arguments. Here’s the other side’s argument, here are the counter-arguments to that. And I leave it at that. At this point, now you’re up to speed and, of course, you’ll make up your own mind.

The Marxism example is a good example of that. Part of my job is whenever we cover something by Marx is to make the arguments as strongly as possible, but also the criticisms of Marxism as well. Not until students are juniors and seniors that, in class sometimes and outside of class, I’ll let them know my views. By then they know me and that I’m not going to grade them arbitrarily. And they’re also more up to speed.

So we do the same thing: here’s the issue, the argument on one side, the arguments on this other side, and now you the student are up to speed on that and at a higher level. And then I will say, I think this side is correct, and here’s my reason why and what I think about the criticism from of the other side. Of course, I’ve got students from all over the religious, ideological, political maps. But they’re typically stronger minded at that point, and they will wonderfully argue with me.

Marsha Enright: That’s great. Good. Oh, that’s wonderful advice to the students.

So everything that you’ve said, and it’s got an even further benefit, which is, if students or anybody tries to pay attention to the best arguments from both sides of a controversy, they’ll actually if they see that, well, the other side has some reasonable ideas there or some reasons for what they’re saying. Then they’re more inclined to have a good conversation with people for who take that point of view, so that they can actually have a productive conversation? Because you’re giving them the benefit of the doubt and saying, Okay, I think I can see where you have some merit to what you’re saying. And then you can exchange the ideas and the information about it to try to get somewhere in a conversation.

Stephen Hicks: Absolutely. So you mentioned the my philosophies of education book that’s nearly finished. My co-author, Andrew Colgan, is a younger Canadian Ph.D. in philosophy of education. One of our motivations for that book is exactly the point that you’re talking about. Those of us who are parents and teachers and administrators in education — we’re going to be having thousands of conversations about education. About what the content should be, what the methodology should be, what kind of teachers we should hire, how we assess, the physical layout of schools, and so on. And we need to know going into that profession that people coming in with very different philosophical ideas about education.

The only way those conversations can be productive is if I have some knowledge of those other perspectives. Some people are coming in as pragmatists, or as religious ideals, or as scientific realists, or as objectivists. We all need to know something about other perspectives to do fruitful conversations.

Marsha Enright: You’ve pretty much answered this, but I’m going to ask anyways. Is there anything else you can suggest to help students develop their own objectivity?

Stephen Hicks: Yes. On the cognitive side, there’s lots of good material out there about how to pay attention, how to try looking at the data from different perspectives, seeking out the alternative viewpoints, and putting yourself in different intellectual shoes. Also: Being aware of cognitive biases that we all can be prone to by taking courses in logic, statistics, mathematics, and so on. Develop your skill set. Our minds potentially are an enormously powerful tool. Keep the tool clean and sharp. And there’s always a more powerful version of the tool — you can get the software upgrades, so to speak. That can be a lifelong process.

The other thing I would about objectivity is on the character side. A lot of times, failures of objectivity come from a kind of laziness. Objectivity and learning take work. Many time we want the path of least resistance. Or we’ve got a pretty good idea and just don’t want to think about something any more. So school yourself to say, It really matters that I have the truth, or at least the best possible answer. And not to be satisfied with the easy answer or just the first answer that you happened to come across. You want to go the extra mile.

It’s like physical conditioning: we can be in pretty good shape, but be more ambitious and to work out more frequently. The same thing goes, not to be an intellectual couch potato. That’s a character trait about developing that habit of active-mindedness.

The other thing is. It’s about courage. Courage is all about managing fear. I think in many cases a failure of objectivity is because people are afraid that they will have to change their minds about something. Or that it’s too hard to be able to say, You know, I made a mistake. It’s sometimes hard just say it to yourself, let alone to say it publicly. But work on that.

Marsha Enright: Because it bruises your ego.

Stephen Hicks: Yes. It is in one sense an ego bruising. But I like to say that really it is the sign of a strong ego to be able to say, I made a mistake. We all make mistakes, we make a huge number of mistakes. And the sign of strength of character is to be able to say, I was wrong about that. That’s the fact of the matter, and really I am interested in truth, I’m interested in improvement. And that signals a strong ego.

O to be to be willing to go against the flow. Our peers exert conformist pressures on us. Objectivity often is, if you have some doubts about the prevailing viewpoint, not letting those slide or suppressing them in order to go along with the group. That is a courage issue — how to diplomatically stand up for your own thinking and ask questions to make the results more objective.

Another kind of fear that we grapple with is in hierarchical social contexts. It’s hard to challenge our parents or teachers, our bosses. Yet again, strong-ego teachers and strong-ego bosses encourage criticism. They don’t want a bunch of conformist-mind followers. Nonetheless, it’s hard for students and it’s hard for employees to raise questions to say, Well, maybe there’s a different way of looking at this.

So work on your courage, work on your active-mindedness. Those are the two important character complements to whatever skill sets of objectivity one needs to acquire.

Marsha Enright: Wonderful advice. The person in the last instance, where it’s your teacher or your employer you have, you might have some material fear that you’re going to lose your position, or you’re going to get a bad grade, and all that. And the other instances, I always try to encourage people to be loyal to the truth and to get their sense of self-esteem from the fact that they’re loyal to the truth. So their ego is more tied to being loyal to the truth. And in that sense, then when they’re wrong and they admit it, they actually can feel good about themselves: Well, I’m being loyal to the truth. I’m and I’m proudly admitting that I was wrong, because the truth is more important than me believing something.

Stephen Hicks: Yes.

And I like the advice that entrepreneurs will often give: If you’re if you’re not failing a lot — if you’re not making a lot of mistakes – then you’re not doing it right. That fits exactly with what you’re saying.

But I do think it is a responsibility of good parents, good teachers, and good bosses, because they are all aware that their children, their students, and their employees are worried about sanctions against them if they say the wrong thing. So they have to go out of their way to make it clear that’s not going to happen. Actively encourage — and reward students for asking uncomfortable questions, and reward employees who raise uncomfortable questions.

A sidebar from the history is the idea of the king’s fool. When one is a king, all of those incredibly difficult decisions you need to make if you’re going to be a good king. And everybody is aware of your power, that you could have them beheaded at any moment. But do you have an official person whose job is to criticize you in a mocking way? Whatever it is that you’re thinking about, to encourage the fool? We all need that.

Marsha Enright: Yes. Exactly. Well, thank you so much for a wonderful and very informative conversation.

Stephen Hicks We pleasure for me too. This is great.

Marsha Enright: I hope that we can get this conversation out to a lot of people that I think would be very helpful to parents and, and parents, teachers and students.

And hope you have a wonderful holiday. And once again, I will put all the information about anything that we refer to in the notes to the conversation. For example, there’s a blog called Less Wrong, that has all kinds of discussions about cognitive errors and how to make them better. Hope to have a lot of resources for the viewer.

And once again, this is sponsored by The Great Connections. We’re an educational organization. Please visit our website at the great connections.org. Thank you.

Stephen Hicks Thanks a lot, Marsha. A real pleasure.

Marsha Enright: Thank you. Bye bye.

Source: YouTube.

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