Liberal Arts & Great Books Renaissance?
Cross posted from the Castoff Review.
There is a small and mostly unnoticed renaissance of sorts occurring in this country, arising out of a renewed interest in the study of fundamental ideas and the serious books which explicate them. Check out this WSJ article by Emily Esfahani-Smith describing students from 12 to 17 who willingly spend their summers reading the greatest of books:
The mere existence of these programs suggests an important trend in student learning habits. The academic radicalism of recent decades is receding, and students are ready to be serious again. Flaky courses…no longer interest them. Instead, students from book camp and Princeton are interested in “sitting down with Plato, St. Augustine, and James Madison, to think through the perennial issues of politics and citizenship,” says Robert George, a professor and director of Princeton’s James Madison Program…
Students want to learn this stuff…
…too many colleges are not meeting that demand.
Amen to that. There is as much or more going on at the K-12 level in this respect than there is at our nation’s institutions of higher learning. Besides the Great Books Summer Program described in the article, for instance, check out Great Hearts Academies in Arizona: a classical, liberal arts education within an innovative charter school model.
The participants in this modest renaissance stand in good company. Read Thomas Jefferson’s suggestions to his nephew (who I believe was 16 at the time) on what the young student should read during his high school years, and weep:
For the present, I advise you to begin a course of antient history, reading every thing in the original and not in translations. First read Goldsmith’s history of Greece. This will give you a digested view of that field. Then take up antient history in the detail, reading the following books, in the following order: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophontis Hellenica, Xenophontis Anabasis, Arrian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, Justin. This shall form the first stage of your historical reading, and is all I need mention to you now. The next, will be of Roman history (Livy, Sullust, Caesar, Cicero’s epistles, Suetonius, Tacitus, Gibbon). From that, we will come down to modern history. In Greek and Latin poetry, you have read or will read at school, Virgil, Terence, Horace, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles. Read also Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakspeare, Ossian, Pope’s and Swift’s works, in order to form your style in your own language. In morality, read Epictetus, Xenophontis Memorabilia, Plato’s Socratic dialogues, Cicero’s philosophies, Antoninus, and Seneca.
Anyone want to take a wild guess how many of the books listed above the people who write the Western Civilization textbooks have read seriously (nevermind “in the original and not in translations”)?
As Tom Dillon, president of my alma mater, pointed out in an op-ed earlier this year shortly before his untimely death:
A frequent objection to liberal education is: How can it prepare our students for life in the “real world”? What good are a bunch of dusty old tomes in a highly competitive global marketplace?
Such questions remind me of a visit I once took to Monticello, where I encountered on Thomas Jefferson’s bookshelves authors such as Virgil, Plato, Cicero, Locke, and Ptolemy. If these thinkers shaped the minds of our country’s founders, then surely they have something to offer the minds of those who will shape our country’s future.
It is worth noting that most of the books mentioned above have, shall we say, been “in print” for a good long while, so maybe it was a case of generational hubris to think, rightly or wrongly, that they were going to simply disappear. Of course, much of what they have been replaced with is thrown out on an annual basis, never to be seen again.
Cross posted from the Castoff Review.