"Learning is the comprehensive engagement in which we come to know ourselves and the world around us. It is a paradoxical activity: it is doing and submitting at the same time. And its achievements range from being merely aware, to what may be called understanding and being able to explain."-Michael Oakeshott, "Learning & Teaching"

The goal of a truly liberal, that is, a liberating education, is initiation into the most refined and self-conscious mode of the activity that Oakeshott speaks about in this passage.
Once upon a time, providing such an initiation was a primary, if not the defining, purpose of a university. That time is no more. Universities have become very large and expensive institutions intended to serve a multitude of mainly economic purposes (hence the growing acceptance of the word "multiversity"). A clear majority in their faculties have neither an affectionate commitment to liberal education, nor a real understanding of it, being unacquainted with it from personal experience. The so-called Arts and Humanities faculties are increasingly staffed by partisans of ideological postures. True, bits of the old rhetoric survive, formulaic pieties wielded mainly on public relations occasions by administrators, meant to evoke a suitably vague notion of "the higher aspirations of the human spirit". But the day-to-day reality is that liberal education has but a furtive and beleaguered existence in the modern university.
Thus the need for a book such as the one under review, which is designed to forewarn and forearm naive college-bound youths (and their parents) who might otherwise presume that pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree at any respectable university will provide an educational foundation of life-long value. The book is also for others, not so naive, who have concluded that a possession of this sort is not to be had, either because there is no such thing, or because today's institutions of higher learning do not and cannot provide it. The authors address both these grounds for pessimism in the course of disabusing the naive. They trace the current skepticism about the possibility of a liberal education to the pervasive influence of value relativism in contemporary life, go on to identify its principal consequences in academic practice, and introduce their readers to various considerations that challenge the plausibility of value relativism in any of its fashionable incarnations. And they do so, moreover, using language and arguments simple and straightforward enough for any moderately intelligent high school student to understand. Since roughly three-fourths of their book is given over to this endeavour, it would be excellent in high school "values clarification" courses, opening up a perspective on so-called value questions not well represented in the texts now used.
The last chapter and its brief appendix offer practical advice on how to acquire some tolerable approximation of a liberal education, and perhaps even the thing itself, through carefully choosing the most nourishing fare from the smorgasbord typically offered by today's amorphous universities.
There is no shortage of "college guides" that purport to evaluate and rank the various alternatives in Canada and the United States-or, for that matter, no shortage of reports by commissions and individuals roundly critical of the teaching in colleges and universities. The commercial success of several general indictments of modern higher education attests to the widespread suspicion amongst the educated public that something has gone wrong. But the kinds of information in the conventional guides, and the mainly statistical data upon which they base their rankings and recommendations, do not help young people seeking a liberal education cope with the real problems that confront them. In fact, these guides can be positively misleading insofar as they give a spurious reassurance as to the quality of the education an institution offers. Faculty-student ratios are of little importance compared with faculty members' conceptions of their duties. Size of library holdings means almost nothing; cultivating a critical appreciation of books worth reading is almost everything.
The authors of this very different guide start with a discussion of what is-and is not-a liberal education, and the reason to pursue it. They explain why it is not the same thing as the acquisition of some nebulous skill called "critical thinking", or as an introduction to "Western Civilization". Rather, as its Latin root (liber, "free") suggests, a truly liberal education frees a person from a slavish subjection to unselfconscious ignorance. This liberation is the result of reflection on the questions of greatest importance to a human being, namely, those that bear directly on the paramount question: what is the good life? In practice, it is through serious consideration of varying perspectives on these questions-views about "justice, love, God, death, friendship, community" and such-that one receives the requisite material for reflection, while at the same time cultivating an habitually reflective temper. In the words of Professors Malcolmson, Myers, and O'Connell:
"[The] final objective is the formation of thoughtful and civilized human beings. A genuine liberal education should make you a different person, by giving you new perspectives on the questions that ultimately define your humanity. And it should give you a life-long taste for the beautiful, the noble, the true, and the good."
Their view is unashamedly old-fashioned. They credit Socrates, famous for contending that the unexamined life is not worth living, with being the founder of liberal education. Accordingly, they provide their readers with a first step by introducing them to the most famous image in all of philosophical literature, Plato's "Allegory of the Cave", in which shackled prisoners watch a shadow-play they mistake for reality. It is meant to represent the intellectual situation into which all people are born, and most live and die: a particular way of political life, structured by authoritative opinions that go largely unquestioned, and conducted according to an understanding of the world implicit in the common language, manners, and mores. Plato's allegory has a special pertinence to the central theme of Liberal Education & Value Relativism, for the ancient philosopher's image captures all the truth that's to be had about people's opinions being relative to their "socio-historical circumstances". The authors recur to this image throughout their analysis of the problem of gaining liberating education, and the very fact that they can frame so much of their argument in the terms of this allegory lends credence to their contention of its timeless validity.
They identify "three great trends which dominate the modern university-specialization, democratization, and politicization," each of which militates against liberal education. But they contend that all three can be traced to one root, namely, "the doctrine of value relativism", and that this "powerful dogma poses the deepest threat to liberal education":
"Because the doctrine of value relativism holds that there are no universally and permanently true answers to the great questions of human existence, it poses a direct and deadly challenge to the very possibility of liberal education. On the theoretical plane, relativism renders the quest for human wisdom pointless. And psychologically speaking, relativism creates the most debilitating teaching environment possible. For students are not inclined to pursue in any serious way questions for which they believe there are not true answers."
The three writers examine the various versions of it most often met with, in each case making several telling observations and arguments that weigh against it. They discuss successively "perspectivism" (the notion that "truth is relative to each individual"); "emotivism" (the claim that "value" judgements, as distinct from "factual" ones, are elliptical expressions of "the emotional preference of the person making the judgement"); "legal relativism" (the view that what people call "just" or "moral" is simply-and properly-whatever is established as such by their legal system); "cultural relativism" (that all value judgments "are valid only in relation to the customs and opinions" of a given society-a view pervasive in modern anthropology and sociology); "historical relativism" (this comes in several variants, the more radical being those that deny the very possibility of trans-historically valid principles and standards of judgement); and finally, "nihilism" (the logical culmination of relativism, being the view "that there is no truth whatsoever": from nihil, "nothing").
Relativism does have other appeals, such as the erroneous belief that it logically validates and encourages tolerance of diversity, and thus tends to support policies such as multiculturalism. The actual implication of this doctrine is that a preference for tolerance and its consequences is just one more subjective value judgement, no more rationally defensible than the most intolerant bigotry. Applied scrupulously, value relativism insists that neither posture is objectively right (or wrong), and that there is no objective measure whereby these or any other value judgements (or the people that make them) can be gauged as being of equal worth. Everything is incomparable so far as value goes. So too, the value of this very doctrine compared with alternative views-so too the value of truth itself!
The authors expressly deny that they are trying to refute conclusively any or all of these relativisms. More modestly, they want to show these doctrines to be dubious enough that no-one with sense could dogmatically affirm them; they want "to awaken a healthy skepticism, one that will promote learning as opposed to passive acceptance of [these] orthodoxies of our age."
Since these doctrines implicitly trivialize intellectual life, the university should be the last place they would flourish. Quite the opposite is the case. So what is at work?
Let me suggest that staple of modern analyses: guilt-academics' guilt that they are ignorant of the cultural tradition about which they are supposedly the experts. The sad fact is, the typical academic today is a narrow specialist having little or no personal familiarity with any of the works of the greatest minds of the past two dozen centuries. One of the more amusing spectacles on the academic scene is the rush of specialists to condemn "Eurocentrism" in the curriculum on the grounds that its range of views is narrow, and that it exerts an illegitimate domination over people's thinking. How would they know?
Their acquaintance with the great Western authors has been pretty much limited to the edited samplings and second-hand summaries typically assigned in undergraduate survey courses, where the guiding rationale is not to learn from past thinkers but to learn about them.
Most students today, having been saturated with relativistic teaching and preaching, suppose, as Malcolmson, Myers, and O'Connell put it, that the only alternative "is something like religious fanaticism. They assume that those who are not relativists must be moral `absolutists' who think they know the truth about everything and want to force their opinions on everyone else." But Socrates, the epitome of our philosophical tradition, was neither a fanatic nor a relativist.
The three authors agree with C. S. Lewis that relativism "robs people of any real convictions," leaving them tolerant through indifference. Probably that is the effect on most people, but I think it has the opposite one on some, who then become disproportionately influential precisely because many others are "value-diffident". If "values" are "established" by sheer willing, by leaps of faith, by passionate commitment, then dogmatic adherence, zealotry, or even fanaticism may seem to be the only way to ground values. These days we often hear people justify their positions by avowing that they care deeply, or feel strongly about something-as if that carried weight.
Three chapters are given to the consequences of value relativism in the academic world, each in its own way inimical to liberal education. One is specialization, which runs directly contrary to the goal of a liberal education ("a well-rounded and synoptic understanding of the world at large, and...of one's place in it"). But with all scholarship and research now being modelled on the practice of the natural sciences-whose technological successes presuppose the kind of finely detailed knowledge only possible through ever-narrower specialization-arts professors with any interest in career progress must become narrow specialists. They cannot pursue their own liberal education, or serve as credible exemplars of its importance, except at the expense of the only thing that will effectively advance their careers: publishing specialized research of interest mainly to other specialists. Moreover, this imperative clashes with their duty as teachers. The authors rightly observe, "There is no necessary tension between good undergraduate teaching and scholarship. In principle, teaching and research can and should complement each other." But in practice they seldom do.
First of all, effort invested in trying to teach well goes largely unrewarded, in part because teaching is notoriously difficult to assess (again, for several reasons), but mainly because, compared with published research, teaching excellence does little to enhance either the professional reputation of individuals, or (consequently) the prestige of institutions. With professors being tacitly encouraged to pursue academic fame, they are proportionally discouraged from taking their teaching responsibilities as seriously as some of them would prefer. This has various harmful results: one is outright neglect of teaching, spending no more time on it than absolutely necessary for avoiding censure; another, the tailoring of what is taught to the professor's narrow research interests of the moment, not to the students' long-term needs. Specialization also adversely affects both the curriculum and the degree requirements. In the absence of any over-arching agreement on what it takes to be an educated human being, "the student is supposed to shop around the academic supermarket, guided by passion or ambition, freely choosing the best bargains." Often, "the result is a program that looks like an academic version of a patchwork quilt."
Democratization is another consequence of value relativism, and it too has several interesting (and amusing) facets in the modern university. Malcolmson, Myers, and O'Connell single out the fashion called student-directed learning (SDL). They entangle what is right about this-"that students learn best when they discover things for themselves"-from what isn't-how "the fully democratized classroom.turns into the very opposite of true education: pooled ignorance, and the reinforcement of prevailing prejudices": bull sessions in the cave. The proper, and practically indispensable, role of the teacher is to serve as a guide, but one whose leadership-like Socrates'-is exercised most importantly through raising the right questions, ones that lead students to an awareness of their ignorance, to a recognition of their intellectual poverty and their need for education. Thus, "a genuinely liberal education is one which combines student discussion and thinking with strong leadership from the teacher." The authors note, "Only in the humanities and social sciences does one find complaints about the hierarchical classroom," for these are based on the presumption that "opinions in the matters covered by the B.A. curriculum [unlike in math or engineering] are relative," hence "equally valid or invalid, those of professors and students alike." The irony is that those who contend "professors should have no more intellectual authority than the students" are in effect denying that it's possible to make progress in these subjects, with the clear implication that they "are not worth studying"-that what should be called for then is not democratization of the classroom, but a dispensing with it altogether!
As for politicization, the authors think this may be "the most troubling aspect of the contemporary university," for it involves much more than attempts to impose "politically correct" speech and behaviour (which "are merely a crude manifestation of the problem"). What is most significant "is the transformation of programs of study into vehicles for social and political change rather than the liberation of the intellect from the convictions and fashions of the day." They readily concede that "the university has never been totally free of politics," but there is a world of difference between its being "committed to the ideal of scholarly objectivity and impartiality," and its seeing "its task as the dissemination and implementation of [particular political] views." By way of explaining how the university came to be so politicized, the authors briefly review the influence of old-fashioned Marxism, but focus mainly on the various components of what is called postmodernism ("a sort of new umbrella organization for all schools of relativism") and its governing premise "that all knowledge, including our knowledge of reason itself, is `socially constructed.'" For reasons that I cannot summarize here, they find that this umbrella turns out to shelter another particular political agenda, no less "arbitrary and contingent" than those it sets out to expose. The authors ask, "If `empowering' is what we're after, then shouldn't our first priority be to empower students to make reasonable political decisions on their own, rather than making them pawns in their professors' political intrigues?"
With that goal in mind, the authors conclude with a chapter (and a related appendix) devoted to fulfilling the promise of their book's subtitle-that is, with a compilation of practical advice on how to salvage a decent education despite the pervasive obstacles they have been at pains to warn their young readers of. For while "the widespread influence of value relativism makes it difficult to pursue a liberal education at our colleges and universities, [it is] not impossible." And so they discuss what sorts of courses one might consider taking, and why; similarly, what sorts to avoid as being a waste of time; what to look for in choosing a school; and perhaps most importantly, how to find recognize good teachers. From start to finish, the student must be open to the possibility that the essentials of being fully human transcend "time, place, gender, and race" and that there can be "a universal and timeless conversation about the meaning of our common humanity." Such is the ruling premise of this engaging and much-needed little book: that to feel the desire "to join in that conversation, or even to question its possibility, is to embark on the quest for liberal education."

 Leon Craig is a professor of political science at the University of Alberta, and the author of The War Lover: A Study of Plato's Republic (University of Toronto Press).