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3 3 4 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 3a payoff at the conclusion of study; it is an education specifically fitted for afree people. The cause of freedom would be advanced through the properuse of liberty; a liberal regime requires a liberal education. 67 It has meant aneducation in certain great books, that is, works written by the greatest mindsof the Western canon. Since America is a Western nation, and since the colonists’heritage was derived from Western nations, schooling in the works ofthat tradition was encouraged. Liberal education, then, has always been aneducation of a certain kind and toward a certain end, and as Cardinal HenryNewman wrote in his Idea of a University, it is for the cultivation of the intellect,teaching universal knowledge. The Eastern Orthodox Jaroslav Pelikanstated in a review of Newman’s seminal work that knowledge has its ownend, and that is in its deciphering of some chief good. 68Ancient liberal education made citizens fit for liberty; it inculcated civicvirtue, courage, justice, self-control, and patriotism. 69 It was not to make citizensopen-minded, and it was not a practical education. The business art wasconsidered vulgar. However, the rooting of education in nature—the discoveryand thinking of it—made the ancient city less stable because it detachedthe educated from the polis. It undermined the pious fidelity to the city andhad the effect of undermining the authority of politics and jeopardizing liberty.Ancient philosophical education seemed to liberated the citizen fromthe polis in some way. 70 The American Founding resolved this problem bymaking nature the authority of the Union. Therefore, it was able to groundliberty in nature.Allan Bloom contended that a simple attachment to a great-books curriculumwas not enough to foster a liberally educated person. What is mostimportant is the way those books are studied, as politicized instructioncan make learning abhorrent; students should first and foremost endeavorto understand authors as they understood themselves. Liberal education isdedicated to human completeness and is the “home of reason.” 71 Our modern67Mark Blitz, “To See Ourselves,” Weekly Standard, 16 June 2008, 34.68Jaroslav Pelikan, The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 1992), 43; John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of NotreDame Press, 1982), xxi, xxxvii.69See in particular Lorraine Smith Pangle, “Liberal Education and Politics: Lessons from the AmericanFounding,” Academic Questions 8, no. 1 (March 1995): 34.70Ibid. Pangle makes the interesting argument that philosophy became more intertwined with liberaleducation, thus making the relation to “civic education…far more ambiguous.”71Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 22; Wildavsky,“Death of the Humanities,” 69.