I don’t know what I was expecting from A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam. I take that back. I expected one of two things, that it would either be serious biography or a fun gossipy romp. It wasn’t really either. It kind of reminded me of Susan Cheever’s American Bloomsbury without the delicious chattiness. This doesn’t mean A Great Idea was bad, it just wasn’t as good as I had hoped.
The Great Books is a history of a few determined men who believed they were saving education and western civilization from decline. John Erskine and Robert Hutchins both believed that what was wrong with American education in the early 20th century was the elective system that allowed college students to choose their own courses. They felt that giving the students a choice had contributed to the students’ lack of familiarity with the Great Books. The elective system, it should be noted, was first instituted by Harvard in 1899. Prior to that the four-year course of study was regimented: Greek, Latin, Math, French, Elocution and Ethics for the freshmen and History, Philosophy, Latin and Greek for the seniors. The years in between included math, physics, German, more Latin and Greek and few other classes.
The first Great Books class was taught at Columbia in 1920. The class required two teachers who sat with 20 – 25 students and launched a Socratic style discussion. A typical discussion launching question was “What is the ruling passion in The Iliad?” Mortimer Adler took the class as a junior at Columbia in 1921 and began teaching it as a grad student in 1923. The teachers did not have to be experts on the book, they only had to have read the book and be good at engaging students in discussion.
Time goes by as does lots of academic politics and Robert Hutchins finds himself the head of the University of Chicago. With the help of Adler, they institute a two-year Great Books undergrad curriculum. The people at the University of Chicago who liked Hutchins loved it, his enemies hated it. There was much sniping within the university and between universities as well as Hutchins starts vigorously marketing their Great Books program and deriding other educational pedagogies.
The Great Books craze outside of academia started at the end of the 1940s after Hutchins and Adler undertook to take the curriculum to the general public. In 1943, the University of Chicago announced that it was going to publish the Great Books. And so began the haggling of the selection committee with each member angling to get his favorite author on the list.
The set was expensive but Hutchins, Adler, and the salesmen of the Encyclopedia Britannica company (Britannica ended up publishing the books) didn’t let that stop them. While Hutchins peddled to the rich and Adler to institutions, the salesmen used tactics to get the general public to buy which led to investigations and warnings from the federal government.
Today there is one school, St John’s College, that has an all Great Books, all the time program for four years of undergraduate education (the reading lists and term schedules are on the website for anyone who wants to ogle). In addition to the reading, students take two years of ancient Greek, two years of French, four years of math and three years of laboratory science. The science, however, is Great Books science. Supporters of the program say it is not the facts that matter, it is that students are learning to think critically that counts. I agree to a certain extent. But when students who wish to go on to graduate degrees in the sciences have to spend a year to a year and half taking classes at another school in order to catch up on “the facts,” well, there is a problem there.
There is a lot of history and facts packed into A Great Idea at the Time. Sometimes it is hard to keep up with names and places and events as it seems to jump around a little. But overall it was fascinating reading. And Beam earned major goodwill points in his acknowledgement section when he wrote,
I believe that librarians are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe.
Can’t go too wrong with an author who says something like that.
I just riffled through the book in the store, so I may not know what I’m talking about, but the author sorely neglects Joseph Epstein, who worked for Adler at Britannica and recounts the experience, with his typical humor, in an essay in his collection In a Cardboard Belt. The zippy quotations from Epstein that Beam uses are all from that essay.
Have you ever tried to read one of Adler’s Great Books? They must be among the most wretchedly designed books in publishing history. Crowded pages, small type, strange paper, no notes of any sort. And then there’s the bizarre, useless Syntopicon.
This obviously has nothing to do with the contents! I’m pro-great books, sure, but Adler’s Great Books were a disaster.
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I loved this post, and loved looking at the reading lists of St. John’s College. I found myself saying, “Oh, I forgot…I read that! I read that! Opps, missed that…” We read a lot of Thomas Aquinas in college – he was a great hero to the founders of my college and an academic hall was named after him. As far as Adler goes, practically as early as I can remember, my Mom had (still has I believe) an old volume in her bookshelves written by Adler. I think it’s called “How To Read A Book.” I’m not sure how I feel about the electives argument, however, I was distressed at times when I saw my kids reading lists in college. There were certainly not as many “Great Books” included as I would have liked to see. Good work on this one, Stefanie. Oh…and Yeah for Librarians! May they live long and prosper.
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Funny! I didn’t even know about this book, but seems like something both Bob and I should read. He got his first graduate degree in the graduate great books program at St. John’s in Santa Fe and has hinted for years that I ought to go.
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This is interesting, since it’s related to my 10 year reading plan. I can’t ever see this working as curriculum for an undergraduate degree, however, there would be too many holes. Even if technically, yes, it would be wonderful if everyone read these books (perhaps this is what high school should consist of?)
Hooray for librarians!
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I work for the Great Books Foundation, which is briefly mentioned in Beam’s book and was founded by Adler and Hutchins in 1947. Anyway, what Beam fails to mention in his interesting history, is that the Great Books Foundation is no longer aligned with its founders’ more strict adherence to the Western canon. We publish a wide range of contemporary and classic literature. Our newest book, The Great Books Foundation Short Story Omnibus (www.greatbooks.org/omnibus) includes graphic stories as well. But definitely check out Beam’s book, for while disappointing at times, it describes a fascinating (if not complete) history of this movement and its characters.
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Ha! I just put this on hold at the library. I agree about the science. While there is probably not much new to say about the human condition, science is all about new knowledge, and it’s been a very long time since scientific discoveries were published in book form. However I don’t imagine that any student with scientific aspirations would go to St. John’s College so it’s probably a moot point.
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i just finished glancing at st john’s reading list and wow…what a list. i don’t know how i would’ve fit all that into my undergrad studies, tho. after my first semester i took no fewer than 18hrs/semester (at one point i took 21 hrs; i don’t recommend that) and covered subjects ranging from shakespeare and poetry seminars to microbiology and a graduate class in hydrogeology. i do suppose, however, that such reading lists do give support to my answer to ‘what do you want to be when you grow up’ which is: a life-long student (this answer quickly replaced ‘horse’, from when i was five).
oh, and more power to librarians!
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Fascinating. I wish I had had a little more ‘classical’ training (how cool to know Greek and Latin) but learning more about The Great Books would be wonderful anytime. I may have to leaf through this one….
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When I flipped through this book at the store, the tone I got from it seemed heavy on that self-conscious, lightly mocking indulgence of middlebrow postwar earnestness that’s so popular…but I don’t get that impression from your reading, which is good.
I’ve long drooled over the St. John’s curriculum, but I’d have to say that, for better or for worse, a student intending to pursue graduate studies in the sciences shouldn’t be at a school that only confers degrees in liberal arts. It does raise the interesting question though – where would the sciences fit in if the criteria for what constitutes a liberal education were re-formed around modern standards of essential skills and knowledge? Because, even though science has an increasing profile in formal education, I’d say that’s never really happened.
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This book was already on my to-read list, and I’ve enjoyed this post and others’ comments!
As some have already mentioned, it seems like anyone who already knows they want to pursue a graduate degree in the sciences would probably choose somewhere other than St. John’s — and for people who start at St. John’s and decide they want to be in the sciences, I’d imagine it’s not that different than a history major or literature major at any school deciding they want to be a physicist or a doctor or a chemist. (I feel like there was a pretty big contingent of “post-bac pre-med” students in the chemistry 101-ish class I took freshman year of college — people who majored in the humanities and then later decided they wanted to go to med school.)
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I read Katherine Graham’s autobiography a few years ago and she went to a university which had the Great Books curriculum. It might have been St John’s. She had interesting things to say about it, especially how challenging the discussions about the books could be.
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Great post! I had already thought I might want to read this book, and after reading your post, I will definitely have to give it a read. I love reading the classics. I wish I had gone to St. John’s, but I wouldn’t have gone there in the 1980s because I was going to be an accountant and make lots of money. Ha! Ha! My yuppie desires ended as an undergrad, and I became an English teacher instead. π
Now as a school librarian, I always push for the classics. I keep up with current books, but I do recommend read-alike classics when I can.
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You don’t mention–and I think it’s a terrible omission if Beam doesn’t mention–the huge popularity of Great Books book groups during the 1950s and 1960s. My parents met many of their friends in a Great Books book group when they first moved to small-town Las Vegas (pop. 35,000) in the early 1950s, and some of the older members of my favorite book group in Los Angeles were also members of the remnants of a Great Books group that, by the late 1990s, was meeting for a three-day retreat/discussion once a year.
One of the rules for the L.A. Great Books discussions (not sure if this was true of all Great Books groups) was that the discussion had to be confined to the content of the piece being read; no outside historical context, no author biography allowed. A friend and I once attended one of the L.A. Great Books retreats and she was chastised roundly for raising the issue of Willa Cather’s sexual orientation. (One woman told us later that we had completely ruined the book for her.)
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Very interesting! We have a class called Great Books at my school, and it’s a descendant of the great books philosophy — I haven’t taught it yet, but would like to (you pick a theme, basically, and choose Great Books that touch on the theme). Have you heard of/read David Denby’s book Great Books, where he takes the Columbia courses as an adult and writes about it? I liked it quite a bit.
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What an interesting sounding book. Looking back on my education now I think I would love to have had that sort of an education. I missed so much of that and am only now trying to catch up, but somehow it’s probably not the same doing it outside the classroom. As someone else mentioned, though, how do you squeeze all that into four years. Maybe it’s okay to stretch it all out over a lifetime! Nice post!
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I definitely appreciate the idea of teachers needing to be good at facilitating discussion; there is much more value in that than being “well-versed” in the book. Critical thinking is all too often lacking in new grads.
As you say, this does not a curriculum make. Someone wanting to pursue Chemical Engineering would need another three or four years of study on top of their plan. π Perhaps the better path would be to encourage reading of great works (and other works, too) on an ongoing basis from around age 8 to 120.
Reading has great value in the stimulation of our minds, whenever.
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Amateur Reader, you are correct. There is not much about Epstein in the book. It is pretty much Hutchins and Adler. I have not tried to read one of the Great Books. But Beam does describe how hard they are, double columned, small print. I think if I had ever tried I would have given up because of the book design.
Grad, the university where I currently work is named after Thomas Aquinas and I have never read anything he wrote. Can I be forgiven though since I have only been working there three months? I know which Adler book you are speaking of. I have not read it but think about giving a go now and then. I too am a little dismayed about some of the books that make it into classrooms these days. I don’t want to force any book down anyone’s throat, but there is something to be said for challenging classics that make you work and think.
Emily, that is totally awesome about Bob! If you ever go you have to blog it in great detail!
Verbivore, I thought of your ten-year reading plan as I was reading the book π I don’t think it works as an undergrad degree either. I can see it better as a scaled back program that maybe goes two years and is part of general education classes or something. Do students still take general education?
Lindsay, thanks for you comment. Beam doesn’t spend much time on the Great Books Foundation. My sister used to be part of a Great Books book group and she would buy one of your wonderful anthologies once or twice a year.
Sylvia, from the sound of it there aren’t many science students who go to St. Johns but there are some. I think they know they will have to do some extra make up work going in. At least I hope they know that.
erica, were you insane as an undergrad? π I am with you on wanting to be a life-long student. I never get tired of learning new things and wish someone would pay me to go to college all my life!
Daphne, it would be very cool to know Greek and Latin. It’s never too late to start learning!
Mella, the whole Great Books program was “middlebrow postwar earnestness” as you describe it. I didn’t get the sense that Beam was mocking it though. He actually attended some Great Books groups and a weekend and says how much he really enjoyed himself. You ask an interesting question about the sciences. It is all too easy to get through school without having to take any challenging science classes.
Heather, you make a very good point about St. John’s education!
Ed, it seems that people who have had Great Books classes/education are very devoted to it. It is fascinating how it inspires such loyalty.
Kim, thanks! Your comment made me laugh. I was going to make big money as a vet but by my second year had switched to English and now I am in library school. Obviously neither of us are really dedicated to making big money π
Holly, Beam does mention the Great Books book groups and how popular they were. I think he said there were something like 50,000 of them at one time (I could be wrong on the number, but there were thousands). The Los Angles group you refer to doesn’t happen to meet at the Beverly Hills library does it?
Dorothy, how fun to teach a Great Books class! If/when you ever do you must be sure to share what it is like! I heard about the Denby book when it first came out but wasn’t sure how good it would be so promptly forgot all about it. Since you liked I will definitely get a hold of a copy!
Danielle, I think I would love that sort of education now but back when I was younger I think I would have hated it. Squeezing it all into four years would be very hard. It looks like they read a book a week and some of them are not small books! I’m with you on being ok stretching it out over a lifetime!
Bikkuri, I agree with you about critical thinking. I believe it is one of the most important things that is left out in much of education these days. I am not sure that cramming a lifetime’s worth of reading into four years is a good idea, so I’m with you on the 8 to 120 plan!
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