Great Books refers to a curriculum and a book list, as well as a method of education. Mortimer Adler lists three criteria for including a book on the list:
- the book has contemporary significance; that is, it has relevance to the problems and issues of our times;
- the book is inexhaustible; it can be read again and again with benefit;
- 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.
Origin
It came about as the result of a discussion among American academics and educators, starting in the 1920s and 1930s and begun by Prof. John Erskine of Columbia University, about how to improve the higher education system by returning it to the western liberal arts tradition of broad cross-disciplinary learning. These academics and educators included Robert Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, and Alexander Meiklejohn. The view among them 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.
They were at odds both with much of the existing educational establishment and with 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).
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.
Program
The Great Books Program is a curriculum that makes use of this list of texts. As much as possible, students rely on primary sources. The emphasis is on open discussion with limited guidance by a professor, facilitator or tutor. Students are also expected to write papers.
In 1919, Professor Erskine taught the first course based on the "great books" program, titled "General Honors," at Columbia University. Erskine left for the University of Chicago in the 1920s, and helped mold its core curriculum. It initially failed, however, shortly after its introduction due to fallings-out between the instructors over the best ways to conduct classes and due to concerns about the rigor of the courses. Survivors, however, include Columbia's Core Curriculum and a comparable program at Chicago, both heavily focused on the "great books" of the Western canon.
A university or college Great Books Program is a program inspired by the Great Books movement begun in the United States in the 1920s. The aim of such programs is a return to the Western Liberal Arts tradition in education, as a corrective to the extreme disciplinary specialisation common within the academy. The essential component of such programs is a high degree of engagement with whole primary texts, called the Great Books. The curricula of Great Books programs often follow a canon of texts considered more or less essential to a student's education, such as Plato's Republic , or Dante's Divine Comedy . Such programs often focus exclusively on Western culture. Their employment of primary texts dictates an interdisciplinary approach, as most of the Great Books do not fall neatly under the prerogative of a single contemporary academic discipline. Great Books programs often include designated discussion groups as well as lectures, and have small class sizes. In general students in such programs receive an abnormally high degree of attention from their professors, as part of the overall aim of fostering a community of learning.
There are only a few true "Great Books Programs" still in operation. These schools focus almost exclusively on the Great Books Curriculum throughout enrollment and do not offer classes analogous to those commonly offered at other colleges. The best known of these schools is St. John's College located in Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM. There is also Shimer College in Chicago, Thomas Aquinas College, the College of Saint Thomas More in Fort Worth, Texas, and the upcoming Imago Dei College in Oak Glen, California.
Several schools maintain some version of a Great Books Program as an option for students. Some of the most prominent schools are the University of Notre Dame, Boston College, Pepperdine University, University of San Francisco, Mercer University, University of Dallas, Gutenberg College, the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, the Integral Liberal Arts program at Saint Mary's College of California (Moraga), the Hutchins School at Sonoma State University, the Great Conversation, American Conversations, Asian Conversations, and Science Conversation programs at St. Olaf College, Franciscan University of Steubenville and the Louisiana Scholars' College at Northwestern State University (Natchitoches). In Canada Great Books programs exist at the College of the Humanities at Carleton University, at the University of King's College, and at the Liberal Arts College at Concordia University.
Controversy
The Great Books curriculum was drawn into the popular debate about multiculturalism, traditional education, the "culture war," and the role of the intellectual in American life. Much of this debate centered on reactions to the publication of The Closing of the American Mind in 1987 by Allan Bloom.
Series
Main article: Great Books of the Western WorldThe Great Books of the Western World is a hardcover 60-volume collection (originally 54 volumes) of the books on the Great Books list. Many of the books in the collection were translated into English for the first time. A prominent feature of the collection is a two-volume Syntopicon that includes essays written by Mortimer Adler on 102 "great ideas." Following each essay is an extensive outline of the idea with page references to relevant passages throughout the collection. Familiar to many Americans, the collection is available from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., which owns the copyright.
Shortly after Adler retired from the Great Books Foundation in 1989, a second edition (1990) of the Great Books of the Western World was published; it included more Hispanic and female authors and, for the first time, works by African American authors. During his tenure as president of the Foundation, Adler had resisted such additions.
Sample list
Any recommended set of great books is expected to change with the times, as reflected in the following statement by Robert Hutchins:
In the course of history ... new books have been written that have won their place in the list. Books once thought entitled to belong to it have been superseded; and this process of change will continue as long as men can think and write. It is the task of every generation to reassess the tradition in which it lives, to discard what it cannot use, and to bring into context with the distant and intermediate past the most recent contributions to the Great Conversation.The following is an example list from How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. (1940, 1972)
- Homer: The Iliad , The Odyssey
- The Old Testament
- Aeschylus: Tragedies
- Sophocles: Tragedies
- Herodotus: Histories
- Euripides: Tragedies
- Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
- Hippocrates: Medical Writings
- Aristophanes: Comedies
- Plato: Dialogues
- Aristotle: Works
- Epicurus: "Letter to Herodotus", "Letter to Menoecus"
- Euclid: The Elements
- Archimedes: Works
- Apollonius: The Conic Sections
- Cicero: Works
- Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
- Virgil: Works
- Horace: Works
- Livy: The History of Rome
- Ovid: Works
- Plutarch: Parallel Lives ; Moralia
- Tacitus: Histories ; Annals ; Agricola ; Germania
- Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic
- Epictetus: Discourses; Enchiridion
- Ptolemy: Almagest
- Lucian: Works
- Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
- Galen: On the Natural Faculties
- The New Testament
- Plotinus: The Enneads
- St. Augustine: "On the Teacher"; Confessions ; City of God ; On Christian Doctrine
- The Song of Roland
- The Nibelungenlied
- The Saga of Burnt Njál
- St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
- Dante Alighieri: The New Life ( La Vita Nuova ); "On Monarchy"; The Divine Comedy
- Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde ; The Canterbury Tales
- Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks
- Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince ; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
- Desiderius Erasmus: The Praise of Folly
- Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
- Thomas More: Utopia
- Martin Luther: Table Talk ; Three Treatises
- Francois Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
- John Calvin: Ins
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