Letters on Liberty: The liberating power of education

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Open debate has been suffocated by today’s censorious climate and there is little cultural support for freedom as a foundational value. What we need is rowdy, good-natured disagreement and people prepared to experiment with what freedom might mean today. Faced with this challenge, the Academy of Ideas decided to launch Letters on Liberty – a radical public pamphleteering campaign aimed at reimagining arguments for freedom in the 21st century.

In his Letter – The liberating power of education – writer, lecture and education publisher, Harley Richardson, argues that education has always held a tension between the practical and the technical application of skills and the broader appreciation of a liberal approach to knowledge. Our contemporary aversion to teaching ‘the best that has been thought and known’, he argues, represents a long-standing fear of what the masses might do with unbridled access to education. Teaching is an act of faith, he says, one which must be free to produce new and exciting ideas.

Join Harley and respondents as they explore why we tend to direct education to such narrow ends like teaching to the test. Should we direct funding to subjects that are perceived to be good for the economy? What do we mean by an open-ended liberal education today?