The document outlines the academic goals and philosophy for a course based on the views of Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College. It discusses how the goal of a liberal arts education is to draw out the best from students' intellect and soul through teaching intellectual and moral virtues. Education aims to lead students from their experiences and external knowledge to an understanding of the fundamental nature of things. It emphasizes developing both students' minds and hearts through challenging their whole person. The document advocates applying this approach to promote what is highest and best in life and learning for all students.

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ACADEMIC GOALS FOR THE CLASS
Running head: THE ACADEMIC GOALS FOR THE
SEMESTER
The Academic Philosophy and Goals for Our Course:
A First Inquiry
Steven Christopher Ippolito
Monroe College
Abstract
The work of Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College,
Hillsdale, MI has attracted considerable attention, as of late, in
the area of higher education. Its focus on the value-laden
timelessness of the liberal arts education represents the essence
of conservative values in classical teaching and culture.
Traditionally, the goal of the liberal arts education is to stress
what is highest and best in life and learning. Thus, education,
from the Latin, e ducere (to lead out; to draw out) signifies, in
Dr. Arnn’s conceptualization, the junction of the empirical and
the sensible (that which comes from outside a person) and the
rational (the intellectual center of a person’s being), the logos,
or the soul. The liberal arts education re-creates the human
being; it envisions the intellect, not as an epiphenomenon of the
brain and nervous system, but something that is more in the
Medieval construction, something where the intellect is one of
the three main powers of the soul, the other two being memory
(memoria); and the other, the will (voluntas). Moroever, the

2. liberal arts education teaches the intellectual and moral virtues,
something that is sorely lacking from the contemporary
classroom, onsite or virtual. The purpose of this paper,
therefore, is to reference and advocate the academic views of
Larry Arnn and the fundamental meaning of the liberal arts
education, past and present, for all students, in order to draw
our or lead out of them from their most profound center of
being (soul; logos), and engender the work of intellectual and
personal transformation in both the classroom and in all of life.
Keywords: logos, learning, soul, will, memory, intellect, liberal
arts education, virtues
The Academic Philosophy and Goals for Our Course:
A First Inquiry
One of the great educators in the United States, Dr. Larry P.
Arnn (2012), President of Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, MI, has
set forth what one might call, the Hillsdale Way, that is, a view
to what is best in teaching and learning. With these views, I
wholeheartedly agree, primarily because they are predicated on
sound teaching experience, and a basic common sense that never
seems to go out of fashion. The purpose of this brief paper –
actually it is an introduction to all my Monroe students – is to
reference these views, the core of the Hillsdale Way, for they
will be the basis of how this class, indeed, all my classes, will
proceed throughout the semester.
The Liberal Arts Education
The word education is derived from two Latin words, e ducere,
meaning “to draw out,” or “to lead forth”. Education, then, is
an attempt by a teacher to draw forth the best from the center of
a student’s existential Self, by introducing the student to that
which is best from the world of ideas, and phenomenal Being
(Gr. όν). The center of one’s being, the anima (Lt. soul) or
logos (λόγος), which involves “principle,” or “reason,” a

3. critical component immanent within the human essence,
permeates all reality, as “an active rational and spiritual
principle” (Logos, 2012). The logos, however, cannot be
separated from the human person; intrinsically, therefore, the
logos or soul is the critical dimension in the process of
education and amongst the highest and best aspects of what it
means to be a human person. Thus, education can never be
divorced from the development of a completely formed human
being, for in the struggle to master the rigors of learning, the
student confronts the logos.
Through education, the learner takes what is best from the
history of innumerable learners’ experiences in many times and
many places. In education, the student must bring forth what is
best in his or her deepest, highest, and most profound levels of
being, if education is to be considered meaningful. The
profound depths of being are called by some the soul; and with
that term I have no substantial objection. Historically, one
learns that the relationship of the soul and philosophical
speculation can be dated to “the time of the pre-Socratic
philosophers” (Kelly, 2004, p. 9). Yet, even before the Greek
experience, the concept of soul was already time-honored and
venerable in the lives of human beings (Kelly, 2004). In
various cultures, East and West, the soul was conceived as the
“breath of life that survived death” (Kelly, 2004, p. 9). But it
was in the West, however, that the Greeks would develop the
concept of soul to an important degree (Kelly, 2004). The
Greeks regarded the soul as a powerful principle of one’s life
and experience; it was the soul, in this view that characterized
the human person as a “unique individual” (Kelly, 2004, p. 9).
[The soul] is the seat of human character, and the ground of the
possibility of our awareness of one’s existence. This soul
became the object of higher education. Education released a
person’s soul from its immersion in the physical and mental
environment into which it had been born and prepared the
person to think in a new
way about a new kind of object. Socrates told his fellow

4. Athenians to ‘care for their souls.’ They should turn their
thoughts away from the changing individual things of
this world and look into the nature of things (Kelly, 2004, p. 9)
(emphasis added).
Plato, the student of Socrates, made it a standard practice for
educators to “pass from seeing to understanding, from a
practical grasp of how things work to a theoretical
understanding of their nature” (Kelly, 2004, p. 11). Apropos of
the soul in relationship to learning, the Greeks utilized a
specific term in their language: paideia, in order to refer to the
“state of cultivation of the soul that is fostered by education
(Kelly, 2004, p. 9). In succeeding centuries, the medieval
scholastic philosophers, the founders of the university tradition
in Europe, and their intellectual descendants in the New World
of America would build upon the Greek experience in regard to
matters like the soul. The academic heirs of the Greek
experience, moreover, would come to understand the intellect to
be one of the traditional powers of the soul, and not simply an
epiphenomenon of the brain and the nervous system (not to
denigrate that most marvelous piece of human equipment that
helps us to understand the way we do), but a reality of the
human spirit that makes us different from all the other species
of the earth.
The intellect, then, is what concerns us in the fundamental
experience of education, though the application of the intellect
is not by any means the only issue in good education. Learning
is one of the most challenging emotional experiences of a
person’s life. Education can never be simply a matter of rote
memorization of facts and figures, but rather a comprehensive
experience that necessarily challenges the whole person, to
which any good student or teacher who has ever struggled with
individual course work can attest. Additionally, this challenge
would come to comprise a central concern in the modern liberal
arts education. For in time, a belief would emerge that the goal
of a liberal arts education is to promote “the highest and best

5. learning is that which ’develops the minds’ and ‘improves the
hearts’ of the students; in other words, it teaches the intellectual
and moral virtues’” (Arnn, 2012, p. xi). It is this belief that is
being advanced unhesitatingly in this paper.
In short, the liberal arts education represents an attempt to
secure for individual students what is highest and best in life.
This is a value system that is not heard nearly enough
nowadays. Approaching education in this manner, allows
powerful realities to take place on a daily basis in any good
classroom (or online course in cyberspace). It is precisely what
I hope to see happen
in this class, just as I have seen it happen frequently in many of
the classes at Monroe College.Thus, whatever the academic
major, whatever the class, the goal described in this paper, the
unification of heart and mind, and the virtues that are both
intellectual and moral, for me represent that which is drawn out
(e ducere) from the midst of diligent learners; and it is always
taking place when good students know what their goals are, and
when they are determined to succeed. My hope, too, is to for
all of you to succeed, in this and every class, and in precisely
this way.
That which is gained in higher education. In the contemporary
world, racked by political instability, dangers of various kinds,
and seemingly interminable economic distress, some have
wondered aloud as to what the need or purpose of learning is,
anymore. This, I am sure, is a response to uncertainty. The
answer to these problems, however, is not to promote less
learning, but to encourage more of it. After all, it is going to
take some mighty clever people – and there are not as many of
these in evidence nowadays – to rectify these issues.
Fundamentally, then, the student learns to learn in his or her
academic career. If there is no learning, the positive goals of a

6. healthy society are made that much more difficult to realize.
Thus, in the basic classroom, is where an entire universe of
positive and life-affirming changes will begin. Education is a
work with a marked beginning and an end point. That
termination point is the conferring of a diploma and degree at
the end of a course of study. Yet, it is not really the end, nor
does it indicate the end of the work, as it were. More properly,
it is a new beginning.
The goal of the work. On graduation day, the student will take
his or her place in the community of educated human beings. It
is quite a good feeling, too. The realization that college
educated people are giving years of life to this goal puts them in
a unique place. It may not be clear at this point, but when the
work is completed, the diligent student will see more, and he or
she will understand more. Indeed, they will know more, and for
all time, if they have been honest with themselves, they will be
able to grasp and express themselves on a range of issues and
matters that are not necessarily clear to others. The drawing out
of the logos through e ducere will have done its work. This is
what a person gains in education. It is hard work, to be sure,
but, then, anything that means something will always have a
price. I think you will see, too, that it is a price worth paying.
Hence, I say thanks for coming to Monroe, and living the dream
of the liberal arts education (Arnn, 2012). All the best, too, to
those who have helped you along the way and who continue to
help you, now: family, good friends, and significant others.
You knew quite lot from simply living life when you came here;
and you will know more and have a better life, too, when it is
finally time to leave. Till then, let us seek what is highest and
best in life and in formal learning -- in this class and every
class at Monroe College.
Conclusion
The word education, from two Latin words, e ducere, meaning

7. to draw out, or to lead out, is an attempt to draw the best from
the center of a student’s being. The center of one’s being, the
logos or the soul is what is impacted in the business of
education. A reciprocal action occurs in education and
learning; learning of information, but also the development of
the intellect which calls forth a developmental action from the
center of the student’s being, the soul, logos, or anima.
Education as a way of life never ends for the educated person.
For all the student’s days, during and after formal education, he
or she will continue to learn. Education is a developmental
process, a humanizing, refining activity that like the liberal arts,
themselves, yields what is the best in life and in the human
being.
References
Arnn, L. (2012). Foreward. In L. Arnn & The Hillsdale College
Politics Faculty (Eds.), The U. S.
Constitution: A reader (pp. xi – xii). Hillsdale College Press:
Hillsdale, MI.
Duignan, B., & Sampaolo, M. (2012). Logos. In Encyclopedia
Britannica online. Retrieved
from http://www.britannica.com/topic/346460/contributors
Kelly, E. (2004). The basics of western philosophy. Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press.