S8 Ep190: PREVIEW — Peter Berkowitz — Classical Liberal Arts Education and Roman Republic Heroes. Berkowitz argues that modern liberal arts education has systematically severed its intellectual connection to Roman Republic heroic figures including Cato and Cicero,

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

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🗓️ 11 December 2025

⏱️ 2 minutes

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Summary

PREVIEW — Peter Berkowitz — Classical Liberal Arts Education and Roman Republic Heroes. Berkowitz argues that modern liberal arts education has systematically severed its intellectual connection to Roman Republic heroic figures including Cato and Cicero, classical exemplars of republican virtue and liberty who profoundly inspired the AmericanFounding Fathers and shaped their constitutional vision. Berkowitz laments that few contemporary university students or faculty members possess the requisite cultural heritage, classical education, or imaginative capacity formed by engagement with these ancient standards of philosophical liberty, political virtue, and republican governance, thereby depriving new generations of the intellectual and moral foundations that undergirded American constitutional democracy and republican principles.
1789 NEW YORK

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is John Batchel. Conversation with my good colleague, Peter Berkowitz, an educator from Hoover Institution,
0:07.0	about the disappointment in today's liberal arts education, what needs to be done. In this instance,
0:14.9	Peter reflects upon the heroes for the founders. Not the founders themselves,
0:21.8	they were alive and struggling
0:23.9	up against the greatest empire on the planet
0:27.4	and the best Navy ever.
0:29.9	No, their heroes were
0:31.8	the heroes of the Roman Republic,
0:34.0	Cato, for example, or Cicero. And today, those names are
0:42.6	forgotten or never know. And what can go right about restoring liberal education's
0:50.5	foundation consistent with the foundation of this nation.
0:55.2	Peter describes much more of this later.
0:59.1	Here's Peter Berkowitz.
1:00.8	Well, I think that's right, John.
1:03.0	The colonists, the revolutionaries, the founding fathers, they lived in a world, an intellectual world that was populated by the best, the freest and noblest citizens of Republican Rome.
1:21.1	They were a part of their cultural heritage.
1:25.1	They inspired their imagination. They wanted to guide their lives in accordance with
1:30.7	the same standards and virtues. I'm sorry to say that we have entirely lost it. Very, very few
1:39.4	are the students today? Worse. Very, very few are the the professors today even those teaching the humanities
1:46.7	whose minds have been formed whose imaginations have been excited and enlivened by by the study of
1:55.2	the roman republic

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