[ndriscoll]

To that point, how many university educated American adults have actually read, say, Locke? It's been freely and easily accessible for decades, e.g.:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7370

How many university (liberal arts even) educated Americans have read the Federalist Papers? The Declaration of Independence? The Constitution?

[aleph_minus_one]

> How many university (liberal arts even) educated Americans have read the Federalist Papers? The Declaration of Independence? The Constitution?

To give a counterpoint:

C. P. Snow. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures (overview)

> https://web.archive.org/web/20170508085255/https://www.rbkc....

[ndriscoll]

I don't think that's really a counterpoint. My point was that I get the impression that even those in the humanities seem to be losing familiarity with liberal ideas. So it's even worse now (or we've just lied to ourselves as we pretend to expand access to higher education).

[UncleMeat]

Where do you get this impression from? Faculty? Published research? My observation is that people working in the humanities have a deeper and wider reading list than at any point in prior history.

If you are complaining about students then I don't see what the problem is with not having read these particular texts. The humanities is so incredibly wide and it is good that we have widened curricula to not just focus everybody down a particular reading list of western intellectual tradition. A humanities education isn't there to just pump out classical liberals.

A polisci major who studies ancient chinese politics or 21st century dictatorships is just as legitimate as somebody who studies Locke and western liberal democracy.

[ndriscoll]

I'm mostly speaking to the students, but certainly there are faculty that would apply to as well.

If we're talking about some intangible benefit to society for having lots of educated people, I would interpret that as being in service to civic contributions, so yes I would expect that means a liberal arts education should teach Western canon, and certainly it should not undermine it. If not in service to economic utility or propagating our values and traditions, then why exactly would we support a large portion of the population to do nothing but pursue hobby study in something no one else wants for years? Actually it's not even clear that the students even want to do that study either, given the apparent mass cheating or AI usage. So who is it for?

[UncleMeat]

What does it mean to undermine it? Is your position that no matter what the rigorous application of some research method produces that you should always come to a predetermined conclusion that some particular form of western liberalism fro the 17th century is the best? Or is it possible to place these texts in complex and even critical dialog with other texts?

Can you be specific about which "values and traditions" you need to see forcefully propagated through higher education? And are we to assume that a particular form of libertarian economic project is best for "economic utility?" And should we even be optimizing for economic utility rather than human flourishing?

Hobby study? Graduates in the humanities also consistently get jobs that require degrees and go into the work force.

I am curious how much time you've spent engaged with the college humanities departments of today.

[ndriscoll]

You can place them in a dialog with other texts, but that implies that students are reading and becoming intimately familiar with the canon being critiqued. And generally speaking, I'd expect more of a refinement than a critique per se.

I didn't say we should forcefully propagate anything; I said we shouldn't fund things that aren't useful somehow. Some basic values would be that e.g. governments derive their authority from the citizenry, and should therefore always act in the interests of the citizens. If the citizens aren't seeing some benefit, then they shouldn't be taxed to fund a thing. Assuming people disagree on whether they want something, it follows that government should be as local as possible, so if we do fund such things, we shouldn't do so at the federal level unless there is widespread agreement (e.g. maybe we all agree to fund STEM degrees for their economic utility but there is disagreement on social science so those are done locally).

Or that as a high level idea, our entire system is predicated on the idea that people are qualified and able to define their own destiny and self-govern, which is generally in opposition to the idea that we are determined by various privileges and circumstances that require all sorts of compensatory adjustments. Basically, if you want to flourish, just go do that. Again, the books are all there. Most if not all of them are free. We already have 13 years of free, compulsory schooling to learn how to read them.

Or the idea that rights should be principled (e.g. carry some symmetry), not arbitrary. c.f. elsewhere in the thread about natural rights. And by extension, that some systems (e.g. ours) are better than others.

The context here is targeting programs that do not produce economic benefit, so that is hobby study, yes. There's nothing wrong with hobby study. I read textbooks all the time for fun. I think we should encourage everyone to do a lot more of it instead of e.g. Instagram. But I also have a day job.

[WillAdams]

Those texts were a standard part of grade school social studies when I was young, and my children read all in the course of a typical public education long before graduating.

[ndriscoll]

They might be part of the curriculum, but apparently ~half the country doesn't know what we just celebrated[0], so I somehow doubt they actually did their reading. It's pretty easy to pass or even do well in classes without really engaging with the material at all, even at the university level. Like I got an A in a philosophy course by just reading the professor's notes on exam morning and spitting them back out on an essay. I've still never gone back and actually read Grotius.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2026/07/03/nx-s1-5881451/cato-institute-...

[WillAdams]

By definition, half of the population is of below average intelligence.

As my daughter said to her boyfriend in college, "Welcome to the upper half of the bell curve."

[ndriscoll]

Right but that's just it: it's barely the upper half (over 40% of young people now get a degree apparently[0]), and the age breakdown indicates that 40% is also apparently the proportion of 18-29s that know we declared independence 250 years ago. So assuming continuity and rough correspondence of the two distributions, that's approximately the level of knowledge at the threshold of degree holders now.

Actually the census data says ~43% get a degree and the article says 39% of 18-29s know what we celebrated, so presumably at least 4% (~9% of degree holders) are able to get a degree and don't know.

If this is our bottom end, I get the sense that even above-average students (even of liberal arts) aren't reading Montesquieu or whatever image people try to evoke about highly educated societies.

[0] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/educatio...