Helena Rosenblatt

He engaged in moral uplift.

And they recognized that.

And it showed that a liberal democracy could survive if it had a leader like this.

They also recognized that it was those kinds of leaders are very hard to find.

Oh, the purpose of the liberal arts education is really to form leaders, to form freedom-loving and moral leaders and giving them the tools, rhetoric and history and some science for sure.

But it's supposed to train citizens, really, through engagement with the classics.

In the early times, there was a lot of emphasis on being able to speak in public language.

to speak in a convincing way in public.

And this is all really to convince people to become citizens and to do the right thing.

It sounds terribly idealistic, and I don't always want to, again, idealize them or say these people were perfect in every way, far from it.

But the ideas were pretty beautiful, and I think we could learn something from them.

No, it was not.

Today, it's a lot about vocational training, a lot about preparing students to get jobs.

These were considered menial tasks.

Liberal arts was for the leaders in the times, and the citizens were the leaders of society in Rome.

In medieval period as well, it was always about something other than preparing you for a job.

Isn't it funny that today, when people try to defend the humanities, which are under siege in many universities, frankly,

and they try to advocate for liberal arts education, that they say, oh, well, actually, there's proof that having a liberal arts education will get you that job.

So that whole discussion about what a citizen of a democracy means, what it means to be a citizen, what are the values, what is our common language, what does it mean to be a citizen of a democracy?

All of these questions that are so important have kind of dropped out of our discussion.