SOURCE: Fuller, Timothy. “Reflections on Leo Strauss and American Education.” In Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Émigrés and American Political Thought after World War II, edited by Hartmut Lehmann, pp. 61-80. Washington, D.C.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Fuller discusses Strauss's contributions to the debate on American education.

What follows are reflections on Leo Strauss's role in and contribution to the debates over American education, particularly the character of his defense of liberal education. In entering the American educational scene, Strauss entered a forum in which a revolution in education had been underway since the second half of the nineteenth century, parallel in its own way to educational changes in Great Britain and Europe. Strauss did not invent, and did not claim to invent, the issues about liberal education in a democratic culture on which he spoke. But he did present himself as...