A century ago, the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard and one of the founders of the NAACP, W.E.B. DuBois published The Gift of Black Folk, a book that was commissioned by the Catholic organization the Knights of Columbus, as part of a series intended to help Americans appreciate the contributions of minority groups.
DuBois was highly educated and an avid reader of great texts from Plato to Frederick Douglass. The irony of the present moment is that if DuBois were currently a student in a core philosophy class at Texas A&M University, he would be assigned only a redacted version of Plato's great work, The Republic.
Amid the current right-wing movement that purports to counter progressive woke indoctrination in the curriculum, there is often also a stated desire to avoid controversial topics. Alas, there can be no real education without such controversy or without entering into contested issues.
What we are witnessing in our public life is a battle between different forms of identity politics, with cancel culture avidly pursued on both sides. We've created a political version of Newton's law of motion wherein every action calls forth an opposite but exponentially greater reaction.
Here's another irony. DuBois, who asserted that the "problem of the 20th Century is the problem of the color line" and worked tirelessly to bring to light various forms of prejudice, from lynchings to the denial of voting rights, is also among the greatest defenders of classical liberal education.
At the original and still premier great books school in the nation, St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., DuBois is the only author read there who also lectured at the school, an event in 1952 that was initiated by the school's first African American student. In a senior seminar that includes Alexander Hamilton, Alexis de Tocqueville, Frederick Douglass, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, St. John's students read DuBois' Souls of Black Folk.
In one brilliant chapter, he argues that liberal education counters the reduction of human persons to producers and consumers by nourishing the human longing to pursue what is true, good and beautiful and to ponder "the riddle of existence."
America has typically seen education in instrumental terms, as providing resume credentials. Benjamin Franklin offered a paradigmatic defense of useful education in his autobiography. But Black authors like DuBois have often stressed the connection between human dignity and searching inquiry about what it means to be human.
Self-educated against the prohibitions of slave owners, Frederick Douglass came to have quite an exalted view of education, as the "uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light by which men can only be made free."
Of course, Douglas and especially DuBois were also quite critical of Western texts and traditions at times, and often drew upon authors who amplified those critiques.
Consider the influence of the Russian author Dostoevsky, often a part of the mainstream great books canon, who excoriated the corrupting influence of modern Western thought on his native Russia.
But then there is no single Western tradition. At its best, it is the site of inquiry into contested issues and ongoing debates.
In any serious education, controversy and disagreement will always be present. Such debates help us to see that the discussion is often extended by disagreement coming from those at its margins. No doubt the Catholics who published DuBois' book a century ago were motivated in part by their own history of exclusion and by the fact that at that moment in American life, the Ku Klux Klan was turning its execrable brand of hatred toward Catholicism.
Currently we lack both high level debate and a willingness to detect in others similarities to ourselves. For education to occur, we will need more of both, not less.