Curriculum of Liberty

The author proposes the Curriculum of Liberty, in the spirit of the National Association of Scholars' principles, which will educate American college students toward freedom, the pursuit of truth, and virtuous citizenship, with a double goal in mind. In the short term, Americans must learn the lessons of self-reliance, liberty, and virtue to make it possible for them to secure decent livelihoods under an indecent regime, to endure their corrupt elites, and to reclaim the nation. In the long term, Americans should equip themselves with the scientific education needed to sustain America in its competition with rivals such as China--now technological peers, and soon superiors, if the crippling policies of elites continue in force. The nation should be free, and it should be capable of greatness in the world. The author offers the Curriculum of Liberty keenly aware that it is only the latest of a great many sketches on how to redo higher education--many of them worthy, few of them influential. But the National Association of Scholars has been offering a great many policy reforms the last few years, and the author thinks that it is worth articulating a basic vision of higher education, which are taken to be in accordance with NAS principles, to provide a background for those proposed policy reforms. Then too, the new surge of successfully enacted education reform policies offers the possibility that a sketch of education reform principles may indeed have real-world effect. The Curriculum of Liberty's vision is articulated as much in the Introduction's essayistic account of America's ideals and current national challenges as in the curricular details that follow. The author hopes that readers will find both halves of the Curriculum of Liberty to be useful as an orienting account of what American higher education has been, is, and should be.