When The Stanford Review was founded in 1987 by Peter Thiel and Norman Book, two of the guiding ideas were to present alternative views on a wide range of current issues in the Stanford community and to create a forum for rational debate. In this issue, we provide a forum for rational debate about the Terri Schiavo case and offer alternative views about taxes from staff writer Shawn Sims and Dr. Alvin Rabushka. Besides these topics, we broach the perennial debate about education at Stanford.

As we begin the Spring Quarter at Stanford, it is appropriate to reflect on the state of our education. To what extent does Stanford promote a classical liberal education with a foundation in Western Civilization? Omkar Muralidharan investigates this question in his report on the Introduction to the Humanities – the program which succeeded Culture, Ideas and Values (CIV) and Western Cultures. Our Editorial Board proposes a course guide consisting of a smorgasbord of “best” courses at Stanford, which is of course not comprehensive.

What is the purpose of a classical liberal education? It is certainly not merely to train oneself for a career. By junior year, students realize that the particular courses they take are less important than getting work experience, perhaps through an internship which can lead to a full-time job upon graduation. Fr. Burtchaell, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, posits, “Education is the opportunity, through studying a variety of subjects, to gain the information and the dexterity to use your wits and your expression. Education prepares you to be someone more than to do something.” A classical liberal education ought to encourage students to examine the history, economics, literature, art, philosophy, politics, religion, and ideas that shaped the culture of the West. With this framework, educated graduates can embark on a life long pursuit of wisdom and knowledge and begin to “discover from whence you have come,” according to Mark C. Henrie.

The orthodoxy on campus of promoting multiculturalism in the classroom persists to the detriment of a classical liberal education. A classical liberal education is not intended to hone the parochial notion of diversity of ethnic and gender studies, which Stanford promotes in part through its General Education Requirement (GER) of Area 4.

Stanford’s GERs encompass so many courses that it is up to students to construct their own curricula. The challenge for students today is to think carefully about how each course they take contributes to their education. As John Henry Newman put it in his Idea of a University, “The enlargement [of mind] consists, not merely in the passive reception into the mind of a number of ideas hitherto unknown to it, but in the mind’s energetic and simultaneous action upon and towards and among those new ideas.”

Fiat Lux!

Benjamin Guthrie