The Hitler Question in Education.

The twentieth century has proven that the liberal arts cannot prevent civilizational slide into barbarism, but can only add a unique horror to man's native capacity for the brutal by embellishing it with the grinning death-mask of gentility. Having played Schubert beneath the gas chambers, why do we continue to educate? Would it not be better to control men, firmly and technocratically, rather than continue to naively hope that the educated mind will freely resist its natural inclination to evil?

The great, possibly counterfactual enterprise of education rests—for me—on three ideas. They are hopes, not certainties. The first: that a nation whose people have been educated to be free citizens of an equal polity will be conditioned, as a group, to create just laws and institutions whose strength and resilience will be sufficient to resist our cyclical and apparently irresistible urge to salt the earth and reduce ourselves to dystopia. The second: that though we may be defenseless against this special mania and addiction of mankind, this brutality, we have been given a flabbier enemy to resist: if the 20th century was an abbatoir, the 21st promises to be a squalid room lit only by a flickering television and a blinking modem. Man is naturally violent, but he is perhaps not naturally empty; the humane letters, whose sole function and great merit is to grant the man-animal a soul, a personhood, a core resistant to distraction, parochialism, smallness of being: these are our study in the dream of a mankind brightly lit, house to house, doorway to doorway with inner life. We educate to create humanity where there would otherwise be consumers, implements, data points, the impersonal activities of massed reaction and impulse. Last: that even if none of this is true (and it may not be; our institutions may be feeble, human history may indeed be Hitler history, the vast majority of mankind may be incapable of attaining real self-awareness; our hope rests on something feebler than conjecture, a thing more akin to magical thinking or solipsism) nevertheless to educate is to cultivate the only transcendent good within our grasp and within the power of pessimism to imagine realized—that it is a thing like praying, a liturgy possibly without recipient, a cyclical rite to the divinities of man's better nature.