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Liberty and Learning: The Evolution of American Education
Larry P. Arnn, the President of Hillsdale College, traces the history of education from the founding of the U.S. Office of Education (based on the Prussian system) in 1869 to the Higher Education Act of 1965 and its subsequent reauthorizations, to contemporary legislation. He connects these changes to fundamental shifts in our understanding of what education is, of the purpose and ends of government, and of what it means to be human. He offers insight into the idea of liberal education as it developed in Western civilization, marked by the confluence of biblical religion and Socratic philosophy.
117 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
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April 10, 2024
My grandfather has occasionally sent me books since 2018 and this one was sent to me through a big pile along with a couple of others that took a more implicitly conservative approach to education, Garre LaGrone’s “I Teach, I Touch the Future” (1998) and Paula J. Fox’s “Heart of a Teacher” (2009). Larry P. Arnn’s was the book I liked the least out of the three.
To start, the book’s subtitle is misleading. It purports to trace the history of education in the U.S. and its changes beginning with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 to now, but instead it focuses mainly on the history of Hillsdale College, a few events related to it, and how it has apparently strived to stay the same as when it was founded in 1844; not exactly an “evolution,” then. The book (or rather booklet given its length) also ignores a large swath of educational history as its four chapters hop from 1787 to 1844 to 1957 to 2004. My mother is a historian and would find this as infuriating as I find it because the author is leaving out large gaps of history that also coincidentally or perhaps conveniently for Arnn leave out the evolving arguments and issues regarding class, race, and gender within education. Instead of engaging with liberal arguments for federal involvement in education, Arnn just evades and never offers a critique beyond that he hates federal outreach. Arnn claims that American education has changed for the worse, but he provides no hard evidence for this and exactly how education in this country has changed beyond a superficial, biased reading of a couple of seminal moments concerning Hillsdale and some opinionated stances on typical talking points like political correctness and affirmative action. Arnn’s career seems to have been built primarily through administration, in that he has had no training as a historian as far as I can tell. There’s absolutely no way you can trace and diagnose the supposed changes and issues concerning American education in less than eighty pages (Arnn’s words stop at page 75 and the remaining 42 pages are mostly appendices containing important documents concerning Hillsdale). At most “Liberty and Learning” is really just promotional literature for Hillsdale College. I’m not opposed to reading a conservative viewpoint on the history of American education, I just wish Arnn was willing to actually consult and mention the kind of academic literature supposedly promoting what he’s against, or at the very least, be more honest about the kind of political project he’s promoting through his book that conservative talking heads like Sean Hannity and Dennis Prager have hawked.
I could spend several pages stating each and every specific problem I have with Arnn’s book (which I might do on my own personal blog at a later point), but I will instead look for positives by stating something I do agree with him on. It comes very early in the book, when Arnn states: “In this modern legislation, education is important for material reasons: People can make more money if they get a college degree. The subjects in question are not students, but consumers” (6). Though he comes to a different proposal than I would make, Arnn’s initial diagnosis of the material reality concerning higher education is one that I’ve seen critics on both the left and right make against neoliberal ideology. I think part of this ideology stems from the overemphasis and overvaluing we have placed on going to college. I believe that while education is certainly important, I disagree with the notion that I’ve heard from both educational institutions and from people I’ve known that school is often the only effective tool for economic and social mobility, or has to be the only tool. There are other tools and resources, we just often undervalue them, don’t support them as much as we should, or don’t know that they exist. Companies like Pearson or College Board play large roles in the American education system when it comes to publishing textbooks, determining assessments, and selling pre-packaged curriculums to school districts, turning college into an industry all by itself by instilling the expectation into students as early as possible that they need to go to college in order to make any money, to have any real semblance of an independent life. Entire companies like ones that offer student loans have been built and sustained over people who want to go to college or have come to believe that college is the only appropriate course of action for them, whether that’s actually true for their circumstances or alternative paths have been blocked off for them.
My question is whether an average students’ desire to go to college nowadays is precipitated by learning or because it’ll improve their job prospects, which often correlates to better life prospects for people as well, though even that assumption has been challenged a bit in recent years. It’s hard to take learning outside of school seriously and to instill in people how rewarding it is to learn for ourselves if you’re a first-generation college student saddled with debt and just trying to make it through the next semester, which pushes many to pursue degrees that aren’t necessarily fulfilling for them but are a “safe bet.” I’ve had some experience teaching at the elementary school level and even young children I feel are being conditioned to view education nowadays less as an avenue for personal fulfillment but as a prelude to learning how to become an efficient worker drone, in understanding how to be obedient to some higher institution. I worry that we’ve all now been conditioned to consume everything that we interact with, to act as consumers rather than as life-long students as Arnn champions, to be critical of who we are and what surrounds us. Though I fundamentally disagree with Arnn on almost everything he says in his book, I do share this concern he voices, although him being the president to a private college that probably charges an exorbitant amount to students because they don’t offer federal student aid and relies heavily on conservative donors does make me question his level of commitment to this concern. Nonetheless, if Arnn is true to his ideals, I feel he’d be happy to see me being critical of his book, even if it’s from a perspective he’d vehemently disagree with.
Though this review may fall on some deaf ears, I think it’s important for people who do hold conservative views on education like Arnn to seek out or write better books because this is objectively not a good book. I think a lot of books catered to a conservative audience are of poor quality academically and sometimes stylistically because they’re usually promoted as an alternative “outsider” message to liberal establishments despite their messages capitulating to the status quo. They very often don’t actually offer real arguments to the topics they claim to be arguing about but instead offer a lot of confirmation bias so there’s often an inherent laziness to books that propose a conservative argument to a societal issue. I don’t have any personal book recommendations as to a better alternative to Arnn’s book yet as I don’t go out of my way to search for these kinds of books, but something by a respectable historian who happens to be a conservative or leans conservative would be a better choice, not something written by a popular conservative talking head or someone like Arnn who after the publication of this book in 2004 has spent an increasing amount of time schmoozing with conservatives like Trump and his ilk.
The New Yorker in 2023 came out with an article about Hillsdale and how Arnn in his 20+ years as the school’s president has made it increasingly a center of the education part of our nation’s culture wars in order to retain enough money through donorship to keep the college functioning without federal funding, a fact that Hillsdale seems to relish pointing out to distinguish its conservative credibility. If anyone here wants to be more critical and introspective about Hillsdale and that what Arnn is doing is inherently a political project despite his repeated claims that it’s not, then try to read more up on Hillsdale that isn’t just from Arnn’s own words or from the college. That this book has as high a rating as it does here on Goodreads suggests to me that it hasn’t been challenged as thoroughly as it could for more people to realize it’s a bad book.
For further reading I’ll also recommend an episode from a recently established podcast called “If Books Could Kill,” which covers and deconstructs popular books (self-help, politics, sociology, psychology, etc.) that actually contain harmful messaging and aren’t as good as their popularity/reverence claims them to be. The hosts have critiqued William F. Buckley’s 1951 book “God and Man at Yale” for having set the trend of conservative books lambasting against universities promoting seemingly secularist and collectivist ideologies on campus, an argument that established the much more loud and devolved argument of “woke campuses” nowadays. The hosts comment that Buckley was essentially mad that Yale, a school that was majority white, male and Christian when he was attending, was maybe only 95% rather than 100% that, as his complaints seem mainly lodged at a few specific professors who were secular and left-leaning, with some of his complaints about what he found to be an attack on Christian orthodoxy at the college also coming across as wildly anti-semitic at times. The hosts note that’s it’s telling how lacking Buckley’s argument is and how it informs other books of its ilk like Arnn’s, in that it’s mostly based around anecdotal evidence and grievances about seeming left-wing demagoguery toward conservatives that distort the reality of what was actually going on in American education at the time. I bring this all up because these sorts of conservative books claiming that colleges are somehow Communist indoctrination camps indicate how fundamentally bankrupt the modern intellectual conservative movement that both Arnn and Buckley champion is, and that the only things that books like “God and Man at Yale” and “Liberty and Learning” do is obfuscate from real issues stemming education in this country.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
https://open.spotify.com/episode/55lC...
To start, the book’s subtitle is misleading. It purports to trace the history of education in the U.S. and its changes beginning with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 to now, but instead it focuses mainly on the history of Hillsdale College, a few events related to it, and how it has apparently strived to stay the same as when it was founded in 1844; not exactly an “evolution,” then. The book (or rather booklet given its length) also ignores a large swath of educational history as its four chapters hop from 1787 to 1844 to 1957 to 2004. My mother is a historian and would find this as infuriating as I find it because the author is leaving out large gaps of history that also coincidentally or perhaps conveniently for Arnn leave out the evolving arguments and issues regarding class, race, and gender within education. Instead of engaging with liberal arguments for federal involvement in education, Arnn just evades and never offers a critique beyond that he hates federal outreach. Arnn claims that American education has changed for the worse, but he provides no hard evidence for this and exactly how education in this country has changed beyond a superficial, biased reading of a couple of seminal moments concerning Hillsdale and some opinionated stances on typical talking points like political correctness and affirmative action. Arnn’s career seems to have been built primarily through administration, in that he has had no training as a historian as far as I can tell. There’s absolutely no way you can trace and diagnose the supposed changes and issues concerning American education in less than eighty pages (Arnn’s words stop at page 75 and the remaining 42 pages are mostly appendices containing important documents concerning Hillsdale). At most “Liberty and Learning” is really just promotional literature for Hillsdale College. I’m not opposed to reading a conservative viewpoint on the history of American education, I just wish Arnn was willing to actually consult and mention the kind of academic literature supposedly promoting what he’s against, or at the very least, be more honest about the kind of political project he’s promoting through his book that conservative talking heads like Sean Hannity and Dennis Prager have hawked.
I could spend several pages stating each and every specific problem I have with Arnn’s book (which I might do on my own personal blog at a later point), but I will instead look for positives by stating something I do agree with him on. It comes very early in the book, when Arnn states: “In this modern legislation, education is important for material reasons: People can make more money if they get a college degree. The subjects in question are not students, but consumers” (6). Though he comes to a different proposal than I would make, Arnn’s initial diagnosis of the material reality concerning higher education is one that I’ve seen critics on both the left and right make against neoliberal ideology. I think part of this ideology stems from the overemphasis and overvaluing we have placed on going to college. I believe that while education is certainly important, I disagree with the notion that I’ve heard from both educational institutions and from people I’ve known that school is often the only effective tool for economic and social mobility, or has to be the only tool. There are other tools and resources, we just often undervalue them, don’t support them as much as we should, or don’t know that they exist. Companies like Pearson or College Board play large roles in the American education system when it comes to publishing textbooks, determining assessments, and selling pre-packaged curriculums to school districts, turning college into an industry all by itself by instilling the expectation into students as early as possible that they need to go to college in order to make any money, to have any real semblance of an independent life. Entire companies like ones that offer student loans have been built and sustained over people who want to go to college or have come to believe that college is the only appropriate course of action for them, whether that’s actually true for their circumstances or alternative paths have been blocked off for them.
My question is whether an average students’ desire to go to college nowadays is precipitated by learning or because it’ll improve their job prospects, which often correlates to better life prospects for people as well, though even that assumption has been challenged a bit in recent years. It’s hard to take learning outside of school seriously and to instill in people how rewarding it is to learn for ourselves if you’re a first-generation college student saddled with debt and just trying to make it through the next semester, which pushes many to pursue degrees that aren’t necessarily fulfilling for them but are a “safe bet.” I’ve had some experience teaching at the elementary school level and even young children I feel are being conditioned to view education nowadays less as an avenue for personal fulfillment but as a prelude to learning how to become an efficient worker drone, in understanding how to be obedient to some higher institution. I worry that we’ve all now been conditioned to consume everything that we interact with, to act as consumers rather than as life-long students as Arnn champions, to be critical of who we are and what surrounds us. Though I fundamentally disagree with Arnn on almost everything he says in his book, I do share this concern he voices, although him being the president to a private college that probably charges an exorbitant amount to students because they don’t offer federal student aid and relies heavily on conservative donors does make me question his level of commitment to this concern. Nonetheless, if Arnn is true to his ideals, I feel he’d be happy to see me being critical of his book, even if it’s from a perspective he’d vehemently disagree with.
Though this review may fall on some deaf ears, I think it’s important for people who do hold conservative views on education like Arnn to seek out or write better books because this is objectively not a good book. I think a lot of books catered to a conservative audience are of poor quality academically and sometimes stylistically because they’re usually promoted as an alternative “outsider” message to liberal establishments despite their messages capitulating to the status quo. They very often don’t actually offer real arguments to the topics they claim to be arguing about but instead offer a lot of confirmation bias so there’s often an inherent laziness to books that propose a conservative argument to a societal issue. I don’t have any personal book recommendations as to a better alternative to Arnn’s book yet as I don’t go out of my way to search for these kinds of books, but something by a respectable historian who happens to be a conservative or leans conservative would be a better choice, not something written by a popular conservative talking head or someone like Arnn who after the publication of this book in 2004 has spent an increasing amount of time schmoozing with conservatives like Trump and his ilk.
The New Yorker in 2023 came out with an article about Hillsdale and how Arnn in his 20+ years as the school’s president has made it increasingly a center of the education part of our nation’s culture wars in order to retain enough money through donorship to keep the college functioning without federal funding, a fact that Hillsdale seems to relish pointing out to distinguish its conservative credibility. If anyone here wants to be more critical and introspective about Hillsdale and that what Arnn is doing is inherently a political project despite his repeated claims that it’s not, then try to read more up on Hillsdale that isn’t just from Arnn’s own words or from the college. That this book has as high a rating as it does here on Goodreads suggests to me that it hasn’t been challenged as thoroughly as it could for more people to realize it’s a bad book.
For further reading I’ll also recommend an episode from a recently established podcast called “If Books Could Kill,” which covers and deconstructs popular books (self-help, politics, sociology, psychology, etc.) that actually contain harmful messaging and aren’t as good as their popularity/reverence claims them to be. The hosts have critiqued William F. Buckley’s 1951 book “God and Man at Yale” for having set the trend of conservative books lambasting against universities promoting seemingly secularist and collectivist ideologies on campus, an argument that established the much more loud and devolved argument of “woke campuses” nowadays. The hosts comment that Buckley was essentially mad that Yale, a school that was majority white, male and Christian when he was attending, was maybe only 95% rather than 100% that, as his complaints seem mainly lodged at a few specific professors who were secular and left-leaning, with some of his complaints about what he found to be an attack on Christian orthodoxy at the college also coming across as wildly anti-semitic at times. The hosts note that’s it’s telling how lacking Buckley’s argument is and how it informs other books of its ilk like Arnn’s, in that it’s mostly based around anecdotal evidence and grievances about seeming left-wing demagoguery toward conservatives that distort the reality of what was actually going on in American education at the time. I bring this all up because these sorts of conservative books claiming that colleges are somehow Communist indoctrination camps indicate how fundamentally bankrupt the modern intellectual conservative movement that both Arnn and Buckley champion is, and that the only things that books like “God and Man at Yale” and “Liberty and Learning” do is obfuscate from real issues stemming education in this country.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
https://open.spotify.com/episode/55lC...
February 23, 2015
A thoughtful discussion of why the Federal government should not be involved in education. Using the example of Hillsdale College and the founders intentions and words Dr. Arnn shows how liberty and learning are necessary to one obtaining the knowledge needed to be a productive citizen in a free society.
June 10, 2016
Got a free ebook from the Dennis Prager website. Learned that the U.S. Constitution is the oldest written constitution in the world.
August 23, 2017
In tracing the history of Hillsdale College relative to federal government involvement, Arnn presents a disturbing picture of how the Founding Father's original intent of limited government has been transformed into a tyrannical bureaucracy. At the time it was written (2004), Hillsdale was the only college in America besides the military academies that required students to take a course on the United States Constitution and Hillsdale refuses to take direct financial help from the federal government, despite government legal action against it.
This is a frightening warning for the future college education of America, as current trends all point away from the basic principles of our founding documents.
This is a frightening warning for the future college education of America, as current trends all point away from the basic principles of our founding documents.
September 13, 2015
At the outset of the book, Larry Arnn sets the tone for not only his, but also Hillsdale College's primary belief regarding the education of America's children. While addressing the divestiture of government-held land whether by way of the Land Ordnance of 1785 or the Homestead Act of 1862 as guided by the Northwest Ordnance, Arnn maintains that "schools and the means of education are to be encouraged as a national purpose. But they are to be encouraged through the agency and under the control of local hands." Other reviews tend to focus on the evolution of the book into Arnn's defense of the Hillsdale College position of complete aversion to ANYTHING associated with accepting "Federal money" and reporting certain information to various federal agencies. For me, the most informative if not most important aspect of this book is its first chapter wherein Arnn sets forth the Founding Fathers' logic for local control of education and provides full reference thereto.
I thoroughly enjoyed this very brief monograph as it concisely provides the information necessary to argue that the Federal Government has no business in controlling the education of America's children other than to encourage it. I find it hard to believe that anyone could take exception to Arnn's early conclusion that, "We have seen that the Founders considered education to be of a massive importance, of the highest importance. We have seen that they found ways to subsidize it on a huge scale, but ways that preserved the ability of the people who engaged in education - ultimately parents, students, and teachers - to manage it themselves. They did this for reasons having to do strictly with education itself."
In my humble opinion, certainly the Department of Education as a cabinet-level entity should be abolished. But then, this has been my opinion for many, many years; it's just nice to feel that someone of the academic caliber of Larry Arnn expresses similar feelings.
I thoroughly enjoyed this very brief monograph as it concisely provides the information necessary to argue that the Federal Government has no business in controlling the education of America's children other than to encourage it. I find it hard to believe that anyone could take exception to Arnn's early conclusion that, "We have seen that the Founders considered education to be of a massive importance, of the highest importance. We have seen that they found ways to subsidize it on a huge scale, but ways that preserved the ability of the people who engaged in education - ultimately parents, students, and teachers - to manage it themselves. They did this for reasons having to do strictly with education itself."
In my humble opinion, certainly the Department of Education as a cabinet-level entity should be abolished. But then, this has been my opinion for many, many years; it's just nice to feel that someone of the academic caliber of Larry Arnn expresses similar feelings.
June 29, 2013
This small book traces the importance of education to the first presidency, to the setting aside of land for schools as our country expanded westward, and how Hillsdale College fits into our country's educational history. By keeping faith with its mission statement through some severe challenges, Hillsdale College continues to be an institution where truth and faith is inculcated into its teaching, preparing students to take their place as very well educated citizens in this day and age. As to be expected, President Larry Arne, the current president of Hillsdale, writes very well, and I could hear his voice speaking in my mind as I read the book.
June 7, 2016
Definitely a thinking book. If you want to learn about a different way of educating, one without government interference, this is the book. At times the author seems to drift into a pattern of 'patting himself on the back' for how great Hillsdale College is, but in general I found myself admiring the strength of the college's convictions and their determination to cling to them in the face of opposition from a grasping, power-hungry government.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews