For Strauss, the great obstacle to liberal education was the conception of philosophy not as a path to the true, the beautiful, and the good but rather as an instrument of power and a type of technology to advance non-moral goods

Teaching in an Age of Ideology: Leo Strauss

by Lee Trepanier

So far I have examined a set of thinkers that could be classified in the same school of thought as “Voegelinian”: Eric Voegelin, Ellis Sandoz, Gerhart Niemeyer, and John H. Hallowell. 

In their different styles and approaches to teaching, each of them sought to show their students the true, the beautiful, and the good in a manner devoid of ideological thinking. 

1. Eric Voegelin invoked eros in his students to lead them from a common sense understanding of the world to a theoretical one; 
2. Ellis Sandoz began with the student’s own experience of reality as a reference point to validate the claims of the thinkers they were studying; 
3. Gerhart Niemeyer demanded clarity in thought and in prose from his students in their mutual “wondering questioning”; 
4. and John H. Hallowell saw teaching as his first professional priority, asking students to think for themselves, even if it meant challenging the professor in the classroom as long as the students could present sound reasons.

In each of these cases, and in their different ways, these thinkers became the incarnation of what they taught in seeking to understand and to convey the true, the beautiful, and the good.

I want to turn next to a different school of thought, the Straussian School, and look at Leo Strauss and two of his more prominent students, Stanley Rosen and Harvey Mansfield, as teachers. 

What we discover is the same spirit of openness to the true, the beautiful, and the good, as we have found in our previous thinkers. 

Although these two schools of thought differ on the nature and relationship of faith and reason and how one should interpret classical texts, they both subscribe to the belief that teaching at its core should be non-ideological in nature. 

In this sense, they share a common purpose in the classroom to teach rather than indoctrinate students.

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