Two Cheers for the Great Books

Recently, Luke Burgis, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Catholic University of America, posed a provocative question: “What is the strongest argument from the political Right AGAINST Great Books programs?” 

In my view, the Great Books is a fine program for lifelong learning. 15,000 people a year participate in discussion groups affiliated with the Great Books Foundation. By contrast, a parallel lifelong learning project—the daily two-pages-a-day study program of the Babylonian Talmud known as Daf Yomi—drew over 90,000 people (almost all of them men) to the official completion celebration of its seven-year cycle at MetLife Stadium, with a further 7,000 at the major event in London and many thousands at others throughout the globe. So while Great Books is not the most successful classical-text-based lifelong learning program, it is hanging in there.

But for students, a Great Books program is not the best way to get the skills constitutive of secondary education. The ideas found in Aristotle’s Rhetoric about the way humans live together through speech are inexhaustible, but contemporary speech and debate classes offer more relatable examples and give students a chance to hone their PowerPoint skills.

Nor is the Great Books the best way to acquire the basic scientific education that many go to college to pursue. Yes, if you are as smart as Voltaire, you can learn calculus and mechanics from Newton and Leibniz, but even for the future Voltaires of America, contemporary calculus and physics textbooks will prove a smoother path. St. John’s College at Annapolis and Santa Fe teaches a science- and math-heavy program relying exclusively on a list of Great Books. The two campuses together graduate only a couple of hundred students a year combined. 

When I was applying to colleges in the 1980s, I gave serious thought to applying to St. John’s, but I did not because I wanted to learn more physics than St. John’s taught. In the end, at the University of Washington and Harvard, I proved able to assimilate from modern texts, lectures, and teaching labs roughly the St. John’s physics curriculum. I did finish a BA in Mathematics, and mastered some math topics St. John’s has, for whatever reason, never seen fit to include— though to be fair, even at what was the top undergraduate math program in North America, nobody ever explained to me the rationale behind the chosen curriculum.

As the market correctly perceives, the Great Books are not the best secondary or college option for most students. But the Great Books approach is even less suited to be the core of tertiary education. As I have argued elsewhere, tertiary education, properly understood, is education in a professional or scholarly discipline. While every discipline worth teaching in a university can point to genuinely great works in its history, the task of a terminal degree program in a discipline is to give students everything they can get from reading and writing that will prepare them to commence the professional or scholarly practice of their discipline. Medical school graduates are only part of the way through their professional training, and they need years of supervised practice to get an actual medical license. But they would be even further from that if, instead of the latest brightly illustrated texts, they had been taught out of Hippocrates, Galen, and Osler (fully trained and practicing physicians should read Osler, but so should plumbers, schoolteachers, and geography professors).

The most prominent living academic identified with the political right is retired Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield. During the 2004 debate over reform of the Core Curriculum of Harvard College, Harvey Mansfield said: “I believe in the great books because I think all human thoughts derive from those few masters, i maestri di color che sanno (‘the masters of them that know’). But the derivations are interesting too, more relevant and urgent, and we don’t want to become another great books college.”

Samuel Goldman suggested the true merits and demerits of the Great Books approach can only be seen by comparison with alternative methods of general education in college. But in my view, college “Gen Ed” is a contradiction in terms—what those of us who participate in daily Talmud study call tarti desatri (trying to say two contradictory things at once)—general education, properly understood, is lifelong. Compress too much of the variety of great human thought into the limitations of a four-year degree and the students will experience the whiplash that traumatized my Directed Studies students at Yale—too many perspectives, taught too fast, with not enough opportunity to be converted to any of them. 

As Mansfield also said in the same intervention, “relativism is not a crazy position to hold if it means that we lack proof of the major conflicting principles guiding our lives.” The Great Books can teach us how great minds thought we should live—but we have to live wisely, and we cannot wait for proof of who is wise to begin to live. We have to take some claim to wisdom on faith, or at least, as Descartes says, par provision.

We need, as Mansfield says, to teach our students “to recognize [greatness] in its diversity,” but our students have more pressing things to do in college than cram as much of that diversity as they can into four years. We should be more than satisfied if they finish college not saying farewell to books, but longing to continue their hopefully lifelong encounter with the best that has been thought and written.

One approach proven to instill a desire for general education is the senior ethics course, where a generally educated professor presents a systematic approach to “Man’s Station and His Duties” to God, country, family, and self, and takes on any doubts or quibbles three years of college have instilled. “The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other,” as James Garfield said of the legendary Williams College President.

I have taught versions of the senior ethics course in my institution of strictly tertiary education, the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University. The most successful has been a course on Nihilism and Cinema where we discuss a few great movies. The selection has varied over the two decades I have offered it, but we always end with The Truman Show, with its message that ordinary life itself is worthy of affirmation. I also give them carefully selected readings, beginning each year with the first few chapters of Ecclesiastes: “‘Vanity of vanities,’ saith the Preacher, ‘vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’”

So, two cheers for the Great Books! As a basis for college, it has a deservedly small uptake, but it seems to be fine for those who undertake it. As a program of lifelong learning, it has much to be said for it, though its promoters should consider why programs with ostensibly much more limited appeal are quantitatively far more successful. But all of us who teach young people will be justified in Heaven and on Earth only if our students leave us with the knowledge that there indeed are great books, and with the taste and discernment to make that greatness a regular part of their lives, whatever their disciplines or pursuits.

Michael S. Kochin is an associate professor in the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University.