Liberty and Learning: The Evolution of American Education

What is education for? The answer to that question determines everything else about how a society educates its children, and Larry Arnn argues that America's answer has undergone a fundamental transformation that most citizens have never noticed and almost none have chosen. In Liberty and Learning, Hillsdale College's president traces the history of American education from the founding of the U.S. Office of Education in 1869, modeled on the Prussian system, a detail that carries considerable weight, through the Higher Education Act of 1965 and its subsequent expansions, to the contemporary legislative landscape. Each step in that progression reflects not merely a policy change but a deeper shift in the underlying understanding of what education is, what government is for, and what it means to be a human being capable of self-governance. Against this trajectory, Arnn sets the classical tradition: liberal education as it developed at the confluence of biblical religion and Socratic philosophy, aimed not at producing useful workers or compliant citizens but at forming human beings capable of living well and governing themselves. Short, lucid, and philosophically serious, Liberty and Learning is an essential primer for anyone trying to understand why American education is in the condition it is, and what a genuine alternative might look like.