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Liberal Education Imperiled3 3 5education ignores the self-evident truth of natural rights as an origin of theAmerican republic. Bloom could easily be speaking of the Union when hewrites that a “in a nation founded on reason, the university was the templeof the regime.” 72 It orders the types of questions that are worth asking andanswering. The question “what is man?” for example, is one of those questions:“the liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy andpreferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows othersworthy of consideration.” 73 We have already discovered, at least for theFounders, something of what that looks like. In a statement similar to that ofMadison and Jefferson, Strauss wrote thatwe understand most easily what liberal education means here and now.Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corrodingeffects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothingbut “specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.”Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from massdemocracy to democracy as originally meant. Liberal education is thenecessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic masssociety. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracywho have ears to hear, of human greatness. 74A liberal education was supposed to teach a new kind of statesmen. The trulygreat are the philosophic minds, and for Strauss, one of those was Plato. Educationin the highest sense of the word was an education in philosophy. Thequest for wisdom is the highest pursuit for man; attaining knowledge thatleads to virtue and happiness is his end. Though we cannot acquire perfectwisdom, we can try to philosophize by spending time with those greaterthan we, those philosophers who because of circumstance and abilities arethe greatest minds of the West. Liberal education means, then, we must listento the conversation between great minds of the past. Thus, we ought to have asense of humility. The problem is that we often think we are superior to thesemen. To overcome this sense of superiority is perhaps a highly difficult task.We are incompetent to be judges of the arguments made, yet we must judge.We are faced with our desire to know, yet do not, initially perhaps, knowwhere to begin.72Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 244–45. Bloom also notes that in a regime dedicated to “freeand equal human beings,” such “reverence” is “appropriate.”73Ibid., 19, 21, and 344.74Leo Strauss, An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989),314–15. Strauss makes a pointed argument concerning how difficult philosophy/philosophizing is.Not only is it elusive to attain wisdom, a philosopher must constantly begin from the beginning forknowledge must be acquired, and reacquired. See ibid., 328–29.