Civics centers, teaching civic and classical education through “Western civ” and great books, are often described as conservative enterprises. In a strong sense, this is manifestly false, because they are, at least in my personal experience, entirely free from political litmus tests.

　　Yet there is a sense in which there is an essential small “c” conservative element to civic and classical education, as there must be in all liberal learning (the appropriate term for such education). As Michael Oakeshott once put it, “Every human being is born as an heir to an inheritance to which he can succeed only in a process of learning.” According to Oakeshott’s attractive philosophy of education, the business of the teacher is to release students from servitude to the current dominant feelings and ideas, not by inventing new ones which may be preferable, but by making available to students something approximating their entire inheritance. In the United States, this includes the rich cultural heritage of Western civilization.

　　For Oakeshott, liberal learning has a strong historical dimension; it is liberal because it liberates us from the stranglehold of the present. It is an education in imagination, an invitation into the art of conversation in which we learn how to recognize the voices of the past—to listen to the conversations in which human beings have forever sought to understand themselves—to distinguish between them, and to acquire the intellectual habits of participating in them.

　　However, liberal learning, and civic education rightly understood, cannot simply be conservative. It must also be classically liberal, prioritizing interpretation and understanding, and valuing intellectual diversity and freedom of thought as an alternative to conformity and the tyranny of current trends. But how does civic and classical education relate to the intellectual tradition of classical liberalism? The rest of this essay will engage with this question, focusing on the role of the state, which can be a sticking point for some friends of liberty.

　　Classical Liberalism, Education, and the State

　　Natural equality is one of the founding ideals of American civilization. It must also be considered as one of the fundamental principles underlying the eclectic yet recognizable tradition that we call classical liberalism (I use this contested term here for the “classical” period of liberalism in the nineteenth century, and its Enlightenment progenitors).

　　Against Platonic elitism and Aristotelian naturalism, many in the classical liberal tradition have subscribed to at least a version of John Locke’s rejection of innate ideas and accepted the view that the mind comes into the world, more or less, as a tabula rasa (a blank slate). Accordingly, they tend to attribute most significant human differences to education and environment. Adam Smith wrote that “the difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, seems to arise not so much from nature as from habit, custom, and education.”

　　Unsurprisingly, many classical liberals have therefore taken a particular interest in education. John Stuart Mill even explained the writing of his Autobiography in part because it could demonstrate the power of education. Of course, the idea is not to turn everyone into a philosopher, or to suggest that this is even possible, but to give everyone approximate equality of opportunity to maximize their potential. The classical liberal support for popular education stood in sharp contrast to an earlier literature, exemplified by Bernard Mandeville, according to which it would be dangerous to empower the wider populace through education.

　　It is true that some in the classical liberal tradition have been suspicious of state-sponsored education. Joseph Priestley, for example, in opposition to John Brown’s plan to revive a form of “Spartan” education in eighteenth-century Britain, wanted “to show the inconvenience of establishing, by law, any plan of education whatever.”

　　Priestley agreed with Brown about the importance of education, and he himself taught what he called “liberal education”—history, literature, and modern languages—at the famous Dissenting academy in Warrington. For Priestley, liberal education had an evident civic function. The study of history, he wrote, helped “form[] the able statesman, and the intelligent and useful citizen.” Agreeing with Bolingbroke that everyone needed to study politics in free countries, Priestley argued that even a daily newspaper would be “unintelligible” to the reader without a thorough knowledge of the history of one’s native country.

　　Smith did not think that education was important for economic gain alone, but to enable the virtues of citizenship and prevent the negative effects of the division of labor.

　　But for Priestley, in education, as in any art, success depended on the “opportunity of making the most experiments and trials, and in which there are the greatest number and variety of persons employed in making them.”Homogenization through state involvement could hardly lead to better educational standards. Mill would later agree, writing in On Liberty (1859)that “A general state education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another.”

　　For the utilitarian Mill, state education could only exist as an alternative to private education for the sake of diversity and competition. But for Priestley, educational freedom was a matter of right, and the state deciding over the education of someone’s children would be as wrong as the state selecting their spouse. “If there be any natural rights which ought not to be sacrificed to the ends of civil society,” Priestley wrote, “it is even more natural to look for these rights among those which respect a man’s children, than among those which respect himself; because nature has generally made them dearer to him than himself.”

　　However, some of Priestley’s proto-liberal contemporaries started to make the argument that the government must play a role in education. One of them was Adam Smith, whom Priestley greatly admired. We know of Smith as the great philosopher of freedom. But he was also, and relatedly, a powerful analyst of state capacity.

　　According to Smith, the state had three primary functions: first, national defense; second, the administration of justice; and third, “the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.” Among such public institutions Smith included popular education.

　　In Smithian economics, the division of labor is central to development. He was, however, clear-eyed about its darker sides. Let’s look at his famous description of the negative effects of the division of labor in commercial society:

　　In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations; frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country, he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. … But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it. (My emphasis.)

　　In summary, Smith thought that the lifestyle of the general worker means that he (or she) risks becoming “altogether incapable of judging” “the great and extensive interests of his country,” and “equally incapable of defending his country in war,” “unless government takes some pains to prevent it.”

　　What can government do? The answer for Smith appears to involve education. Reading, writing, and accounting, he thought, were so essential that “For a very small expense the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring these most essential parts of education.” By contrast, Mandeville had contended that “Reading, Writing and Arithmetic are very necessary to those whose Business require such Qualifications, but where People’s livelihood has no dependence on these Arts, they are very pernicious to the Poor, who are forced to get their Daily Bread by their Daily Labour.”

　　Though Smith saw a role for the government in a way that Priestley did not, Smith wanted families to share the payment with the state, to ensure the accountability of teachers. But affordability was key; Smith wrote in the Wealth of Nations that the state “by establishing in every parish or district a little school where children may be taught for a reward so moderate that even a common labourer may afford it; the master being partly, but not wholly, paid by the public; because if he were wholly or principally paid by it, he would soon learn to neglect his business.”

　　The mature Humboldt became one of the great advocates of state-sponsored education in Germany.

　　It is fair to assume that Smith did not think that education was important for economic gain alone, but to enable the virtues of citizenship and prevent the negative effects of the division of labor, which he so eloquently described.

　　Smith was himself a professor at Glasgow University between 1751 and 1764, which he later said he regarded as by far “the most useful,” “happiest” and “most honorable” period of his life. In his correspondence, he wrote that “I have come under no engagement which I look upon as so sacred as those by which I am bound as a member of this University to do every[thing] in my Power to serve the young people who are sent here to study, such especially as are particularly recommended to my care.”

　　Though he was professor of moral philosophy (initially, logic, but he switched chairs in 1752), his teaching covered jurisprudence, politics, constitutional theory, history, rhetoric and literature, political economy, and natural theology; in short, much of what we would call “Western Civ.” He took his job as a teacher very seriously; Ryan Patrick Hanley has recently argued that we should understand Smith’s professorial career “in terms of concepts that are central to his own moral philosophy”—utility, happiness, and honor—enabling us to connect Smith’s life with the principles he promoted in his books.

　　Liberalizing Oxbridge

　　When education, at school and university levels, expanded in the nineteenth century, classical liberals played leading roles.

　　In Prussia, though the young Wilhelm von Humboldt had expressed opposition to state-led education in The Limits of State Action (1791–92), he was convinced that incapacity for freedom was a direct result of insufficient “intellectual power,” and thatit was the duty of the statesman to make people “ripe for increased freedom by every possible means.” The mature Humboldt became one of the great advocates of state-sponsored education in Germany, and he was one of the founders of the University of Berlin, which, since 1949, bears his and his brother Alexander’s name:Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Humboldt favored an open and liberal education, steeped in Greek and Latin, that did not restrict life choices.

　　In England, classical liberals continued to champion popular education in the nineteenth century, notably through Nassau William Senior’s efforts. Jeremy Bentham included an education minister in his “cabinet” in the Constitutional Code. John Ramsay McCulloch could not have been clearer when he said, in the later editions of his Principles of Political Economy, that “An ignorant and under-educated people, though possessed of all the materials and powers necessary for the production of wealth, are uniformly sunk into poverty and barbarism.” The Manchester School liberals Richard Cobden and John Bright, often wrongly viewed as extreme laissez-faire supporters because of their advocacy of free trade, were jealous of Prussia’s superior popular education, and urged the British state to play a bigger role in providing education.

　　As Gregory Conti has recently pointed out, nineteenth-century liberals in England took a particular interest in reforming the country’s medieval universities, Oxford and Cambridge, which remained confessional long after the state had divorced political rights from membership of the Church of England in a series of reforms in the 1820s. In short, Liberals sought to liberalize and modernize “Oxbridge,” and they were willing to use the legislative power of the state to make the English universities “less exclusive, less sectarian, more secular, more meritocratic.” As Conti puts it, the Liberals, in opposition to the Conservative Party, “urged incessantly that the universities are part of the national patrimony and should not be treated as the property of a political-ecclesiastical party.” In 1871, religious tests were abolished.

　　Two reformist Victorian Liberals, George Goschen and William Edward Forster, argued that giving families of business from Dissenting backgrounds access to university education would not only increase social harmony; they also connected civic culture and classical learning in a way similar to the modern civics centers. Even though “classical education” had a stricter meaning for them, the parallels are informative. As Jonathan Parry has written, “Manufacturing philistinism … would be diminished by access to classical education that would teach Dissenters, as it traditionally taught landowners, the need to demonstrate civic responsibility in their own public sphere.” Goschen and Forster believed in a common cultural code because of, rather than in spite of, their liberalism.

　　As long as ample space is left for private initiatives and choice, education that is both state-sponsored and civic thus appears to be central to the classical liberal tradition, broadly construed. In today’s academic environment, many, far from all of whom are insiders, hold out civics centers to be a beacon of hope for the humanities. Positioned at public universities across the country, they have the ability to revive liberal learning, both through core teaching and their own majors, inviting students from different backgrounds to understand their inheritance in the form of Western civilization, and giving them a chance to eavesdrop on the great conversations of the past, as well as to participate in them, and to think freely.