Until 1959, Middlebury offered a major in Home Economics. Wendell Berry would be both pleased and amused, I think, by this title – for as he says in a different essay, the word economics itself alludes to the home: the root is oikisteis, Greek for “household” thus making the name of the discipline rather redundant. Should not the economy be small enough that the proper running of a household should infer the proper running of the larger system? He would appreciate that students learned important skills, like “dietics” “nutrition” “sewing” but would perhaps wrinkle his nose when he saw that the senior seminar involved living in a mock house and practicing table setting.
Middlebury once offered this major, but does no longer, not on grounds of sexism (when Middlebury takes action on the grounds of sexism, and not capitalism, I will eat my hat) but on utility; the home economics major was considered too practical and therefore not proper for a liberal arts institution. It was phased out at the same time as the teacher training programs.
What am I getting at? That there is a fundamental difference between the way that Wendell Berry looked at the domestic role and the way our college did way back when. Our college saw it as practical, and Wendell Berry saw it as practical and therefore soul-nourishing. Practical, and through the practicality, spiritual. While he saw the two hand in hand, Middlebury tends to see anything that is practical as something that should not be taught, because the liberal arts is intended to cultivate the mind, not the land. In this sense, I believe that Middlebury defines the purpose of the liberal arts education in a way that runs parallel to Leo Strauss, in his essay, “Liberal Education and Mass Democracy.” In this essay, Strauss notes that the liberal arts is a study in culture, with the final product being a cultured human being. Culture is created, and as such the liberal arts is a metaphor based off of and understanding of Berry’s agriculture: the cultivation of “the soil and its products” which will necessarily involve maintaining and improving. The mind, too, needs to be cultivated with similarl ends in mind, but Strauss claims that cultivators of the mind are not as easy to come by as good farmers (although to this, I think, Berry would insert statistics of the decline of “the good farmer of the old school”).
These cultivators of the mind are teachers, but these teachers, too, are in turn students. Before Strauss gets pulled into a system of infinite regress, he mentions that there are also First Teachers – these are the minds that not also belong to pupils but are the greatest minds and live in the pages of books: the great books.
These books are supposed to teach us lucky few liberal arts students how to live. The great books will grant us access to culture, they will show us not just why, but what a virtuous life looks like. With this knowledge will come responsibility, and etcetera etcetera we will become leaders and light the way for the masses out of the cave of materialism and into the light of correct opinion etcetera.
What I am trying to say is that Wendell Berry and Leo Strauss start in similar points, they start with culture, and end in radically different places. Each thinks he has found an ideology that the lucky few should cling to, whether that is via farming or reading.
Middlebury seems to agree with Strauss over Berry, as we read books, not soil. And while this may be the best route to the ethical flourishing of the soul, for all of those masses trapped in that cave, I consider the way of agriculture to be a noble and heroic way forward. I don’t think I got to the best ending, I would appreciate dialogue – after all, I am most certainly a beginning pupil myself.