When I introduced undergraduates to the U.S. Constitution, I asked them to read James Madison’s detailed notes from the 1787 Constitutional Convention. They were fascinated to learn that ostensibly sacrosanct words had been the subject of intense, principled disagreement and that much of the Constitution’s structure was the product of compromise. I taught the questions, not the answers, and encouraged students to defend their own views.
I taught this way in part because of my experience as an undergraduate at Cornell in the 1960s. I studied with young professors such as Allan Bloom, Walter Berns and Donald Kagan, who became pillars of American conservatism, but also with noted liberals such as historian Walter LaFeber, who advanced an unsparing critique of American diplomacy. I noticed that they were open to sparring with their students and that they treated colleagues with respect, regardless of their disagreements. This openness of mind and generosity of temperament, I concluded, was the hallmark of education at its best—liberal education—distinguished not from conservative education but from illiberal education, otherwise known as indoctrination.
