Reclaiming a liberal education
My son was assigned this essay to read this week. It is worth passing along:
"While at Princeton James Madison did not immerse himself in public policy and technical training but,following his teacher’s exhortation 'Do not live useless and die contemptible,' he studied Hebrew, philosophy, history and theology. So,as one historian has said, 'the arguments of the philosophers became for Madison the slogans of a fighting faith and a political career.' Abraham Lincoln did not have the advantage of a liberal education in a fine institutional setting, but he educated himself by, according to his biographer, 'saturating his mind with Shakespeare and the Bible'. The Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural are not accidental compositions. Furthermore, while in Congress he mastered the propositions of Euclid. These not only proved a good in themselves, helping to hone his already fine mind, but they also became enormously useful to him in his debates with Senator Stephen Douglas. See how clearly he put the issue between them i n a speech in Columbus, on September l6, l859: 'If Judge Douglas will demonstrate somehow that this is popular sovereignty the right of one man to make a slave of another, without any right in that other, or anyone else, to object, demonstrate it as Euclid demonstrated propositions there is no objection.'"
"While at Princeton James Madison did not immerse himself in public policy and technical training but,following his teacher’s exhortation 'Do not live useless and die contemptible,' he studied Hebrew, philosophy, history and theology. So,as one historian has said, 'the arguments of the philosophers became for Madison the slogans of a fighting faith and a political career.' Abraham Lincoln did not have the advantage of a liberal education in a fine institutional setting, but he educated himself by, according to his biographer, 'saturating his mind with Shakespeare and the Bible'. The Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural are not accidental compositions. Furthermore, while in Congress he mastered the propositions of Euclid. These not only proved a good in themselves, helping to hone his already fine mind, but they also became enormously useful to him in his debates with Senator Stephen Douglas. See how clearly he put the issue between them i n a speech in Columbus, on September l6, l859: 'If Judge Douglas will demonstrate somehow that this is popular sovereignty the right of one man to make a slave of another, without any right in that other, or anyone else, to object, demonstrate it as Euclid demonstrated propositions there is no objection.'"
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