I'm John Bachelor with Jacob Howland writing at Civitas Outlook for Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches.

And we're discussing the liberal education and what happened to it?

Where did it go?

Thomas Jefferson understood that research, research, research was an opportunity for America, the young republic, to set itself apart from the overwhelming

classical traditions of Europe. At the same time, Jefferson had thoughts about liberal education.

I wanted distill this all down to what is to be done. The word usefulness, Jacob, all of a sudden,

having read your essay, I become wary of the word

usefulness. Should I be?

I think you should be. You know, back in early 1870s, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a series of essays

on education.

And he also wrote something called in The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.

And in those lectures and in that book, he said that universities ideally should be places

where the young can ripen, develop into mature adults, develop their own perspectives.

And he even complained at that time, and that's now 150 years ago, that instead, the German

universities were trying to rush students through their education so that they could be useful.

And what he meant by useful is plug into the economy, right?

Be productive citizens in the very literal meaning of that word, right?

Add to the GDP.

Fast forward.

Today, of course, people go to a university, by the way, for many reasons, and one legitimate reason is to be employable when you graduate.

But today, social utility has expanded beyond the economic to mean something like political utility.

One of the things Eva Braun talks about in 1979,

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