Great Books Academy Ad 2010

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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.

The Great Books?

Daniel J. Flynn

From every page of A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, author Alex Beam whispers: put down the Aristotle and pick up the remote. Stop reading that Dostoevsky text and start responding 2 a txt. There is a Dog the Bounty Hunter to watch, internet porn to surf, Grand Theft Auto IV to play. Conform.

"Great Conversations"

The Great Books movement, spearheaded by autodidact Mortimer Adler, University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins, and Encyclopedia Britannica publisher William Benton, represented “everything that was wrong, unchic, and middlebrow about middle America,” according to Beam. A confirmed participant in middlebrow culture as a Boston Globe columnist, Beam is the latest bourgeois to attack the bourgeoisie for not knowing their place. The fighter pilot buried with a copy of Adler’s How to Read a Book, the motorcycling high-school dropout transformed into Adler’s St. Paul, and the Utah plumber turned onto the Great Books through Adler’s television appearances all feel the brunt of Beam’s passive-aggressive writing style of oblique put-downs, spotlighted quirks, and condescending prose.

More direct is Beam’s contempt for the trio behind the Great Books. Hutchins becomes academia’s “boy wonder,” Adler his “Hobbit-like sidekick,” and Benton the “hustler extraordinaire” who peddled their 54-volume Great Books of the Western World. If you missed the snake-oil salesman characterization, then Beam reminds you on pages 5, 13, 75, and 197 that “hucksters” pushed the project-and that Beam needs a thesaurus. The trio’s crimes include successfully marketing 1 million editions of the Great Books of the Western World (full of Aristotle and Aquinas, Newton and Einstein) to Middle America.

Robert M. Hutchins	“The best education for the best is the best education for all.”
1st Editor in Chief of the Great Books

Count one on Beam’s indictment stems from the Great Books Movement’s raison d’etre, which, in the words of Hutchins’s guiding mantra, was “the best education for the best is the best education for all.” In Beam’s eyes, there is something uncouth rather than uplifting about evangelizing great books through door-to-door sales, in book clubs run by retirees and suburban moms, at resort seminars, and in downtown continuing education classes aimed at businessmen. He divines dollar signs rather than vocation as the motivation for the campaign. Adler, a self-taught immigrant’s son, touted liberal arts education in an age of specialization. As a twentysomething instructor at Columbia University, Adler opened up the school’s Great Books-style honors curriculum to a general public more interested in an education than a piece of paper. That Adler offered the courses free of charge undermines Beam’s smear. Twenty years later, the Batman to Adler’s Robin, University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins furthered the continuing education revolution by launching a UC annex in downtown Chicago aimed at Second City businessmen. Rather than a scheme to make a buck, a notion belied by Adler’s dependence on a book-a-minute publishing schedule and the enormous $60 million profits going to the non-profit University of Chicago, the Great Books were an extension of Adler and Hutchins’s life mission. As the title of Adler’s Great Books newsletter proclaimed, Philosophy Is Everybody’s Business. Beam counters that philosophy, for Hutchins, Adler, and Benton, was merely a business.

Aristotle

Beam’s snobbishness toward a movement spreading great books to mediocre minds strangely morphs into egalitarianism when he attacks the project’s contention that some books truly are great. Who’s to say Jane Austin over Danielle Steele, Aristotle over Deepak Chopra, Thomas Aquinas over Richard Dawkins? “America was becoming a land of consumers, and a land of choice. [Harvard President] Charles Eliot was very much in tune with the times,” writes Beam of academia’s trendsetter at the turn of the last century. In contrast, Hutchins, who launched a counterrevolution against Eliot’s free elective system, was very much not in tune with the times. This is the closest Beam comes to a point in his proudly pointless book. He views the Great Books movement, and the core curriculum associated with it, as a reaction to the Deweyite model of education, of which he sees Elliot as a proto-proponent and himself as a latter-day defender. Just as Beam enlists a century late in the battle pitting the cafeteria curriculum against the core curriculum, he plays Hiroo Onoda to the 1990s campus culture wars over Western civilization, dead white males, and identity politics written to death in a cottage industry of conservative critiques. Scandalized to discover the Great Books of the Western World were not only written before his birth, but by authors who were-gasp-white, Beam repeatedly reminds readers of this find. “No blacks or Hispanics appeared on the list,” “the seventy-four writers, all deceased and primarily Caucasian males,” “the Western canon of predominantly dead white males,” and so on. Might Beam go into shock to discover the Orient’s Great Books were authored by Asians? Who, exactly, did the author think resided in the West over the last several millennia? The models in the United Colors of Benetton catalog? “The Great Books are not in fashion,” Beam taunts. “Harold and Allan Bloom not withstanding, the literary canon has broadened to encompass slave narratives and the utterances of Chief Joseph Seattle, among others.” For this we should be thankful?

Added to the Great Books’ offenses against multiculturalism, “There were no concessions to contemporary taste.” The books, then, are a slur upon our age and its diversity cult. Calling the kettle black, Beam complains that Hutchins “mocked (and of course, simplified) Dewey’s notion that education should conform to young people’s wants.”

“All young Americans of a certain age now want to be cowboys,” he quotes Hutchins. “I doubt whether it would be useful for the schools to concentrate on cowpunching in its moral, social, political, scientific and intellectual contexts.” By ignoring last week’s New York Times bestseller list, the Great Books offends the man stuck in his age. It is anti-democratic elitism, Beam avers, for a small group of scholars to decide what books the masses ought to read without consulting modern tastes. But is it not anti-democratic to ignore, as the critics of the Great Books routinely do, the votes of Elizabethan England, Ancient Athens, and Medieval France? That a book is still read hundreds of years after its publication date, and in languages foreign to its author, is a clue that it just might be a great book. That it is prominently displayed near Barnes & Noble cash registers, or talked about at last year’s Modern Language Association panels, is not. Great books fuel a lasting conversation across millennia and cultures. Great books transcend the muck rather than descend into it.

A Great Idea at the Time sneers but doesn’t speak. “For a while, the Great Books were important enough to be made fun of,” Beam informs. His snarky indirectness always keeps open the plausible deniability that he’s really not saying what he seems to be saying. It is a writing style that’s all style, leaving a reader entertained but empty. There is a mood but not an argument. The cowardice in that should not to be overlooked: the latter can be refuted; the former cannot. It is the sucker punch from behind a football helmet.

A Great Idea at the Time is a silly book on a serious subject. A thoughtful critique of the Great Books movement could have been written. There are obvious drawbacks to education without the benefit of instruction. By applying the word “canon,” with its connotations to holy writings approved by a clerical body, the Great Books movement risks cultivating a cult that believes the subjective the sacred. The math and science books included have aged as well as the various popular books that contemporaneous critics thought merited inclusion. There are certainly great books outside of the Great Books just as there are certainly not-so-great books within. Might they have selected this text and not that one?

But such an investigation would require reading the actual texts, which would be quite a task in between newspaper columns on squash matches, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and headmasters addressing sex scandals at Milton Academy and Groton. And as his breezy broadside against the Great Books demonstrates, the provincial author is too preoccupied with what captivates his Boston neighbors today to enter into a discussion with dead white males from across the ocean.

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.

Tami Kozinski

“I am really enjoying the teaching [the online Great Books Program classes]; it is continually fascinating to have students from far away places piping in, like Matluba from halfway round the world.” - Tami Kozinski

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.