Rescuing Socrates Quotes

“Liberal education looks to the meaning of a human life beyond the requirements of subsistence—instead of asking how to make a living, liberal education asks what living is for. “These studies,” says Aristotle, “are undertaken for their own sake, whereas those relating to work are necessary and for the sake of things other than themselves.”3 Liberal education concerns the human yearning to go beyond questions of survival to questions of existence.”
― Roosevelt Montás, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation

“Aristotle described it as an education “given not because it is useful or necessary but because it is noble and suitable for a free person.”
― Roosevelt Montás, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation

“Gandhi understood the civilization that emerged from the Industrial Revolution as a materialist worldview that placed wealth, comfort, and longevity as the highest human goods.”
― Roosevelt Montás, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation

“When making the case for liberal education to low-income students and families, I often point out that there is a long tradition of steering working-class students toward an education in servitude, an education in obedience and docility, an education in not asking questions. The idea that liberal education is only for the already privileged, for the pampered elite, is a way of carrying on this odious tradition. It is a way of putting liberal education out of the reach of the people who would most benefit from it—precisely the people who have historically been denied the tools of political agency. I ask them to take a look at who sends their children to liberal arts colleges and at what liberal arts college graduates go on to do with their “useless” education.”
― Roosevelt Montás, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation