355. "My education is superior to yours." True on debate day?

The debate tonight between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  What I want to find out is whether I was wrong all my teaching career about what I taught and the people I taught.

I believed that what I and my colleagues in a liberal arts college taught was superior to anything anybody else taught or could teach.  I know that that belief, stated, is surely arrogant, often offensive, and sometimes downright snotty.

Nevertheless I held it, and was sure I could defend it.  To demonstrate superiority I used the court-of-appeal test.   Where do we go to settle disagreements, the last place, with authority as final as human authority can be? 

With matters of fact the answer is clear.  We go to Western science.  Because it is most careful about belief.  You see the care in the tests imposed before a proposition is accepted as true.  In no other culture are these tests as severe and what "stands up" against them more firmly established.

Imagine a world forum.  Listen with ears uncharmed by culture-sentimentalists telling how close to nature primitive religions — like native American — were, how imaginative, how human, how far from the West's great crimes.  At a world forum that will need to be argued and tested. 

The sentimentalist — who I admitted may be an admirable humanitarian — will bring stories, anecdotes, the human touch, maybe with side screens of industrial inhumanity ready for your glance.  The unsentimentalist will bring facts, statistics, numbers.  Nothing in them, I pointed out to doubters, will be as ready for you as it is in the stories.  Numbers require imagination, an ability to see, unaided, little girls saved, little boys going into the future unmaimed, mothers presented alive to their families.

In matters of fact a sentimental education is always inferior to an unsentimental education, the kind the West introduced to the rest of the world, the kind offered in my college.  Are you arguing a case about disease? the stars? gravity? the atom? the effects of inflation?  Start with the best any other education can produce, have a disagreement, try to resolve it, and where do you finally go?  To a Western court presided over by the liberally educated.

In matters of worth the superiority of the West — you can tell I'm arguing against those who think all cultures are equal — the superiority of the West is less clear, though it is gained in the same way, through testing.  In a Western democracy, when we see forums of discussion, university conferences, parliaments with their debates, public journals with their polemic, we are seeing, even in the sloppiest ones, respect for dialectic.  And that respect derives from respect for Plato's dialogues, like the Symposium or the Phaedo, the respect continuing in the Academy, in today's colleges of arts and sciences, and in the academics who teach in them.

Where, in matters of fact, the question was, "What is better established?" the question here is, "What is worth more?"  You find out by asking the same question asked in Western science and Western philosophy, "What stands up?"

 In the public arena, in a democracy, you have to be careful arguing your case of worth since, from the sight of the pundits and politicians around you, you know what attacks you're going to get.  That's the Western arena, that's the theater in Athens, that's Aristophanes giving the government hell, that's Aneurin Bevan giving it to Churchill, that's Walter Lippmann giving it to Barry Goldwater, that, hopefully, will be Hillary Clinton giving it to Donald Trump.  What testers they are!

Who fails?  Father Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith and Joe McCarthy.  Who succeeds?  Franklin Roosevelt and Robert Taft and Joseph Welch, speakers there with the goods, the factual goods, the tested goods.

How often it happens, I pointed out, that the winners have checked with Socrates, the model of care.  They learned.  They got educated.  Where?  In a liberal arts college.  "If you don't get educated that way you're going to be a loser," I said, regardless of arrogance.

And now, judging by his poll numbers, I have to consider the possibility that Donald Trump, who rejects and indeed reverses my kind of education — and, if he's true to form, will show that rejection in his performance — may be considered the winner by a majority of viewers.  Who gets crowned depends on the audience.  I had assumed one that had absorbed Western education. 

Now the correcting voice:  "That can't be an assumption.  It's a hope."

All right, I say, it was my arrogant assumption.  And yes, Trump's standing in the polls has shown it to be a hope.  But that only makes my question about tonight's debate more urgent.  How far is my hope justified?  How far have the common people of our time become educated in the way my colleagues and I thought we were educating them, the way Thomas Jefferson thought they would be educated, the classical way of the enlightened West?