Section Four: Liberal Education Redux

In recent decades, Britain has largely only thought about the enduring value of the liberal education tradition. Across the Atlantic, throughout the twentieth century, groups of Americans set to work to restore liberal education’s impact. From John Erskine’s pioneering work at Columbia in the early decades of the twentieth century (work inspired by his experience teaching soldiers in Europe after World War I) to the Catholic colleges living out Cardinal Newman’s dream, America became, and remains, the latest haven for the liberal education tradition. Perhaps in the twenty-first century, as when Alcuin brought liberal learning back to Carolingian Europe from the School of York, this pragmatic, American spirit will prove a resource for a new British revival.

XIV. Revival in America From World War I to Christian Classical Schooling

To put an end to the spirit of inquiry that has characterized the West it is not necessary to burn the books. All we have to do is to leave them unread for a few generations. On the other hand, the revival of interest in these books from time to time throughout history has provided the West with new drive and creativeness. Great books have salvaged, preserved, and transmitted the tradition on many occasions similar to our own.[1]

(a) American Lessons: Rereading the Great Books

Ever since liberal education left the shores of Greece, it has shown its capacity for revival by those committed to its principles. As Robert Ralph Bolgar writes in The Classical History and its Beneficiaries, the Venerable Bede and Alcuin of York had to read the antique sources and deliberately bring them back into the mediæval classroom: ‘They moulded their teaching on the information these records [St. Augustine’s De Doctrina, the grammars of Donatus and Priscian, etc.] gave them about what had been done in the past. They put into practice what they read, and found that it worked.’[2]

In the twentieth century, it was America’s turn to follow this path. If the reformers did not ultimately succeed on the grand scale, America, large enough to contain many contradictions, remains the home of a number of separate, conscious attempts to preserve and reinvigorate the tradition of liberal education for modern students, both in their early schooling and at university level. In researching the latter years of the British tradition, it becomes quite striking how often the speakers are recorded addressing American audiences (Albert Mansbridge’s commencement address ‘The Waters of Learning’; Oakeshott’s ‘A Place of Learning’; even back to Matthew Arnold’s ‘Literature and Science’ lecture, in its revised form), or how the American reception of a British proposal gave that work its afterlife (Sayer’s Lost Tools of Learning; Lewis’s Abolition of Man). The Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts appreciates its debt to Europe, and sends all its sophomore students to Rome for a semester, but its campus is in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and not in the country that once educated St. Thomas.

The revival grew from a longstanding culture that valued self-education. A notable example is the tradition of Chautauqua assemblies, an adult education movement beginning in 1874 and popular into the mid-1920s in rural America. President Theodore Roosevelt called it ‘the most American thing in America’ and certainly these grand, multi-day assemblages of speakers and entertainers featuring lectures, music and classic plays attested to the national hunger for knowledge and self-improvement that continues to be one vital aspect of the American Dream. Nor was Chautauqua alone. The generosity of Andrew Carnegie (who thought Matthew Arnold the most charming man he ever knew) established libraries for self-improvement across the nation. In New York, workers took their education seriously. The ‘Lectors’ hired to read to Puerto Rican and Cuban cigar makers in New York provided material for passionate intellectual discussions and their listeners also became discriminating opera and theatregoers. The New York Public Library’s incorporation of the Astor (1848), Lenox (1880) and Tilden (1886) bequests created one magnificent free and public collection. In 1895, Charles Sprague Smith founded The People’s Institute to provide intellectual lectures to the city’s recent immigrants, and the Institute was later led by Scott Buchanan, who introduced the Great Books curriculum at St. John’s College.[3] New York’s Cooper Union was established in 1859 as a full-scholarship college, together with a public reading room and a library, by Peter Cooper, who believed the best education should be ‘free as air and water’.

Out of this background came America’s twentieth-century liberal education revival, centred on the reading of the Western canon: the Great Books. Today, the Great Books Foundation (www.greatbooks.org), established in 1947 to promote liberal education for the general population, still supplies extracts from the canon and related resources for reading groups of all ages. A century ago, in 1909, the modern American revival laid its cornerstone with the publication of the first volume of the Harvard Classics, edited by Charles W Eliot.

Eliot, the President of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, had transformed that university into a world-class research institution. In his career, he had been a bold spokesman for, inter alia, downgrading the prominence of classical languages in education. But it was his much-repeated claim that anyone could educate themselves in the liberal sense by reading for ten or fifteen minutes a day from a five-foot (originally just three-foot) shelf of books that inspired the Harvard Classics. They were not the first-ever effort in this vein. John Lubbock’s Hundred Best Books had been put forward in 1886, and the Everyman’s Library series was conceived in 1905 by JM Dent in London; Bohn’s Libraries (possibly the source of the idiom ‘to bone up’ on a subject) began appearing in 1846, and the Tauchnitz reprint editions of British and American authors had been published since 1841. Nonetheless, Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf was perhaps the first American attempt, and important for its combination of deliberate concision with a uniform edition. It has been called the most comprehensive and well-researched anthology of all time. It aimed, for those who read their way along the shelf, ‘to present so ample and characteristic a record of the stream of the world’s thought that the observant reader’s mind shall be enriched, refined and fertilized’.[4]

The Harvard Classics were a spectacular success. When Eliot died in 1926, nearly three hundred thousand complete sets of the fifty-one volume library had been sold. By 1930, some seventeen and a half million volumes had been sold by monthly subscription, and a number of imitators had also entered the market, increasing the sale of canonical works to the general population even further.[5]

But if the Harvard Shelf provided the essential tools for revival, the educational movement itself really began with the creation of courses based around these books. Despite Eliot’s instrumental role in driving the classical curriculum out of Harvard, others were bringing the canon, with the classical authors now often read only in translation, back into the undergraduate classroom. On 15 January 1901, a Great Books course began at the University of California in Berkeley, under Charles Mills Gayley, who was also instrumental in establishing debating as an important part of the campus culture there. Gayley seems to have been a brilliant lecturer. By 1909, when the first volume of the Harvard Classics was published, Gayley’s one hour introductory lectures on the Great Books could draw audiences of more than a thousand, and were reported at length in the student newspaper, The Daily Californian. More significantly, at New York’s Columbia University George Woodberry had inspired one of his pupils to a similar passion for the canon. John Erskine would go on to create America’s most influential great books course, beginning in 1920.

Erskine marks the real beginning of a lasting liberal education revival in America, and for him the impetus seems to have come from Woodberry’s influence, combined with his own experience in Europe. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, he was involved in providing education for the American troops on their way back to civilian life. In the ruins left by that confrontation, at the American Expeditionary Forces University at Beaune, Erskine saw education with a new urgency. Transmitting the best that had been thought and said became a passion. On his return to America, Erskine founded the general honours course in classic texts at Columbia that was eventually known as ‘Humanities A’ and today ‘Literature Humanities’, part of the Core Curriculum for all undergraduates at the college. The course would go on to have considerable influence, and Columbia would also later become the home to the much-loved classicist Gilbert Highet, whose radio broadcasts in the 1950s discussing classic literature with a general audience were carried by over 300 stations in the US and Canada.

Out of Columbia’s example, related courses developed across American universities, including the St. John’s College Great Books program, founded in 1937 by Scott Buchanan and Stringfellow Barr and still taught on the twin campuses of Santa Fe and Annapolis. Sister Miriam Joseph’s primer to the core of the mediæval liberal arts curriculum, The Trivium, was also first published in 1937. Demand continued, and it was reissued in 1940, 1948 and most recently in 2002.

Perhaps the most important student of the Columbia Core was Mortimer Adler, who studied there with Erskine himself. Adler had also befriended Robert Maynard Hutchins, who became President of the University of Chicago in 1929 and invited Adler to join the Law School there as a philosopher of law, the Philosophy faculty itself being apparently resistant to Adler’s candidacy. With Adler’s help, Hutchins brought some of the ideas represented by the Columbia Core to Chicago, but more importantly, Adler and Hutchins re-energised the Great Books movement in America, creating the Great Books Foundation in 1947 and ultimately bringing together the resources for a new attempt at the Five Foot Shelf in Great Books of the Western World (1952), this time hoping to produce not just a uniform edition of masterworks, but also a detailed concordance by which related passages could be contrasted and compared.

Those two projects began in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, even as Erskine’s project had come from the 1914-1918 conflict. Just as in the UK, this renewed battle for civilised values gave fresh impetus to the cause of liberal education, but in the United States the calls for revival had more influence. In 1940, Mortimer Adler published How to Read a Book, which, revised with Charles Van Doren in 1972, has become a staple introduction to disciplined reading for American students. Robert Maynard Hutchins published Education for Freedom in 1943, the same year that Mark Van Doren, Charles Van Doren’s father and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and critic, published Liberal Education, not as one who was liberally-educated but as someone who hoped to be.

My book is not by one who considers himself educated. It is by one who still wishes to be, and who has set out to discover if he can of what the experience would consist.[6]

Nevertheless, Great Books of the Western World did not sell in such prodigious quantities as the Harvard Classics, even after door-to-door encyclopædia salesmen took up the cause. In part, this may have been the fault of the series format, with unwieldy, rather ugly volumes, content in columns of small print and out-of-copyright translations, out-of-tune in twentieth-century ears. A second edition, in 1990, dealt with some of the worst translations, but walked into the crossfire of the canon wars, criticised for insufficient revisions to reflect contemporary concerns at under-representation of women a nd of non-European or even non-Anglophone authors.[7]

The popularising of philosophy and great works by Will Durant and his wife Ariel had more currency in the post-war years, perhaps because the Durants were more open to discussing non-western philosophers. Durant received a joint Pulitzer Prize with his wife in 1967 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Ford in 1977, but the couple died within two weeks of each other in 1981, as the canon wars began heating up. Allan Bloom’s 1987 Closing of the American Mind, a hymn to what he saw as a dying vision of education on the American university campus, was a bestseller, but the stinging reviews it received from America’s intellectual elite were a more accurate guide to the times. Harold Bloom’s 1994 attempt to define The Western Canon along broadly traditional lines became notorious, but largely as a lone reaction against the new schools of literary criticism that had become dominant. The New York Times reviewed the book under the title ‘Bloom at Thermopylæ’, to indicate that this was a doomed, if heroic, last-ditch stand for the Great Books.

In the limited success of the Great Books of the Western World (although it must be acknowledged that the seond edition is still in print) and the other popularising guides to the canon that followed, the limited success of America’s Great Books movement over the twentieth century can be measured. Popular sympathy for the ideal remained quite high, but the intelligentsia, education’s gatekeepers, were less and less convinced. Unsurprisingly, with the suspicions of authority and official culture that marked the years after 1960, such a project, despite the traditionally revolutionary nature of much of the material, came to seem a dead-end. While the Great Books Foundation continues, it work now includes supplying materials to school reading groups, something not part of its original mission.

In America’s schools, the Great Books movement has also been supplemented by a broader concept - the transmission of core knowledge. The Core Knowledge Foundation was founded by ED Hirsch Jr in 1986, in response to a problem he had noted as early as 1978: some students, especially those from poorer backgrounds, were strangers to commonly-accepted items of cultural knowledge regarding, for instance, American history. The idea that an educated civic conversation on great issues demands at least some common vocabulary and knowledge, and that fairness demands that this be provided to all citizens, produced the Core Knowledge curriculum, which is designed to build solid, specific, shared knowledge in sequence throughout school years education.[8]

Such supplementary work is also carried out at American universities. The Symposium Readings at Lynchburg College, Virginia, begun in 1976, have been suggested as a model of their kind: encouraging cross-curricular engagement with the Great Books. The conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute, founded in 1953 to ‘educate for liberty’ operates as an umbrella organisation across American colleges, providing students with resources that support liberal learning. In 2007, the ISI published The Great Tradition, its own comprehensive collection of original sources on liberal education, and in February 2009 published Anthony O’Hear’s The Great Books - an introduction to the high points of the Western canon.

In general, then, it is in courses at schools and universities that the American liberal education revival now continues, not as a shelf of great books for the adult autodidact, but in liberally-conceived courses or course supplements built upon those books and the idea of essential knowledge, and standing in counterpoint to what has become the mainstream of American education - making John Erskine, rather than Charles W Eliot, the more visionary of the revival’s founders, and Mortimer Adler, who created the Paideia schools movement,[9] more successful in retrospect than Robert Maynard Hutchins, although Shimer College, the Great Books College of Chicago, could be said to be the inheritor of Hutchins’s curriculum.

Hutchins himself might not have minded being marked down by history as a man with a limited legacy. There is no doubt that his tireless and stirring promotion of the value of a liberal education did much to keep the ideal alive and to energise those who would take it forward in new ways. And he was in any case fond of quoting words that have been attributed to William the Silent or Charles the Bold:

It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in order to persevere.

(b) Why America?: US Exceptionalism versus Models for Britain’s Future

For Britain, the larger question may be not how, but simply why America has proved more enthusiastic, certainly more practically committed, to the defence of liberal education. In some respects, this was quite surprising: American educators from the days of Emerson possessed a pragmatic streak and a desire to challenge tradition that resisted education for its own sake, particularly in ancient languages - as witness the work at Harvard of Charles Eliot before he devoted his retirement to the Five Foot Shelf. Was it only a British lack of American “can-do” spirit that made the difference?

America did have certain advantages that helped to make it the natural setting for such a revival. Here, small liberal arts colleges were a long-established fact. Even a more narrowly vocational higher education never replaced that tradition. Here too, the emphasis in America on looking back to their founding for inspiration proved influential. America’s Declaration of Independence may have been a product of the Enlightenment, but it was also a neoclassical uprising, adopting appellations such as ‘Senate’ and ‘Capitol’ and ultimately constructing Washington DC as a second Rome, dominated by white marble columns and pediments and with all quadrants of the District of Columbia designated in relation to the Capitol’s Pantheon-inspired Rotunda. The founding fathers of America were men raised on liberal learning and inspired by the democratic message of its originators in ancient Greece and Rome, and whenever their inheritors look back to these great statesmen and their debates, they also discover the educational tradition that produced them, and their common debt to Europe’s cultural heritage. So, for instance, the Thomas Jefferson Classical Academy in Mooresboro, NC, chooses to follow a modern interpretation of the mediæval curriculum advocated by Dorothy Sayers to honour Jefferson’s memory. More widely, Dr. Oliver DeMille’s influential Thomas Jefferson Education books and courses show the synergy between the American founding and a restored liberal education.[10]

America also had a newcomer’s respect for European culture and an awareness that the cultural legacy inherited from so far away could easily be lost. This sense of fragility readily translated into a preservationist movement, including the Harvard Classics, even as it also produced counterforces that sought to break from the past, particularly with the politically-correct canon controversies that raged over the privileging of “Dead White European Males” in the 1980s and 1990s, on which William Casement’s 1996 history, The Great Canon Controversy, provides an overview, while David Denby’s 1996 account of attending a Great Books course in middle age, Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World, offers a useful corrective.

It is also probably true that America was more open to a liberal education revival because of the strongly religious character of its civic life. A liberal education does not have to follow any religious doctrine. Indeed within the United States the twin campuses of St. John’s College in Santa Fe and Annapolis demonstrate, despite their name, a Great Books curriculum without a religious foundation. The Paideia Schools inspired by Mortimer Adler also continue to work in the tradition without necessarily instructing their pupils into any faith, focusing instead on combining factual instruction, skill acquisition and Socratic discussions. Yet it is also true that the liberal education tradition was intimately bound up with the fortunes of Christianity for many centuries, as discussed in the introduction and as the main body of the book bears out. It is then no surprise to find that America, the most religiously-observant Western nation, should boast first-rate Catholic liberal arts colleges. Thirty years ago, an Englishman, Christopher Derrick, had to come to America to see the work of Thomas Aquinas College. His subsequent book, Escape from Scepticism: Liberal Education as if Truth Mattered (1977) is still worth reading and celebrates a modern place of learning where faith and reason coexist harmoniously.

What kind of image will most aptly suggest the distinctive happiness which I observe in these rather unusual students? An image (I think) of liberation; and I have titled this book accordingly. Most colleges and universities today provide excellent education of the servile kind; but along with this, most of them provide also an indoctrination in scepticism, and this is something which paralyzes and imprisons the mind. But these particular young people have been set free.

Today, Thomas Aquinas College continues to thrive, ranked in 2009 by the Princeton Review as one of the nation’s 50 “Best Value” private colleges. Since its establishment in 1971, a number of new Catholic colleges have joined it in the USA. Meanwhile, the Vitale Supreme Court ruling of 1962 and the Schempp and Murray decisions of 1963 effectively outlawed schooling with a religious character from America’s public classrooms. The response has been the growth of Christian homeschooling and new, private school foundations in America, and both have turned to the liberal education tradition for guidance. The Christian Classical School movement is large and various but supports a strong academic education. While the emphasis on religious instruction and a characteristic rejection of evolution are startling by British standards (although Britain is not without its creationist academies, and all UK state schools are legally obliged to provide ‘daily collective worship for all registered pupils’), they sit alongside an education that is genuinely liberal. Patrick Henry College (motto: for Christ and for Liberty), founded in 2000, offers homeschoolers a college where they can continue to pursue a liberal education within the Christian ethos of their early education. Their legal debate team is already recognised as possessing some of the nation’s foremost young orators.[11]

The USA is bigger and much less centralised than Britain, thus allowing for a much greater degree of genuine diversity in education. The situation in Britain is further exacerbated because in 1989 the state nationalised both exams and the curriculum, through the national curriculum and state licensing of the examinations permitted in state schools. As was utterly predictable at the time (and was predicted in print by one of the editors of this anthology), the state curriculum in the UK has been increasingly captured and moulded in their image by the progressives and utilitarians of the political and educational establishments, with the dire results for classical study in particular we have already mentioned.

A revival of liberal education in Britain such as exists in parts of the USA seems increasingly remote in our time, not least because of the moral weakness of the independent sector. Terrified of losing charitable status and of appearing elitist, some notable and recent exceptions notwithstanding, all too often even our historic public schools are content to follow lamely in the footsteps of their colleagues in the maintained sector, and to implement what the state decrees on syllabuses and exams (and on much else besides). It is fair to say, though, that liberal educators in British schools have had very little support from the universities. Individual academics complain constantly about the levels of knowledge and understanding of incoming students, but those leading the universities are notable for their silence on what is happening. One can only conclude that this is an almost inevitable consequence of the fact that all but one of Britain’s universities are funded by the very same state whose policies have contributed so markedly to the erosion of liberal learning in our country. In delivering ‘A Place of Learning’ at Colorado College (see the section ‘After Tradition’ above) Michael Oakeshott charmingly observed that he had crossed half the world to find himself in familiar surroundings: a place of learning. Without correction, the time may be approaching when we Britons will have to cross half the world to find ourselves in a very unfamiliar place: a place of learning - as, indeed, Christopher Derrick was already discovering some thirty years ago.

By contrast to Britain’s crushing reliance on central control, the American revival has been rooted in freedom, and has survived by demonstrating those elements of liberal education that accord so well with its own national tradition: its democratic character, aiming to liberate all who wish to submit to its disciplines; and its supra-political status, offering a form of learning whose value partisans of both right and left can agree upon. America in the twentieth century made Allan Bloom’s erudite and conservative Closing of the American Mind a bestseller in 1987. It found Leo Strauss, the godfather of neo-conservatism, proclaiming ‘liberal education is the counter-poison to mass culture’ in 1959. And yet it also produced the St. John’s campuses, Clemente courses in the humanities and Paideia schools, all of which leaned politically away from Strauss and Bloom.

America revived liberal education most successfully by re-emphasising it as a mass endeavour that transcended party lines, and there is food for thought here for Britain, where issues of class and ideology have helped to keep such a generous education a matter of suspicion, from one side or the other. After World War II in America, the GI Bill brought men from the army into college who might never have anticipated such an education, with great success. Robert Maynard Hutchins used to argue, “the best education for the best is the best education for all”, and Mortimer Adler’s Paideia Proposal and the ongoing Paideia Schools movement derived from it, centred on the National Paideia Center, remains the most comprehensive attempt to develop a truly modern, universal, faith-neutral, non-ideological liberal education.[12] Those involved began with the assumption that ‘All children can learn’, and went on to combine liberal studies with a number of other elements, some progressive, adapting themselves to the exigencies of a system that had to prepare students for earning their living as well as using their minds. The result may not be the final word, but it is a living experiment in revival with many creditable results, often in areas of socioeconomic deprivation.

Another attempt to bring liberal education to those traditionally excluded from the humanities curriculum was the Clemente Course of Earl Shorris, founded in 1994 and since extended around the United States and overseas. Resembling the workers’ education movement in Britain, Shorris provided university-level liberal arts courses to the socially marginalised. He hoped to encourage them into personal liberation and the capacity to live the political life as understood by Pericles, Aristotle and Cicero, engaging with the world through reasoned argument and personal control. The course took Socrates as its model and proved very successful, demonstrating once again that those long considered unsuitable for the liberal arts can indeed benefit from their power. Shorris’s memoir, Riches for the Poor (2000), details a highly original, modern remaking of the generous education devised by the ancient Greeks.

“You’ve been cheated,” I said. “Rich people learn the humanities; you didn’t. The humanities are a foundation for getting along in the world, for thinking, for learning to reflect on the world instead of just reacting to whatever force is turned against you. I think the humanities are one of the ways to become political, and I don’t mean political in the sense of voting in an election, but political in the broad sense: The way Pericles, a man who lived in ancient Athens, used the word ‘politics’ to mean activity with other people at every level, from the family to the neighbourhood to the broader community to the city/state in which he lived.

“Rich people know about politics in that sense. They know how to negotiate instead of using force. They know how to use politics to get along, to get power. It doesn’t mean rich people are good and poor people are bad. It simply means that rich people know a more effective method for living in this society.

“Do all rich people or people who are in the middle know the humanities? Not a chance. But some do. And it helps. It helps to live better and enjoy life more. Will the humanities make you rich? Yes, absolutely. But not in terms of money. In terms of life.

[...]

“It is generally accepted in America that the liberal arts and the humanities in particular belong to the elite. I think you’re the elite.”[13]

Shorris developed a course that, with slight alterations, could be offered with success in the Yucatán, Mexico, demonstrating that liberal education still transcends boundaries, reaching across the divisions that cultural identity politics can emphasise too much. In an increasingly culturally-fragmented Britain, there are surely again lessons here worth learning, about finding potential among the disregarded, and about refusing to allow accidents of birth and background to deprive individuals of the best education possible.

Here is a suitable moment to leave the tradition, which is endlessly in the process of becoming, even as it looks back to its roots to remember where its origins lie. The story of liberal education in America is by no means an unmitigated success, but it continues, and shows that a practical revival of such an education is possible. Our broken tradition can still be mended, by many routes. The ancient ideals of self-mastery, weighty reading and civilised debate remain as valuable as ever, worth journeying across an ocean to bring home once more, as Mark Van Doren once dreamt of seeking their distant origins by looking towards Europe.

The liberal arts lie eastward of this shore.

Choppy the waves at first. Then the long swells

And the being lost. Oh, centuries of salt

Till the surf booms again, and comes more land.

Not even there, except that old men point

At passes up the mountains. Over which,

Oh, centuries of soil, with olive trees

For twisted shade, and helicons for sound.

Then eastward seas, boned with peninsulas.

Then, orient, the islands; and, at last,

The cave, the seven sleepers. Who will rise

And sing to you in numbers till you know

White magic. Which remember. Do you hear?

Oh, universe of sand that you must cross,

And animal the night. But do not rest.

The centuries are stars, and stud the way.[14]

It seems fitting to pair this with Goethe’s lyric ‘Kennst du das Land’ (c. 1783). A dream of Italy (or of the Greece Goethe never actually got to) and itself a palimpsest of James Thomson’s 1746 English ballad ‘Summer’ (‘Bear me, Pomona! To thy citron groves’), it is a reminder of one of the times when the greatest spirits in European culture saw salvation in the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome. Thomas Carlyle translated it, and wrote to Goethe to say that his wife played it for him often on the pianoforte. Louisa May Alcott’s biographer, Madeleine Stern, imagined Alcott singing it beneath Ralph Waldo Emerson’s window, and Professor Bhaer hums from it ‘like a big bumblebee’ in Little Women. It was set to music by many of the great composers of the nineteenth century, including Schubert and, most memorably, Hugo Wolf. No doubt echoing somewhere in Van Doren’s imagination when he wrote, here again the American, European and British traditions meet with their classical antecedents: as Thomson invokes the Roman goddess of the orchard, Pomona, and in Goethe’s melancholy evocation of classical magnificence. All share freely in the great and endless conversation that a liberal education is always ready to invite new voices to join, whether men or women, whether of the old world or the new. Goethe’s poem stands as a passionate invitation to the world conjured up in liberal education and an urgent summons to know that world really, for those with eyes to see, ears to hear and the heart to respond; and as such offers a fitting conclusion to our work.

Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom,

Where in dark foliage golden oranges glow,

A soft wind blowing from the azure heaven,

The myrtle standing still and the laurel tree high?

Do you know it, really?

Thither, thither,

May I with Thee, o my beloved, go.

Do you know the house? Roof resting on columns,

The gleaming hall, the glittering rooms,

And marble statues standing, looking at me:

‘What, my poor child, have they done to you?’

Do you know it, really?

Thither, thither,

May I with Thee, o my protector, go.

Do you know the mountain, and its cloud-wrapt path,

Where in mist the mule picks its way;

In its caverns dwell the dragons’ ancient brood,

The cliff falls sheer, and over it the stream?

Do you know it, really?

Thither, thither

Lies our way. O Father, let us go!

1 Robert Maynard Hutchins, Great Books of the Western World, volume I, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education, ‘The Tradition of the West’ (1952).

2 (1954), p. 27.

3 Tim Lacy has recently contended that The People’s Institute offers the true origin of the Great Books curriculum, rather than John Erskine’s work at Columbia. Those interested in examining his research in detail should consult his doctoral thesis with Loyola University, Chicago: ‘Making a Democratic Culture: The Great Books Idea, Mortimer J Adler, and Twentieth-century America’.

4 Taken from Eliot’s preface.

5 To coincide with the Five Foot Shelf’s centenary, Christopher R. Beha’s memoir of reading the entire collection, The Whole Five Feet, was published in May 2009.

6 Van Doren (1943), p. 11. Mark Van Doren also taught at Columbia, beginning in the same year as Erskine’s Great Books course, 1920-1959.

7 Alex Beam offers an up-to-date, though slightly flippant history of the project in A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (2008).

8 This idea may be gaining currency in Britain as well. Even Michael Young, once the author of Knowledge and Control (1971), a revolutionary manifesto for restructuring the school curriculum to increase pupil engagement, uses his 2008 book Bringing Knowledge Back In to warn that schools must not forget their role in transmitting difficult-to-acquire knowledge. Michael Gove, the Shadow Education spokesman for the Conservative party, used the 2008 Aske’s Education Lecture to stress the progressive nature of demanding that knowledge-acquisition remain central to national education.

9 See The Paideia Proposal (1982).

10 DeMille is also the Chancellor of George Wythe College in Utah. George Wythe taught law and read the Great Books with Thomas Jefferson, who referred to him as “my second father”.

11 For an overview and discussion of the movement, see ‘The New Classical Schooling’ by Peter J Leithart in The Intercollegiate Review, 43 (1), Spring 2008.

12 That said, America still grapples with the limits that natural ability places on access to a liberal education at the highest level. The approach, derived from Plato, of concentrating on liberally educating a cadre of future leaders was taken up most notoriously by Leo Strauss and is evident today in Oliver DeMille’s George Wythe College, which proudly claims to be ‘Building Statesmen’, and the exclusive and secluded Deep Springs with its ‘education for service’. Charles Murray’s 2008 book Real Education addresses this topic in some depth. See also his Wall Street Journal articles 16-18 January 2007, ‘Intelligence in the Classroom’, ‘What’s Wrong with Vocational School?’ and ‘Aztecs vs. Greeks’. In the last of these, Murray writes, ‘In short, I am calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty.’ However, even Murray does not discount the value of a humanities-led education for all, he merely questions how far it can go. Following ED Hirsch and the Core Knowledge movement, he argues that ‘More people should be getting the basics of a liberal education. But for most students, the places to provide those basics are elementary and middle school.’ (Charles Murray, ‘Are Too Many People Going to College?’ The American, 8/9/08).

13 Shorris (2000), pp. 127-8.

14 ‘The Seven Sleepers’, from The Seven Sleepers and Other Poems by Mark Van Doren (1944). The collection’s dedication is to St. John’s College, ‘where the Seven are awake’.