A Thought on Liberal Education from Eva Brann

"The very distinction between learning free of interested motive and training for practical ends implies a recognition of high and low, a hierarchy of worth in matters intellectual.  I do believe that to an educated person all things, grand or pitiful, and all studies, pure and applied, are eventually interesting.  But I also think that the young especially ought to learn how to live with the array of conditions associated with excellence: that is what is finest often denies itself to easy access; that to live admiringly with things above oneself is a source of dignity; that genuine hierarchies confer respect on all their members; that even what is greatest, or especially what is greatest, offers itself for critical judgment.  The familiarity with greatness I have in mind is only remotely connected to Arnoldian "culture," familiarity with "the best that has been thought and known in the world"; it is a much more concentrated, particular, and laborious immersion.  Its real point is not even to induce disciplined self-respect in the way just laid out but to stock the mind with exemplars of the highest quality, based on the hypothesis that in order to battle the bad you have to know some good.  But even that aim is too purposeful.  The real point is just that if learning is to be liberal, that is, for its own sake, its objects have to be ipso facto authentically attractive.  The unfashionable assumption here is that differential greatness exists and is discernible, and that the teachers should in common acquire the experience to discern it." -Eva Brann, "The Place for Liberal Learning"