Juliette Sellgren (05:31): 

Thanks. But it's one thing to be aware of it and it's another thing to be grappling with feeling that. And it's kind of hard to be able to, on the one hand, you can look back and say, I've done that. That's happened to me. I can kind of relax this need for expectation because through, I guess through acting and through being, you're going to accomplish something and be a person anyways and say it was

Charlotte Thomas (06:09): 

Fun. That's right. Yeah, it's, it's not a recommendation for inactivity or for lowering your standards or for being unambitious. It's just a kind of acknowledgement that you don't know what the future looks like and you are in the process of learning who you are. And that's true whether you're 57 like I am or you're in your twenties are, I mean, I'm in the process of learning who I am and of moving towards self-knowledge and I don't know. And if I pretend that I know things I don't know, then I'm not likely to learn things that I would otherwise learn.

Juliette Sellgren (06:55): 

What has been difficult for me is trying to project that mindset into the future because I know it's held true in the past, so I shouldn't worry. And I think a lot of people feel this and I don't know, I guess it just takes time maybe, but I don't know if there's anything I can do. And I'm wondering if you have any recommendations about things I can do to LA Is the only way I can say it.

Charlotte Thomas (07:24): 

Yeah, look, I think, I don't know. I think you're doing it. I mean, whatever you do next and whatever you decide to pursue, you have this unbelievable foundation just through this podcast. Forget the other parts of your people who you've talked to of ideas that you've let roll around in your mind. And one of the things Plato sort of has Socrates say is that you don't take ideas into your soul. We put water in a bucket. Whenever you put an idea into your soul, whenever you take an idea into yourself, it changes who you are. So if you're a curious person and you are talking to people and you're reading things and you're thinking about things you are developing, you are moving forward as a human being. And it's not that all ideas and all things that you could do are equally good, but there is an extraordinary range of things, good things to be done and you should be trying to do good things.

But what they are kind of in a day-to-day, week to week, month to month sense is probably less important right now then that you are trying to do good and interesting things. There's certainly something to be said for consistency over time and developing skills that require focus and you have done that and you will do that. But a lot of life, it happens around the edges of that. And that's incredibly important too. And so the thing you should shall relax about is you should recognize what you were talking about with your friend, how far you've come already, and know that that doesn't stop when you graduate. In fact, in some ways maybe there's a kind of passive education that slows down. You won't be sitting in as many classrooms listening to people talk in graduate school. Maybe that'll ramp back up again, but never the same way as it did when you were an undergraduate.

You'll be being more active, pursuing your own ideas and having to seek out knowledge rather than being a passive consumer of it, but in every other way other than that particular being a student in the classroom mode. Your education will just ramp up at this point. And you know, that's another thing that I didn't know when I was in my twenties is how much more I would become capable of. I feel like I had some sense that intellectually my prime or my peak would come much, much, much earlier. Not only do I know more now than I once did, and I am capable of reading better and faster than I once was and understanding all the sorts of things coming to an understanding of things more quickly and more thoroughly than I once did. But I also have more energy. I am able to do more work in a day than I could do when I was in my twenties. And if you'd have told me that in my twenties, I wouldn't have believed you. But it's true. And I didn't know that I, that my capacities were going to just keep expanding and they will expand forever, but they certainly have it continued to expand longer than I would've thought they would when I was young. So are those good reasons to sort of take the pressure off yourself? Juliette does that?

Juliette Sellgren (11:49): 

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I feel better just listening to you. Can you just be in my ear at all times telling me anytime very nice things that make me feel better. The energy thing is really interesting because I've been thinking about this, I've been so tired and everyone I know has been tired and we're like, why are we tired? Aren't we supposed to be in the prime of life? Aren't we not supposed to be tired? But now I'm thinking about there's that image of the teenager and the college student that sleeps until 2:00 PM because we still need a ton of sleep. And so how do you reconcile the fact that we're supposed to be these active, super vibrant, whatever with the fact that we hypothetically could be sleeping all the time?

Charlotte Thomas (12:42): 

They're both true, right? Yeah, you are capable of things. I'm sure you can run faster and lift more weight and run longer than I can, even if you do also sleep more than I do. But intellectually, I don't know. I feel like wherever you are at 20, you're going to be much beyond that in 10 years and beyond that 10 years out from there, if you keep learning and if you try to stay open, you will just keep growing.

Juliette Sellgren (13:21): 

So learning seems very important to you and obviously it's very important to me as listeners of the podcast will know. It's like I mention every episode, I am a ta. I obviously am still in college. I think about learning most of the time. So can you tell us, I know this is seemingly very simple, but can you define a liberal arts education for us? What even does education really mean? If we could even start there.

Charlotte Thomas (13:53): 

Wow. Well, those, the sort of most foundational questions are often the most difficult. But clearly one of the things to say about education is that we've been talking about it for the last five minutes or so, and it is this openness to new ideas, it's taking things on board, but probably more importantly, it's a development of your capacities. So to become educated is both to learn some things that is to furnish your mind, but also to become capable and more capable of furnishing your mind. I mean, there was kind of a cliche that knocked around when I was graduating from college. I don't know if it's still kind of out there, but the college degree was really so that you knew what to read for the rest of your life. Not that you read it all, but that you had a sense of what you should be reading.

And that was kind of a joke, and it was kind of a way of admitting that we hadn't read everything that we were supposed to read or not read it well enough. But I think it's actually a serious thing too that is that of course you should read things in college and you're not going to learn to read if you don't read. But it really is more important, it seems to me, or more important part of what it means to be educated, to be, to have the capacity to learn from your experiences, to learn from books, to become capable of making arguments, of understanding what it means to give evidence, of understanding why it's important and not shameful to change your mind or to admit that you're wrong. So I really think that education, and we can talk about liberal arts education is about the development of yourself as a human being, which happens to have a lot to do with what has conventionally been the topics within conventional schools, colleges, and high schools and universities. Training is fine, training is great actually.

I want my doctors to be well-trained in what they do for the human body, but I also want them to be educated. I want them to be capable of learning new things and curious and sort of open and all these other things. I was just talking about being, learning how to change your mind and how to disagree and how to rely on evidence and be aware when your opinions are, even if you hold them dearly, when they're unfounded and you should be suspicious of them. And all of that has to do with being educated, I think. So connecting that to liberal arts education or to a more conventional understanding of what it means, what people think of and they think of education.

The liberal arts are those sorts of subject matters, activities, ways of engaging the world, which were kind of associated with what it meant to be free and so free in the sense of free of superstition, free of necessarily submitting to authority mean, what kind kind of mind do you need? What kind of skills do you need? What kind of ideas do you need to have considered in order to organize your own life, in order to take yourself in hand and be free in that sense, to be self-guiding, self-ruling, to use kind of an antiquated term. And conventionally what you needed to be able to do that was you needed trivium and the quadrivium, you needed rhetoric, you needed mathematics, you needed all of these ways of knowing and doing things that would help you develop a more independent and reliable and efficient and creative mind. The subject of a liberal arts, education, philosophy and mathematics and natural science, which is liberal arts economics certainly was a part of that outgrowth of the development of the liberal arts literature. I mean, all of these things are important in themselves, but as a part of the liberal arts education, they're contributing to your capacity to be a free and sort of self-regulating human being.

Juliette Sellgren (20:10): 

So you mentioned economics, so I'm going to take it in that direction. I was having this conversation with my boyfriend the other day and I was wondering if you could weigh in on it. So we were talking about electives in economics, we were talking about trade listeners listened to the episode that came out recently with Doug Irwin. That is what inspired that conversation. And he was like, oh yeah, I never took a class in trade, but I took all these other classes in econ. And I said, well, sure. He was like, I think I can learn it, it's just applied. And I'm like, you could learn it, but there's something about time spent that's really important to me. Sure, you could learn it. You have access to this toolkit because you majored in it and you spent time learning it that if you put the time in, you can learn about trade economics and you can learn to do it and learn to think about it, but you didn't put the time in. 

And the thing is, I took a trade class, can I promise that I remember a lot of stuff? No, but the thing that I've been grappling with, I guess to go on from that is that I guess how do we toe the line between putting the time in, not necessarily so that you remember, but it is a capacity thing. You're stretching your capacity in a certain direction. So how important is it, I guess, to learn a specific thing, to apply a specific skillset to say a book or an area of economics or something versus to just learn the tools without applying them? How does time play into it and application and all of that. Does that make any sense? 

Charlotte Thomas (21:58): 

I think so. I thought that question was going in one direction and then it went in another direction. But let me try to respond and you can let me know if I'm getting at what's interesting to you. First of all, I am a bit trepidatious about getting in between your boyfriend and you, but no, it's all good. It was an intellectual argument. Invited me into that space. So the first thing is classrooms, conventional classrooms, a group of people getting together with a teacher and assignments in a syllabus for a certain amount of time, a quarter or a semester or a year or whatever, it is a very, very efficient way to learn things. And it should not be marginalized or minimized. It is not the only way to learn things. And in fact, going on in your life, the opportunity costs of doing such a thing are much too high. And as you get better at learning things, the value I guess of it is a little less comparatively.

It is a little less valuable in comparison to the alternatives, but it is a very efficient way to learn things. One of my examples of this is years ago, MIT when online sort of education was just sort of getting started. So really many years ago, 15, 20 years ago, I don't know, MIT put, I think it was an artificial intelligence class online. I don't remember the language. Is it massive online, open something community MOOC or something like that? I don't remember. But it was free. It was open to everybody, everything was there and it was at the sort of highest quality in terms of the newness and the accuracy, and you were really getting the scientific consensus from people who really knew about it, given it just the same way. They would've given it something very close to the same way they would've given it to their own students at MIT.

And it was all right there. So you would think that everybody who was interested in the topic would know about it because there it was and it was available and it was a very, very high quality. But of course, the number of people who tried it at all is much smaller than everybody. And the number of people who maybe tried it a little bit but quit is quite high or who were distracted. And so that's the first thing I want to say is that taking a class in trade economics, if you're interested in trade economics is a very good choice because it's a very efficient way to learn things. It's not the only way to learn things. And your boyfriend, I'm sure it's true, will be able to learn it if he wants to. Now the other side of it that you kind of came to at the end was this idea about whether application was important to learning.

And I think that's a little bit harder to say. My instinct is to say, yes, absolutely, you have to try things out and see how they go. But that isn't true of everything. It's certainly true of anything that has a practical or a moral component to it. So if you want to learn to play the guitar, you have to play the guitar. And if you think you know how to do something, you have to try to do it to see whether you actually do know how to do it. You need feedback loops. And so you need practice, you need to do things in the world. And that's true of anything that has to do with moral education too. If you think the right thing to do in a situation, the thing to do, do that thing in that situation and reconsider whether it was the right thing or not, and if it was, keep doing it, if it wasn't, rethink it. So actually doing things so that you create feedback loops so that what you think gets tested in the world extraordinarily important, but there's a lot of theory you can learn and you might not have an opportunity to get involved with the kind of trade that your economics course was talking about. And in those situations, you certainly can learn things, but maybe not quite the same way or with the same kind of texture as the sort of things that you can practice and kind of see what happens when you do.

Juliette Sellgren (27:01): 

I guess the example I'm kind of ruminating on now and as you were speaking is what about something like Shakespeare? We say that there's nothing about human nature that hasn't been said by Shakespeare or whatever the quote is. And so that's a reason why you should read Shakespeare also, arguably because it's hard and because it's beautiful. But I guess how do you think about reading Shakespeare to expand? You're probably not going to remember all the words that he made up that now some of them are words that we still use, but then I guess do we learn Shakespeare to have read Shakespeare or is it instrumental in learning something else or is it both? And how do we kind of think about that and how does that take place in the classroom in a liberal arts setting versus, I don't know, something like UVA, which claims to have liberal arts aspects, but I can guarantee it's nothing like some of my friends at liberal arts colleges.

Charlotte Thomas (28:17): 

So I think there's several things to talk about here. The first is that I am a big fan of the lecture format. I think that there is a lot of good that happens when someone who knows something really well gets up and tries to show other people how things work or how they see things. I do a lot of Play-Doh and I also teach in a great books program. I teach seminars and so many, many times, actually I've in the same semester been in a great book seminar where we read Plato's Republic together and also been teaching a history of ancient Greek philosophy course where I lectured on Plato. I'm going to talk more about the seminar format because deeply committed to it, and I think it really speaks to your question, but I would not want to be misunderstood on this point. I think that there's a place for the lecture, I lecture, I think there's a place for expertise, and I think it's important to keep kind of the goals of various courses or various interactions with people who have expertise in mind when you think about these issues of format.

So, with Shakespeare, I absolutely love hearing someone talk about some aspect of Shakespeare. It is great that that's your example. I'm actually editing a volume of essays on Shakespeare right now because one of my gigs at Mercer is to co-direct a center. And we had a conference on Shakespeare last year, and every year the participants in the conference have an opportunity to submit revised versions of their essays for publication and volume. And every other year I edit one of those. And so I'm reading right now all of these remarkable arguments and all of this just beautiful exposition on politics really in Shakespeare, and it's so great, but I really think that even though it's valuable and interesting and great, what's more valuable, and I'll go out on a limb and say more valuable for most people, maybe not for everyone, is to be in a situation where you let Shakespeare read you rather than you're reading Shakespeare.

And that's what I mean by that is if you gather a group of 12 to 18 people who are smart and thoughtful and willing to talk about what they think about things, and you give them Henry IV part one to read and you sit down in a room together, chances are every smart, hardworking, curious person who's chosen to be in that conversation will have ideas about the text. And here's the interesting thing, think that some of those ideas, some of those interpretations, some of those reactions just assume that everybody else had them too, because they look so obvious to them. So it's just obvious that this is what's going on, or clearly this is what's going on. But when you sit down in a room to talk about it and somebody kind of maybe asks a good open question to get you thinking or to drive you more deeply into the text, and then you say what seems obvious to you and someone else in the room is willing to say, I didn't read it like that.

What did you do with this? And how can that be the case if this is also the case and don't you remember what happened in act two? How can you say that about act four? That would be a contradiction. So then you realize that what you thought was obvious or didn't require argument or already was so clearly based in fact isn't to someone else who's smart and who you respect. And then you have to really think, well, why do I think this is the case and is the evidence that I have for it sufficient? And what would I have to say to convince them of that? Or on the other hand, is it the case that there isn't sufficient evidence for it? And I just thought there was, and what does that say about me? Why did I jump to that without sufficient reason? Because obviously I did because they're right and I'm wrong.

And that is so powerful, that kind of thing. And it really is unlikely to happen unless you have something like a shared text in front of you. And unless you're in a situation where you're willing to say what you think, and if you're in a situation where you're open to disagreeing and open to changing your mind and interested in what other people have to say. But if you can set that up, which is what people try to do in seminar courses, like the ones that I promote with the Association for Cortex and Courses, which is the organization I direct, and that's what we're about. Get in a room with a good book and people who are willing to talk about it and get to know the book, but also in the process, get to know yourself and also develop these skills of listening, of changing your mind, of finding evidence and requiring of yourself that you have evidence for what you say and what you think. So would you call that instrumental? Does that make Shakespeare instrumental? I guess it does, but

Juliette Sellgren (34:48): 

So it's interesting. I'm taking this class on the Holocaust and it's a comparative politics class. And so the point is not the professor went into great depth about this on the first day, which I thought was super interesting, very kind of like ib, if you're aware of the high school program, international Baccalaureate. Yeah, it's very much in line with explaining how this happened, why this happened, what the fallout kind of connecting things, not describing things, but in order to explain, in order to make an argument, in order to make claims, you need to be able to point to descriptions. You need to be able to describe. And so it's instrumental, but it's not, I want to say it's not just that, right?

Charlotte Thomas (35:47): 

Yeah. Because in the process of, that's the other thing is that I went to college a long time ago and I actually had this kind of education, and I remember conversations from when I was an undergraduate. I do not remember a single lecture that I attended when I was an undergraduate, and some of 'em were good. I had good teachers. I don't remember a single one, but I remember those conversations. And a part of what I remember about those conversations is obviously about the books we were talking about. And so it is instrumental and it is an intercourse too, but it's also kind of maybe one of the, again, most effective ways of actually learning the book, learning the arguments, learning the author, is to learn it in this mediated way where you're also learning other things.

Juliette Sellgren (36:49): 

So I mean, I keep wanting to just bring it back to the fact that I teach in more of a lecture style type of class, and I always try to get away from that because I mean, even just experientially, I know that that's been true of my education, that it is more effective when you're not necessarily verbally engaged, but any sort of engagement that's more than listening. Listening is a part of all these other types of engagement, I think. But

Charlotte Thomas (37:22): 

Oh yeah, essential part of it. I do think there's something magic about opening your mouth. I think it changes things

Juliette Sellgren (37:29): 

Or the pen or something like acting on the listening. And so I'm kind of wondering how do you bring this into the classroom? What does it look like when someone is changed by this format? What does it bring a student? Obviously we've been talking about growth and learning a lot, but what does that look like even on the whole for an entire campus at a liberal arts college where people are kind of used to this type of engagement?

Charlotte Thomas (38:11): 

The difficult and beautiful thing about this question is that if it's working, then people are going to become more themselves, which means they're not going to become more alike, although they'll have perhaps more things in common, and so they'll be more capable of making themselves understood to one another. So I think what happens to someone who has this sort of education kind of manifests in very, very different ways. But I think there's a kind of intellectual courage that comes with it, and sometimes maybe intellectual arrogance that you have to kind of get over. Because one of the things that I can see when I'm teaching seniors in our Great Books program at Mercer versus freshmen is they're just not afraid of books. They're not, go back to your boyfriend who wants to learn trade economics as a freshman in college. He might not have said what he said to you because he might've thought that he really couldn't go learn it on his own, and maybe he could have and he just didn't know that he could have.

But there's a way in which if you read really hard books and you have hard conversations, you develop a kind of, not just capacity, you do develop that, but courage. And actually you may be think you're capable of things you're not entirely capable of. There may be things that you do need help with, but I like that you air in that direction. So that's definitely a kind of an earmark, I think of this kind of education is a kind of intellectual courage in terms of how to implement it or what it looks like in practice.

It sometimes does not look very impressive. I mean, I already mentioned that I have taught the Republic simultaneously in a lecture course and in a great book seminar. I actually stopped doing that years ago. I used to do it all the time. But the more I worked on Plato, the more I knew, the more I was sort of really invested or I was inhabiting those ideas, the harder it was for me to sit quietly and kind of guide my students, but let my students drive the conversation. You have to be patient because what you want is you want the students to correct each other. You don't want to just jump in and say, no, that's not right. You want somebody else to do that in the class. And so sometimes things that feel wrongheaded or you don't really feel like are the most important things to be discussed are being discussed, and you have to kind of, it's not that you let people just talk about falsehoods or completely get off track.

I mean, it's your responsibility to keep that from happening, but within those bounds you kind of have to be patient and put up with a lot of what feels like wasted time, but it's not wasted time because of all the things we've been talking about. And so making it happen in the classroom is actually challenging because you don't get to be a college professor unless you love what you do. And also the whole, you're socialized as a professor to lean on your authority and lean on your degree and lean on your title. But that doesn't mean anything in these seminars or it doesn't mean it doesn't what it mean, what it means in a lecture class, in fact. And sometimes it can kind of feel like a liability to know what you think students should be talking about when also you're required. Really it's your responsibility to let them come to themselves

Juliette Sellgren (42:47): 

On your earlier note about the courage to open a book, to not be afraid of books. My boyfriend was also a philosophy major, which might explain he's less afraid of books than I am, because in economics we don't really, at least here, I mean sometimes, but way less than some of the other disciplines. And as a department, I know there's been a lot of conversation about that and the lack of writing and all of that because as it stands, economics is kind of missing some of the fundamental things that college is supposed to teach you or at least make you more comfortable with. And so he probably is just more comfortable about taking on new challenges and stuff than I am because he has this entire sandbox of philosophy. And I mean everyone has access to it, but it's a different dimension of expansion that solely economics I don't think gives you, which is why it's maybe important to study more than just one thing.

Charlotte Thomas (43:56): 

Well, maybe, or it's important to read or it's important to put together a group where you're reading in the history of economic thought or you're reading other things together. But I do think reading and writing is important. And I think if your education minimizes those things and you want to kind of do anything really, because anything that you want to do in the world with other human beings, you're going to be better if you can read and write and talk and listen. And so if you don't feel like your academic school classwork is your coursework, is helping you read and write and talk and listen, then yeah, I think it is everyone's responsibility to do that, to do that. And I think you do Juliette, but obviously I'm aware of what you do on this podcast. So I think you have found ways to develop yourself in those ways to become educated that are absolutely compatible with and build on what you're doing in the classroom, but aren't limited to that. And I do think that's, if you want to be liberated, if you want to be a free self-directing human being, learning how to listen and talk and read and write is necessary.

Juliette Sellgren (45:33): 

It means a lot that you say that. Thank you. Of course, I still wanted to get into Play-Doh, but we are running up against the clock. I guess I'll have to have you on another time if you would be willing. I would love that. Alright, that's wonderful. I have one last question for you though before we go. It's been wonderful. I feel so much more encouraged and ready to, well change the narrative really on what it means to be educated and what it means to pursue curiosity, because I think it's everywhere once you think about it, the way that you've described it. So thank you for that gift. I'm sure listeners feel similarly. So thank you. Final question, what is one thing that you believed at one time in your life that you later changed your position on and why?

Charlotte Thomas (46:27): 

Yeah, again, because I listened to the podcast, I knew this one was coming to, and so I've thought about it. And so I'll try to be brief. It's a little bit complicated. The short answer is I've changed my mind about many things. But here's a big one that might be interesting to you. So I had the great good fortune to teach for TFAS, the Fund for American Studies in Hong Kong for three years. And the third year was 2019 when the protests really heated up and the streets were full of protestors and water cannons and tear gas and all of that. And Hong Kong is, I don't know, I haven't been back since 2019, but was such a spectacular city. And of course it's famous among economists for what happened there and and why economically in terms of the growth and the freedom that people had to develop businesses in Hong Kong.

And so Hong Kong's this really interesting case. But what it taught me, this thing that it changed my mind about is since I was there in 2019, I saw that even though Hong Kong had what's called the basic law, which really served as a kind of a constitution after the joint declaration, which where Great Britain was handing Hong Kong back to China, and there was this transition period that was supposed to be 50 years long, 1997 to 2047. And in that time, the sort of constitution was called the basic law, and it preserved Hong Kong's right to govern itself, sort of. It's called One Country, two Systems. So they were already in China, but this joint declaration, this basic law was supposed to protect their self-government for 50 years. And what we were seeing in 2019, so long before the 50 years were up, or was that just dissolving, but they had a constitution.

And I had been up until that time, probably more inclined to think that the rule of law could sort of stand more on its own. And that if you had the rule of law and if you had a constitution that you could roll back a lot of other institutional structures and the rule of law would sort of sustain order and peace and actually perhaps make room for more prosperity. And I still believe that in many regards. But what I learned that summer in Hong Kong is that without the institutions to support their constitution, their constitution meant nothing. It absolutely did not protect them at all. The fact that practically every developed country in the world had signed off on this thing, despite the fact that the UK had an obligation to defend this constitution, none of it mattered. And the people who were protesting that summer, many of them are now in jail, and those that aren't in jail live in fear because there were cameras set up everywhere and there's no statute of limitations.

So, everyone who was on the street, which was practically everybody in Hong Kong that summer, their face is in some file and somebody can knock on the door, say, you were in the street protesting in 2019 and we're charging you with a crime, and you come with us. And they live with that fear every day. And the fact that they have the basic law doesn't mean a thing because they don't have the institutions to support it. So that was a long way of saying, I haven't settled. I continue my opinions on these things tend to change, but I'm more inclined to take institutions seriously than I once was because in Hong Kong, what it appeared to me to be happening was the dissolution of the institutions made the Constitution not worth the paper it was printed on.

Juliette Sellgren (51:16): 

Once again, I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to The Great Antidote podcast means a lot. The great antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at Great antidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.