Hello and welcome to the back of the book, a podcast devoted to arts and culture.

I'm your host, Christopher Scalia, of the American Enterprise Institute.

For this special episode of the back of the book,

I'm happy to share a talk that Zena Hits delivered at AEI on March 11th

about the role of a liberal education and the threats posed to it in our democracy.

In his proposed bill for the more general profusion of knowledge, written in 1779,

Thomas Jefferson made the case that a healthy republic requires an educated citizenry

and that the states should therefore educate the most talented

young men regardless of social standing or class. He wrote, quote, and this is a long quote,

Experience hath shown that even under the best forms of government, those entrusted with power

have, in time, and by slow operations,

perverted it into tyranny.

And it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be to illuminate,

as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts

which history exhibiteth that, possessed thereby of the experience of all other ages and

countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert

their natural powers to defeat its purposes.

And, once it becomes expedient for promoting the public happiness that those persons,

whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education

worthy to receive and able to guard the sacred deposits of the rights

and liberties of their fellow citizens."

Benjamin Franklin is said to have remarked that the Constitutional Convention established,

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