Great Books

The Great Books curriculum is the result of a discussion among American academics and educators (including Robert Hutchins,Mortimer Adler,Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan) starting in the 1920s and 30s, about how to improve the higher education system by returning it to the Western Liberal Arts tradition of broad cross-disciplinary learning. The view among these educators was that the emphasis on narrow specialization in American colleges had harmed the quality of higher education by failing to expose students to the important products of Western civilization and thought.

Many of those involved with the Great Books had a populist agenda, stemming from backgrounds in the Socialist movement. They were at odds with much of the existing educational establishment and contemporary educational theory. Educational theorists like Sidney Hook and John Dewey (see pragmatism) disagreed with the premise that there was crossover in education (e.g, that a study of philosophy, formal logic, or rhetoric could be of use in medicine or economics).

The Great Books started out as a list of 100 essential primary source texts considered to constitute the Western Canon. This list was always intended to be tentative, although many critics considered it presumptuous and laughable to nominate 100 Great Books to the exclusion of all others.

Mortimer Adler lists three criteria for the selection of a Great Book:

the book has contemporary significance; that is, relevance to the problems and issues of our times;
the book is inexhaustible; it can be read again and again with benefit; and
the book is relevant to a large number of the great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last 25 centuries.

--(Adler, "Second Look", pg 142)

Table of contents

1 List of Great Books
2 The Great Books Program
3 The Great Books Series

List of Great Books

The Great Books Program

The Great Books Program is a curriculum that makes use of this list of texts. The Program as implemented at St. John's College, Annapolis involves a four-year set course of studies consisting of four classes:

Science--Natural science from Aristotle to Einstein
Mathematics--from Euclid to Einstein
Language--Translation of Greek and French texts and study of poetry
Seminar--Twice-weekly two-hour discussion of a work of philosophy or literature

As much as possible, students rely on primary sources. They are encouraged to conduct classes themselves, with guidance from a tutor.

The Great Books Program at the University of Chicago was the first trial of this teaching methodology, but it failed shortly after its introduction due to fallings-out between the instructors over the best ways to conduct classes and concerns about the rigor of the courses. Several schools maintain a Great Books Program as an option for students, but the two most prominent schools are the St. John's College sister schools.

The Great Books Series

Many Americans are familiar with the Great Books through the collection of hardcover encyclopedia-style Great Books licensed by Mortimer Adler and others through the Great Books Foundation. Many of the books in this collection were translated into English for the first time.

See also: