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How Liberal Education Isn’t So Liberal

Students are inadequately prepared for carrying on the task of advancing Western civilization.

William Matthew McCarter
4 min readOct 13, 2019
Photo by Jorge Fernández Salas on Unsplash

Legend has it that the greatest school that ever existed was on a street corner in Athens with Socrates engaging in a dialogue with a student or two. We Americans likely would think that this definition is quaint and cute because American education is about as far removed from this as it can get.

Instead of a meaningful dialogue using the Socratic method, American education suffers from aimlessness and confusion.

While Socrates and his students were engaged in one-on-one dialogue, America’s education factories become larger and larger and what passes for education inside them becomes less serious, less rigorous, and less effective.

Consequently, the students coming out of these factories are less equipped than previous generations, have less develop minds and even less developed characters.

Students are inadequately prepared for carrying on the task of advancing Western civilization.

Educators and policy makers have failed America’s students by failing to think hard and be imaginative about what education is supposed to entail.

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William Matthew McCarter
William Matthew McCarter

Written by William Matthew McCarter

Dr. William Matthew McCarter lives in SE Missouri. His award winning fiction and academic work have been published extensively. Profmccarter@yahoo.com

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