forward from An Education for Our Time by Josiah Bunting

 "Major General Josiah Bunting III was not given an easy task in June of 1996.  Although he had served as president of several universities, he was about to embark on his most challenging assignment of all: integrating women into the previously all-male Virginia Military Institute (VMI).  While he disagrees with the Supreme Court's decision declaring such institutions unconstitutional - and fought it zealously - he accepted it.  And he changed the university, accommodating it to the new cadets while preserving many of the traditions that had made VMI what it was.

In our day - when faced with demands for 'new' history, quotas for literature, gender equality, affirmative action, and women's studies - we see that times are changing in American higher education.  But General Bunting was responsible for changing within a year an institution that had gone more than 150 years without much change.  He understood that conservatism is not about dogmatic opposition.  It is, as Abraham Lincoln said, about preserving the best of the past.

Yet this book is the tale not of Bunting's personal or political struggle but rather of his ongoing exploration of timeless truths about education.  He writes that 'the business of undergraduate education remains the cultivation of character and mind, of instinct and ability, of leadership and service.  It is the way men should live and behave in our culture and our country that is the proper business of our colleges.'

Reading such passages, I was reminded of my tenure at the United States Department of Education.  In 1988 I gave a speech at Stanford University in which I responded to growing, hostile arguments for something called 'Cultures, Ideas, and Values,' a new curriculum meant to replace Stanford's Western Civilization program.

Here's in part of what I said to them:

'The point for contemporary higher education is this.  The classics of Western philosophy and literature amount to a great debate on the perennial questions. To deprive students of this debate is to condemn them to improvise their ways of living in ignorance of their real options and the best arguments for each.  Consider the point/counterpoint of Western thought.  On the ends of government, whom do we follow - Madison or Marx?  On the merits of the religious life - Aquinas or Voltaire? On the nobility of the warrior - Homer or Erasmus?  On the worth of reason - Hegel or Kierkegaard?  On the role of women - Wollstonecraft or Schopenhauer?  The study of Western civilization is not, then a case for ideology; it is a case for philosophy and thoughtfulness.  It considers not only the one hand, but the one hand and the other - and, just as often, the third and fourth hands as well.  Those who take the study of the West seriously end up living a variety of different lives and arriving at a diversity of opinions and positions.  And for the diversity, in the West as nowhere else, there is unparalleled tolerance and encouragement.'

I cite that speech in order to prepare the reader for Bunting's radical task.  General Bunting wants to show us how - that is, in what manner and by what means - we might resuscitate the serious study of fundamental, permanent human questions.  He wants to show how we might expand students' minds by refining their field of inquiry - how we might deepen their souls by locating, then cultivating, their better angels.

For many years, conservatives, and even some liberals, have raised concerns about the American higher-education system.  Indeed, most of us now know the failings, the scandals, the problems, and even the causes of the problem.  But Josiah Bunting does not just criticize; he has moved beyond the merely descriptive to the prescriptive and the constructive.  He provides a glimpse of a 'new and improved' American higher-education system ('new and improved' though it stems from the successes of the past) and shows how that improved education might lead to better citizens might lead to a better nation.

General Bunting presents an outline of an ideal university, organizing it around the answers to give specific questions he presents early on:

1.  What is our mission?
2.  Who should our students be?
3.  How should they live?
4.  What should they learn?
5.  Who should lead and teach them?

Of course, these are the same questions that were asked by Plato and Aristotle.  Bunting's answers thus, quite properly point back (and up) to the ancients, the classics.  We should teach our students to be virtuous - to be rugged, responsible individuals, as well as faithful, dedicated citizens.  Teaching students a specific technical skill is not as important as teaching them how to think.  Nor is it as important as teaching them to be good people.  These currently quaint lessons are what guide Josiah Bunting's tenure at VMI.  They are what guide this work as well.

George Washington made the relevant point in a letter to his nephew in 1790:

'To point out the importance of circumspection in your conduct, it may be proper to observe that a good moral character is the first essential in a man, and that habits contracted at your age are generally indelible, and your conduct here may stamp your character through your life.  It is therefore highly important that you should endeavor not only to be learned but virtuous.  Much more might be said to shew the necessity of application and regularity, but when you must know that without them you can never be qualified to render service to your country, assistance to your friends, or consolation to your retired moments, nothing further need be said to prove their utility.'

The proper business of our colleges in indeed to form citizens -  not simply doctors or lawyers or computer programmers.  You wouldn't know it by the numbers.  Less than 25% of today's undergraduates are liberal-arts majors.  Just over 25% are business majors; most of the rest follow vocational tracks to fields such as health care and primary and secondary education.  Bunting is right: 'The things our country requires are simply not the things our colleges are prepared to deliver.'  We must recover the idea that education is more than making a living.  Educations best claim, William James said, is that it teaches a person to value what deserves to be valued.

And in The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis writes: 'We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.'  Citizens are so made - with or without hollow chests - through education.  The education Bunting provides at VMI, and recommends here, makes citizens with chests.

Pledging our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor is not popular at the moment.  But it remains as essential now as it did in 1776.  And it remains the hallmark of a good citizen, a good American, a good person.  Education is more than knowledge of academic interests.  It is about the formation of character.  This latter point is the focus, indeed the noble thesis of Josiah's elegantly written book."

- William J. Bennett
May 1998