An Education on Education at Liberty Fund

Tiernan Kane is an attorney who focuses his practice on commercial litigation and tax controversy. He works out of South Bend, where he earned a doctorate in political science at the University of Notre Dame and where he and his wife are raising their five children.

On October 24, MDLF Class VI returned to Liberty Fund to think a little deeper about the purpose and future of education. In seminar style, the Fellows took up K-12 in the morning and higher ed in the afternoon, considering apprenticeships à la Suisse in the in-between. A few points stand out.

First, there seemed to be a strong sense that objective truth should play a guiding role in education. For some, this view manifested in the desire for math and science (at least!) to be depoliticized zones, or at least relatively so. For others, it came out in proposing that basic moral truths (e.g., the evil of slavery) can be taught without necessarily violating the autonomy of students--and should be taught. There’s an air of commonsense in those points and at the same time a certain tension between them and the common expression that schools should teach people how to think, not what to think.

To be sure, a version of “how not what” also got its due, as the importance of freedom in education was a second theme of the day’s discussion. Promoting freedom of inquiry (perhaps ultimately to safeguard access to the truth of the matter, whatever the matter may be) seemed to motivate discussants who opposed “book-banning” in public schools. Paradoxically, the same principle seemed a starting point for an opposing view that “book-banning” is a propagandistic term used to preserve the power of those who currently control which books are taught in sparse school hours. Freedom can be tricky. 

So can imitation. Any stray Swiss in our midst may have been flattered by our midday panel discussion on apprenticeship, which took Switzerland as a helpful model for making apprenticeships a new educational pathway in Indiana. The panelists’ sobriety about the challenges of applying Swiss lessons in a new land was refreshing, especially because it was matched by an intelligent bias toward action in trying to do so. l was struck that this concentrated effort at learning from another country’s success appears to be driven not so much by that country’s otherness as by its success.

A final takeaway was how seamlessly our Fellowship’s leadership team had woven the speculative with the practical, pulling necessarily abstract discourse on the liberal arts and democracy together with a closer-to-ground policy session on a cutting-edge Hoosier effort to serve the underserved. Taking such a balanced approach, and tapping some of our state’s leading lights to guide the way, is a signature move for MDLF - nonetheless impressive for being typical of this inspiring program.