Brann on studying the West

Eva Brann is not to be confused with Eva Braun. The latter, of course, was Adolf Hitler's companion. The former is the longest-serving tutor of St. John's College (Annapolis), where she has taught the school's great books curriculum since 1957. In this article, "The Great Tradition," she essays to answer the question: Why study the West?

Among the many points that Ms. Brann makes on the benefits of thoroughly studying the Western tradition, one is about intellectual, cultural, and personal empathy for others: "being rooted in one’s own [tradition] is practically a predicate for appreciating the ways of others as other, that is, of confronting these ways not in melding surrender, but in observant receptivity."

Professor Brann's prose does not always make for the easiest of reading, but it is candid. She eschews the common ways in which the value of a course of study is, these days, measured by its presumed utility. (Often it is the utility of future earnings power.) "Why must education be a means only instead of an end in itself?" she in effect asks. A fair question. But the importance of her point about empathy should not be missed.

It strikes me that in affirming liberal education as primarily an end in itself Ms. Brann actually spotlights it as perhaps a truly great means: liberal education in the Western tradition is, when pursued as its own end, a means to the virtuous goal of informed, civil, reflective, and reasoned understanding of those who differ from us. Such informed and patient empathy is currently in short supply.

If liberal education of the sort that Ms. Brann advocates as a goal itself also results in more and better practitioners of empathy, and if this is a prized value of our contemporary society, then why is this course of study in decline in American universities? If this sort of education, as the term itself suggests, "leads people out" of themselves into humane, heady, and heartfelt intercourse with others, then maybe promoting university curriculum in the Western tradition deserves to be reconsidered -- and, well, the study actually pursued.