Americans may be reading online, but that’s not literature. Without the great authors, where are the great thoughts? Five years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) issued an alarming report called Reading at Risk, which declared that literary reading was in dramatic decline. The NEA reported a sharp drop from 1982 to 2002 in the proportion of people who were reading any kind of literature. Fewer than half of adults, the NEA said, had read any single work of literature during 2003, the previous year. Dana Gioia, then the chairman of the NEA, called the decline of literary reading a national crisis that represented a “general collapse in advanced literacy.”

Early this year, however, the NEA reversed course. It said the latest figures showed a turnaround: for the first time since 1982, the proportion of adults who had read at least one novel, short story, poem, or play in the previous year had risen.

The number was still lower than it had been in 1982 or 1992, but Gioia concluded that the downward spiral seemed to have ended. He attributed the happy reversal to an NEA program called The Big Read, which encourages entire communities to read and discuss one particular book, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or Henry James’s Washington Square.

Not long ago, visiting a town in Wyoming where many people were reading the same book, I could see that The Big Read was a wonderful idea. Everyone was discussing the book. I thought wistfully of the many times I had argued with state education bureaucrats who staunchly opposed the idea of specifying a good book for students to read in any particular grade. In these dark days for the publishing industry, which has suffered along with the rest of the economy, any good news is welcome. And yet it is hard to be cheerful when so many signs suggest that the increase in reading springs not from a newfound love of literature but from a devotion to trivial stuff online. Indeed, some critics of Reading at Risk contend that reading is not in trouble because young people are reading material on the Internet. Yes, but what are they reading? It is not likely to be Mark Twain or William Faulkner or Walt Whitman or Ralph Ellison, but rather Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter. Text messaging is also a form of reading, but it is not going to keep the higher end of literary culture alive.

There are other troubling signs of the decay of literary culture. The Washington Post has shut down Book World, its book review section. The New York Times Sunday Book Review is probably the last such freestanding section left among the nation’s newspapers the (Times eliminated its daily book reviews several years ago).

Few genuine outlets now exist for reviewing books, which is bad news for authors, many of whom work for years writing a book and getting it published but then get no reviews. Books that are not reviewed have a hard time finding an audience. The publication of the book is like a tree falling in the forest: If no one heard it, did it fall? If no one reviews a book, how will readers know that it exists? The New York Times book section may also be at risk. It is no secret that the Times, struggling with a large debt, is cutting back sections of the newspaper. One recent week, the Sunday Book Review was a slender twenty-four pages and contained scant advertising. How long can it survive under such circumstances? Writers whose books can change the way you see the world are not on Americans’ “must read” lists.

Most people never read these works, which tend not to become blockbuster computer-generated movies. Even more ominous was the list emerging from “Ten Books to Read before You Die,” a feature that appeared on America Online not long ago. It grew out of a Harris poll that asked people to identify their favorite books. Aside from the Bible, the rest of the list reflected popular culture: The Lord of the Rings, surely on the list because of the wildly popular movies (I wonder how many of those who named this series had read any of them?), and the Harry Potter series, about which nothing more needs to be said (except that Harry Potter is seven books, not one). Add to those two by Dan Brown, including The Da Vinci Code (I would be willing to die with no regrets at all if I had never read that book); a book by Stephen King, a master of popular fiction; and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, presumably because lots of people have seen the movie on television. All that remains to round out the list of the books one must read before dying are Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and two staples of the high school curriculum, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.

One wishes that the Harris poll ad asked people if they had read the book or merely watched the movie. This list is the ultimate confirmation of the dumbing down of America. If these are the ten books one must read before dying, count me out. Why nothing by Mark Twain, whose novels, I believe, are certainly superior to anything on the Harris poll list? Why no mention of Shakespeare or Tolstoy? Why no George Eliot? Why no Ralph Ellison or Richard Wright? Those writers, whose works can change the way you see the world, are not on the list because most Americans have never read them and because their writings have never been converted into a major computer-generated movie.

The publication of the book is like a tree falling in the forest: If no one heard it, did it fall? If no one reviews a book, how will readers know that it exists? Why does it matter if America’s literary culture is dying? It matters because the ability to read challenging books helps make one more independent-minded. It encourages a way of thinking that is not a product of the mass media. It gives one the ability to think for oneself and entertain contrary opinions, and the freedom from dependence on Hollywood for a view of the world. The literary culture is the last bastion of the individualist. Our society, our culture, even our economy depend on preserving freethinking dissidents. And there is nothing that works better to free a mind from cant and superstition than to engage with the ideas of the world’s greatest writers.

End the University as We Know It

By MARK C. TAYLOR

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is20diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educ ational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are self-regulating or, in academic parlance, governed by peer review. While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently. To complicate matters further, once a faculty member has been granted tenure he is functionally autonomous. Many academics who cry out for the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own departments.

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps:

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.

It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be transformed.

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institut ions will be able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I have already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.

4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new approaches and different20cultures and the consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising. Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.

Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming “Field20Notes From Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living.”

The True Origins of Slumdog Millionaire: The Hole-in-the-Wall Project, An Experiment in Slum/Village Education (Free Article)

In 1999, a computer expert in India thought up an experiment. His office was on the edge of a vast slum. It was separated from the slum by a wall. So, he poked a hole in the wall. Into the hole he inserted a computer screen with a touch pad. Inside his office was a desktop computer. It was hooked up to the Internet. He set up a hidden video camera to make a record of what would happen.

Eight hours later, an 8-year-old boy was on-line, teaching his 6-year-old sister how to browse the Web. More children came. Within days, the computer was a phenomenon.

He took one to a village far off the beaten path. He set up another computer in a wall. The first youth to show up was a 13-year-old drop-out. The boy had never seen a television before. He assumed that this must be an interactive TV set. Within minutes, he was using the computer. He got the word out. By the end of the day, 70 children had learned to browse.

The experimenter set up a kiosk system in another village where English was not spoken. Then he left for several months. When he returned, village children had learned basic English. They could not pronounce the words accurately, but they could read them.

This experiment led to a book, which in turn led to a movie, Slumdog Millionaire.

Here is a 2-minute video on how the project works. The experimenter has told his story to a TED group. These 21 minutes will astound you. (If you have little time, begin at 7:15 into the speech.)

He concluded that children can learn in an environment without adults. They teach each other. If the payoff is high enough, they learn on their own what educators say is not possible. Computers are cheap when compared to teachers and school buildings. This is a way to supplement traditional education in poverty-filled towns and slums.

Our free online magazine, Classical Homeschooling has recently been updated to make viewing the articles easier to find and read. Many members of the Great Books Academy have submitted articles to this magazine over the course of the past ten years. To visit the site, please click here.

I live in Alaska, the 49th state in the winter. I stay with my cool grandpa in a small village called the Nikiski. Alaska is the most northern state in the United States and the weather can be very cold in the winter.

My favorite spot in Alaska is my Grandpa’s log cabin in the woods. The cabin is on a big hill with a lake at the bottom. We go sledding down the hill and onto the frozen lake. If we like, we can clear the snow from parts of the lake and go skating. We go cross country skiing on the lake and on some of the trails in the woods. My cousins have snow machines. We have big parties with all my cousins and ride snow machines all day. Even when the weather is cold and snowy, we just dress warm and have fun. There are many mountains near Grandpa’s house. It is fun to spend all day down hill skiiing. My favorite place to ski is called the Mount Alyeska.

Most of all, I enjoy my Grandpa. He is too old to ski now, but he tells us stories that are interesting. He used to run sled dogs when he was young. He even ran sled dogs in the Army because he is so good at it. His favorite lead dog was Murphy. When the Alasken Earthquake came in 1964, Grandpa, my mom, Uncle Stan and Aunt Gretchen were out on the lake coming home in the dog sled. The ice broke into little pieces and water was everywhere. Grandpa says he was scared and wanted to get off the lake. He yelled at Murphy who was scared too. Murphy pulled hard and got the other dogs pulling. They got Grandpa off the lake with mom, Uncle Stan and Aunt Gretchen and took them to the nearest house.

Murphy is dead now and Grandpa doesn’t run sled dogs anymore, but he can still tell stories. I love Alaska and I think it is one of the most interesting states. Alaska reminds me of my Grandpa.

By MICHAEL JANOFSKY

A large majority of high school students say their class work is not very difficult, and almost two-thirds say they would work harder if courses were more demanding or interesting, according to an online nationwide survey of teenagers conducted by the National Governors Association.

The survey, being released on Saturday by the association, also found that fewer than two-thirds believe that their school had done a good job challenging them academically or preparing them for college. About the same number of students said their senior year would be more meaningful if some of their courses could be counted toward college credit.

Taken together, the electronic responses of 10,378 teenagers painted a somber picture of how students rate the effectiveness of their schools in preparing them for the future. The survey also appears to reinforce findings of federal test results released on Thursday that showed that high school seniors made almost no progress in reading and math in the first years of the decade. During that time, elementary school students made significant gains.

“I might have expected kids to say, ‘Don’t give us more work; high school is tough enough,’ ” said Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat and chairman of the governors association, which opens a three-day summer meeting here on Saturday.”Instead,” Mr. Warner said, “what we got are high school students actually willing to be stretched more. I didn’t think we’d get much of that.”

The governors’ survey was conducted as part of the association’s effort to examine public high schools and devise strategies for improving them. Mr. Warner has made high school reform his priority as chairman of the association. His term ends on Monday, when Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, a Republican, is scheduled to succeed him. While a vast majority of respondents in the survey, 89 percent, said they intended to graduate, fewer than two-thirds of those said they felt their schools did an “excellent” or “good” job teaching them how to think critically and analyze problems.

Even among the remaining 11 percent, a group of 1,122 that includes teenagers who say they dropped out of high school or are considering dropping out, only about one in nine cited “school work too hard” as a reason for not remaining through graduation. The greatest percentage of those who are leaving, 36 percent, said they were “not learning anything,” while 24 percent said, “I hate my school.”

Experts in education policy said the survey results were consistent with other studies that have shown gaps between what students learn in high school and what they need for the years beyond.”A lot of business people and politicians have been saying that the high schools are not meeting the needs of kids,” said Barbara Kapinus, a senior policy analyst for the National Education Association. “It’s interesting that kids are saying it, too.

Homeschooling

In his tragicomic essay, “The Great Liberal Death-Wish,” Malcolm Muggeridge, recounts the following experience:

On radio and television panels, on which I have spent more time than I care to remember, to questions such as: What does the panel think should be done about the rising rate of juvenile delinquency? The answer invariably offered is: more education. I can hear the voices ringing out now, as I write these words; the males ones throaty and earnest, with a tinge of indignation, the female ones particularly resonant as they insist that, not only should there be more education, but more and better education. It gives us all a glow of righteousness and high purpose. More and better education - that’s the way to get rid of juvenile delinquency, and adult delinquency, for that matter, all other delinquencies. If we try hard enough, and are prepared to pay enough, we can surely educate ourselves out of all our miseries and troubles, and into the happiness we seek and deserve. If some panel member - as it might be me - ventures to point out that we have been having more, and what purports to be better, education for years past, and that nonetheless juvenile delinquency is still year by year rising, and shows every sign of going on so doing, he gets cold hostile looks. If he then adds that, in his opinion, education is a stupendous fraud perpetrated by the liberal mind on a bemused public, and calculated, not just to reduce juvenile delinquency, but positively to increase it, being itself a source of this very thing; that if it goes on following its present course, it will infallibly end by destroying the possibility of anyone having any education at all, the end product of the long expensive course from kindergarten to post graduate studies being neo-Stone Age men - why, then, a perceptible shudder goes through the other panelists, and even the studio audience. It is blasphemy.

Muggeridge here unabashedly declares that contemporary education is a failure; even worse, a deception, an institution needing, if possible, a new direction, a radical change of course. More specifically, he draws attention to the fact that so much of what passes for educational improvement is no reform at all, itself being just another consequence of their same errant educational philosophy- another instance of the status quo. What is needed, then, is genuine reform, a wholesale change. The homeschooling movement offers just such an opportunity.

What is the nature of the errant philosophy which has modern education in its grip? It is a doctrine of mechanistic and social science built upon an inadequate account of human nature and born out of Enlightenment conceptions of human reason, conceptions which neglect the metaphysical and theological dimensions of the human person and which deny a tradition where they are central. Moreover, this philosophy fails from an axiological point of view because, in light of its limited understanding of human nature, it uncritically embraces pluralism, and ultimately devolves into historicism and moral relativism.

That such a philosophy still dominates education is evident in the numberless drafts of policies and strategies proposed by educators yearly. Their efforts to engineer education generally resist any attempt to understand the human being except in terms of historical, social, and cultural manifestations, cast against a background of mechanistic, empirical science generally; and this is to say nothing of the actual content of classroom instruction, where students are evangelized according to the gospel of Enlightenment science (or its nihilistic consequences) from faculty generally unaware of their own assumptions.

Since, according to this philosophy of education, the human condition points to nothing but itself, to nothing transcendent, the principle objective of learning readily reduces to the dogma of technique or instrumentalism, according to which knowledge has value only because it is useful for individual or social advantage. Hence, the technical training and careerism rampant in today’s curricula.

Instead of such a skeptical and narrow philosophy, Jacques Maritain proposed an education that retrieves the timeless principles of a Christian culture, and that also recovers the Jewish and Greek conceptions of the human condition. These elements are the constituents of a theocentric humanism, which provides a sure basis for education, since it understands comprehensively the nature and ends of human life. This is a humanism that honors the fact that the human person has both a secular and a trans-secular destiny, as well as a natural and trans-natural end. To be human is to be a product of nature and of the human; but to be human is also to be a creature of God, to Whom the human person is supernaturally ordinated.

Theocentric [God-centered] humanism is an alternative to an anthropocentric [man-centered] humanism, according to which human life is explained in purely secular and natural terms, that is to say, as though the human person were sufficient unto himself. Anthropocentric humanism is inadequate, since its explication of the human condition is too narrow, focusing only on two of its causes. Clearly, with its preoccupation with only the natural and secular dimensions of the human condition modern institutionalized education is an edifice built on the sand of anthropocentric humanism.

In calling for a different foundation, however, one that recovers a different tradition, Maritain is neither a pathetic nostalgic nor an exclusivist. In the first instance, he aims to recover a tradition, not just because it is a tradition, but because it holds lessons and values for contemporary times. In the second, he has in mind a legacy that is inclusive, by virtue of its comprehensiveness and analogy, one that accommodates all peoples by not necessitating a commitment to formal institutions or canons but only to a world-view respecting the spiritual depth, dignity, and mystery of human personality.

In a Judeo-Greco-Christian civilization like ours, this community of analogy, which extends from the most orthodox religious forms of thought to the mere humanistic ones, makes it possible for a Christian philosophy of education if it is well founded and rationally developed , to play an inspiring part in the concert, even for those who do not share in the creed of its supporters…

In answer to our question, then, “What is man?” we may give the Greek, Jewish, and Christian idea of man: man as an animal endowed with reason, whose supreme dignity consists in voluntarily obeying the law of God; and man as a sinful and wounded creature called to divine life and to the freedom of grace, whose supreme perfection consists of love.

With this statement of his philosophical anthropology, Maritain is calling for educators to change direction and to journey along another, less worn path, a road more soundly constructed and with a more definite direction. The Frenchman’s call is still timely, for the same crisis that educators faced in his day is still before us. The intersection that defines this crossroads presents educators with one of two alternatives:

1. to continue educating according to the assumptions of a positivistic social science, pressing on with a so-called reform that is, in fact, no reform; or,
2. to provide a different foundation for education, one which is committed to a philosophical anthropology grounded in a tradition antedating the Enlightenment and rooted in more ultimate metaphysical and theological principles, while at the same time doing justice to the fact that the human condition is also situated socially, historically, and culturally.

Institutions of learning have made their decisions: (with very few exceptions) they have chosen the first alternative – to continue down the road of anthropocentric humanism. Having been so radically compromised, they are beyond reform. At the present time, educational reform on any meaningful scale in this country can now only apply to individual educators, to parents and their little flocks at home, not to institutionalized education in general.

The words college and university derive from Latin roots signifying unity. Without coherence and synthesis [unity], knowledge cannot result in understanding nor mature into wisdom; and if educational institutions fail to lay, at least, the foundations of wisdom, they simply fail to educate. American educational institutions have failed democracy specifically in that it they failed to address those abiding concerns of philosophical anthropology and ethics necessary to make sense of our social lives.

If modern educational institutions are unable to contribute to these ends because they no longer make sense out of metaphysical and axiological principles necessary for understanding human existence, then educational institutions can no longer even begin to teach the human being what it is to be a human being. If so, the student ends his education as he began it, with no wisdom about himself. Hence, his soul is impoverished, for, even in general outline, he cannot answer the question, what is it to live a human life?

His education has failed to teach him how to understand himself and how to relate to his world.

This failure to cultivate in students a due regard for their human nature sufficient to inspire them to believe that to live the human life is to live a life according to reason accounts, in my judgement, for the exaggerated careerism and bourgeois individualism among the youth today. Because educational institutions no longer assist students even in those first faltering steps toward wisdom – which, at a minimum, is to exercise confidence in the conviction that reason, to a significant degree, equips one to deal with life effectively – students have come to fear the world and human life as an absurd, dangerous, and wholly mystifying place. Since they have not been taught to value or to depend on reason, they suppose that the world is, in fact, irrational. Since this condition makes for an insecure existence, they turn delusionally to the mystique of job and technological expertise to provide them security. For them a job is the only security possible in a world beyond the reach of reason.

There is no doubt that Maritain would approve of Mortimer J. Adler’s Paideia Proposal to reform education. In Education at the Crossroads he lauds Adler’s efforts. What merits Maritain’s approval is that Adler, unlike so many other reformers, realizes that education can take place only when an understanding of human nature and its ends are vigorously evident and operative in the mission (goals), curriculum, and modes of instruction used.

Since this understanding is generally ignored by systems of education today, one must regrettably conclude that only nominal education is taking place. High schools, colleges and universities may still impart knowledge, but this has only to do with data and technique. There is little effort to connect knowledge with those principles of coherence sufficient to make knowledge yield understanding and relate to human life and its ends. Hence learning in today’s school system is about more or less discrete knowledge, but not really about education.

Taking to heart the Latin root of education (from ex + ducere – to lead out of), there is simply little, if any, leading out of ignorance to an enlightened reckoning of what it is to realize the potentialities of human life. Adler, however, understands that without these ultimate foundations there is no education. His Paideia (that is, the upbringing of children) Proposal, which accords with his earliest recommendations for educational reform, dating back to his association with Robert Maynard Hutchins in the thirties, is a program aiming to supply these foundations and, thereby, to bring about lasting educational improvements. His recommendation is to return to the great books.

Adler proposes that these classic works be taught dialectically, in discussion groups. In this way, moderators can better cultivate in students those intellectual virtues, such as independence of mind, which made possible the production of great books originally. This also sets up the conditions so that education can contribute to the moral and political reflections necessary for the formation of citizens in a democratic society.

Such reflections vindicate religious-based homeschool education because such education addresses the entire human condition and man’s secular and metaphysical ends, and thereby makes sense out of the metaphysical and axiological principles of human existence by integrating them into a coherent synthesis. A religious-based homeschool education, based on Dr. Adler’s Paideia Proposal, concluding in the study of the classics – the great books (particularly if augmented with dialectic discussion groups), such as that proposed by the Great Books Academy, would therefore be an ideal educational environment for our times (the parents providing the religious instruction).

Having returned to its roots in the family, homeschool education has signal significance for history. Parents must become that diaspora of enlightened educators about whom Maritain prophesied, a diaspora laboring in the twilight of civilization. It is a labor, I am confident, that Providence can put to a purpose.