Commentary
In that single sentence, Carvalho captured something essential about liberal education.
The modern university has increasingly placed the sovereign self at the center of its teaching. Students are encouraged to regard their feelings, identities, understandings, and “lived experience” as the primary measures of intellectual and moral significance.
The traditional questions, “What is true?” or “What do you think about this?” quietly give way to the therapeutic one: “How does this make you feel?”
Carvalho described the result with admirable economy. Universities, he said, have been offering students “a self-affirming mirror when what you need is a window.”
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He has identified a fundamental dispute over the purpose of higher education. Is it meant to console students? To confirm and validate their identities and beliefs about the world?
Or is it meant to lead them beyond themselves into a world of new understandings, knowledge, achievement, and moral possibility that they neither created nor control?
Liberal learning embraces the latter view. Its purpose was never self-expression but self-transcendence. As the very name suggests, it is a “liberation” from the contingencies of our birth and from the necessarily parochial and time-bound understandings every generation must navigate, achieved through the disciplined encounter with truths, viewpoints, arguments, and achievements greater than oneself.
Liberal learning was never merely an accumulation of knowledge.
Cardinal John Henry Newman argued that a university education should cultivate the intellect rather than merely fill the mind with information. When pursued properly, it was transformative. It enlarged the mind, disciplined judgment, and liberated us from the ignorance with which each of us is born. Education concerns the kind of person one ideally might become.
Michael Oakeshott expressed a similar idea when he described education as an initiation into a civilizational conversation that began long before our arrival. The student enters an inherited world of philosophy, history, science, literature, and art.
That conversation is not organized around students’ feelings, nor does it pause to ask whether its contents please them or validate their identity. Its voices make claims on the student. They demand attention, open-mindedness, patience, humility, effort, and judgment.
One does not enter such a conversation by insisting that one’s voice be heard first. One begins by listening to what has already been said.
This is the paradox that Carvalho’s address illuminates. Students are endlessly advised to “find their voice.” Yet a voice worth hearing is not found by looking inward; it is formed through disciplined attention to voices wiser, stranger, more powerful and more accomplished than one’s own.
As Northrop Frye put it, “Nobody is capable of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift; it has to be learned and worked at.”
The ancient Greek maxim “Know thyself” was inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, where it counseled humility and an honest recognition of one’s limits. But ‘know thyself” was never an imperative to embark on an inner journey.
For the Greeks, knowing oneself meant engaging with the world and asking, “What is this thing?” or “Who are these people?” or “What does this mean?”
It was a recognition of the ancient paradox that we find ourselves by first forgetting ourselves; by directing our energies outward toward something much greater than our limited self.
To forget oneself, in this context, does not mean erasing one’s individuality or submitting uncritically to authority. Nor does it mean that education should be indifferent to the circumstances students bring with them. It means escaping the prison of perpetual self-reference. It means recognizing that the world contains realities independent of our approval and truths that remain true regardless of how they make us feel.
A mathematical proof does not accommodate our identity. An unsettling historical fact remains true even when it offends our sensibilities. Plato, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky did not write to affirm our preconceptions. Their value lies partly in their power to disturb them.
Among liberal education’s greatest enemies is self-absorption. The student who approaches every text by asking, “Where am I in this?” reduces education to an exercise in narcissism.
The better questions are more demanding: “What is this text asking me to see that I could not before? What does it reveal about the world? About others? About the human condition?”
Such encounters can be humbling. That is precisely their value. As Carvalho told his students, a genuine education should humble without humiliating and challenge without flattering. It should reveal both the limits of our knowledge and the possibility of expanding it.
There is also joy in this discipline, though not always the immediate gratification promised by a culture of self-affirmation. Carvalho’s phrase “durable joy” is apt. The pleasures of flattery are brief because they leave us where they found us.
The pleasures of absorption—in a difficult book, an intricate problem, a scientific discovery, a work of music, or a demanding conversation—are more enduring because they carry us beyond ourselves.
Anyone who has taught will recognize the moment when a student stops performing for a grade or calculating an exercise’s usefulness. It becomes clear when the subject itself captivates and commands the student, who is absorbed in the argument, the poem, the historical puzzle, the scientific equation, or the question of justice. At that point, education has begun.
This is why liberal learning is more than acquiring skills or credentials. It teaches us that we inhabit an intellectual and moral world we did not create and cannot fully possess. That inheritance invites our participation, but not on our terms alone.
Among the university’s deepest purposes is to help students become more fully themselves. But it does so not by affirming their existing prejudices and presumptions, but by initiating them into a civilizational conversation that broadens their understanding, chastens their certainties, and ultimately transforms them.
The world will continue telling young people to find themselves. Liberal learning should offer the more demanding—and ultimately more liberating—invitation: forget yourself for a while. Attend to something worthy of your attention, even if it is alien to you, or maybe, particularly if it is. You may discover, in doing so, not only a durable joy, but a larger and more wondrous world, and a far richer life within it.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
