John Adams and W.E.B. DuBois on What Is Education For

I teach a course that is part of the core curriculum, a sequence required of all students at my university, and my subject matter meets with resistance from my audience of sophomores. Even if it didn’t, I would feel obliged to explain to them why they should read old, difficult books written by authors such as Aristotle, John Locke, and Alexis de Tocqueville. My first reading assignment includes Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech, which urged blacks to pursue practical education and trades in order to advance themselves economically, and W.E.B. DuBois’s piercing criticism of it – that preparation for a useful role in the economy is no substitute for the education required to assert one’s full human dignity as a citizen and as a participant in the life of the mind.

I add another short reading assignment to the mix: a letter that John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail from Paris in 1780. Adams refers to but does not describe the beautiful and edifying sights of Paris because “It is not indeed the fine Arts, which our Country requires,” but rather “the Usefull, the mechanic Arts.” So far, Adams seems to be on the same page as my students and their tuition-paying parents: practicality is all.

But then things get complicated, as Adams tells Abigail that

[t]he Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences….  I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

Adams regards politics and war as instrumental and ministerial. But his liberal education, which enables him to appreciate the needs of the moment, leads him to regard something as higher than politics: the painting, poetry, and music, for which he does not currently have time. Politics and war are required to secure liberty, which then enables the study of the useful arts, among them, commerce and agriculture. Those useful arts, in turn, are also instrumental and ministerial, generating the wealth and leisure necessary to contemplate the beautiful. 

Consider the words Adams uses in this passage: “I must,” “have liberty,” “ought,” and “give their children a right.” Adams’s successful fulfillment of his duty helped give his sons liberty, which they were obliged to use in a particular way so that the next generation could contemplate beauty. There are three moments here: the political, the commercial and agricultural, and the aesthetic. The first is marked by necessity, the second by liberty, and the third by leisure. Neither necessity nor liberty precludes duty and responsibility. Necessity doesn’t merely excuse, and liberty doesn’t merely permit. The duty associated with politics is the promotion of liberty, and the duty associated with commerce is the facilitation of leisure, which can be used to contemplate “the good, the true, and the beautiful.” Commerce isn’t about money-making for its own sake, however tempting that prospect is. And politics isn’t about the pursuit and accumulation of power – either for its own sake or for the sake of accumulating wealth. 

But the appropriate contemplation of the good, the true, and the beautiful is a matter neither of duty nor of compulsion. Rather, it is the felicitous result of the liberal education that Adams received at Harvard, which enabled him to appreciate both the needs of the moment and the dignified purposes of all human striving.  

In the end, Adams and DuBois agree in recognizing the limits of what DuBois calls the “commercial spirit of the age” and locating the dignity of our humanity in what we can understand and appreciate. For these great thinkers, an education in freedom is not merely an education in economic self-sufficiency, nor merely in political self-government, but ultimately one that facilitates human flourishing at its fullest – facilitated by, but not defined by, the economic and the political.

I recognize that in introducing my students to this argument I’m swimming against the tide of the times. But a good education is not one that simply affirms what students already know and feel, letting them stay where they were when they started.