Some Introductory Comments to the Reading List 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Some Introductory Comments to the Reading List .................................... 2

The Reading List ........................................................................................12

Index ...........................................................................................................99

The University of Chicago Great Books List .............................................103

Well-Read Students: Top 30 books ............................................................105

A List of Lists .............................................................................................106SOME INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS TO THE READING LIST

A. THE PURPOSE AND THE NEED

Cardinal Newman comes close to the true meaning of education in his series of lectures entitled Idea of a University (1852). I am condensing Section 10 of Discourse VII here.

“If then a practical end must be assigned…” to a University degree, I say that it is that of training good members of society in the art of living with people, and in fitness for the world. University education is not content with forming just the economist or the engineer. It aims also at raising the intellectual level of society, at cultivating the public mind, and at supplying true principles of popular enthusiasm. It gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, and an eloquence in expressing them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to disentangle a skein of thought…and to have the repose of mind of a mind that lives in itself while it lives in the world… a mind that enlightens and pleases the society into which it travels and a mind that has resources for its happiness at home when it cannot go into society.

Newman summarizes here what most teachers trained in an academic discipline hold to be the most important aspect of a proper education: the cultivation of one’s mind for one’s own sake and for the sake of others with whom one comes into contact, and the developing of a sound mind that can see things in their right prospect and can form wise judgments so that one can live life with pleasure and satisfaction. An uncultivated mind is like a weed patch: considerably less productive and less rewarding to its owner than it ought to be.

Most educated people of the last few centuries have been in agreement that, in addition to specialized professional or vocational knowledge, all students would profit from a considerable contact with the humanities --- especially literature--- because literature records in the most direct way the accumulated experience of the race and what it means to be a human being, and they believed that this knowledge would contribute directly to the development of sound judgment and a satisfying philosophy of life, as well as providing a common background of cultural information that simplifies communication among educated people. Literature requirements for all students intending to take a degree were common up until about 1930 in most colleges.

Modern American colleges, except for a very few private institutions, have regrettably now moved so far from Newman’s ideal that it seems almost ludicrous to suppose that they are much concerned with the development of a truly educated student or with the cultivation of his or her mind. Except for a few token requirements of a fairly undiscriminating nature, the colleges have abdicated their responsibility for prescribing the courses most appropriate for a liberal education, course requiring extensive reading and study of the great writers and thinkers of the past. Instead, they offer a wide variety of mostly non-sequential courses (which therefore develop no logical sequence of information), and many of these courses are too superficial or too much specialized in content to be really useful in imparting a liberal education. The colleges then expect the students, whose educational background is insufficient to judge the courses, to choose, wisely or foolishly, the components of their own education. The United States appears to be the only nation in which this kind of educational anarchy flourishes. Almost all other nations, many as democratic as the U. S., believe that education is too precious and too costly to be treated in such a haphazard way, and they believe also that there is still a core of common knowledge that all educated people should have.

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There are several reasons for the loss of liberal and cultural education in the U. S., and some of them are good reasons --- the reasons, in fact, are far better than the unhappy results they have produced.

(1) The standard liberal education in the U. S., based on the curricula of schools such as Harvard and Yale, and Oxford and Cambridge in England, and heavily oriented toward the Greek and Latin classics, modern literature, history, philosophy, and fine arts, was felt to be an education for the political and economic elite, who were primarily interested in maintaining the status quo. (The privileged did not want education related to current social, political, ethical, racial, or economic problems).

Growing minority groups, whose cultural backgrounds sometimes differ from the standard Western European culture emphasized in the traditional liberal-arts program, felt that their interests were not included in the traditional program, and disadvantaged groups of various kinds felt that their concerns were primarily economic and political rather than cultural.

As a result of such thinking and pressures, many schools in the last thirty years have dropped most of their remaining liberal-arts requirements, thus ceasing to function as colleges in most of the traditional ways and turning themselves into educational cafeterias where students drop in and out, picking up largely unrelated dishes here and there to form usually an indigestible meal of little nutritional value. To preserve the semblance of education, degrees are still given for a collection of a certain number of units in these random samplings, but the results often fail to comprise an education any more (to mix metaphors) than a collection of automobile parts selected at random will go together to make up a car.

(2) It was felt that in the U.S., as an example of democracy, schools should operate as a microcosm of society, and therefore that the students should be free to choose their own courses without much regard to meeting any overall requirements of a core of common background knowledge and culture.

(3) In the last 40 years, all schools (elementary through college) have fallen under the control of professional administrators (or managers, as they now sometimes call themselves) who are trained in business administration or school finance instead of a traditional academic discipline, and who have often little regard for the academic process, or concern with true education, but who are, instead, concerned with maximizing numbers of students and state funding.

(4) Pernicious educational philosophies beginning with Dewey and others in the 1920’s stressed that education for daily living was more important than education for life (i.e., true education of the mind). While it is obviously important to teach practical matters, such as how to calculate your income tax, many high schools went so far as to concentrate entirely on “life-adjustment” courses as a replacement for courses of basis content that were needed as foundation for later work. English grammar was replaced by idle class exchanges of uninformed opinion, foreign language was discarded because it had no everyday application in the eyes of administrators and ill-trained teachers who didn’t know any foreign language, history became, instead of fact needed to understand the modern world, pointless “relevant” discussion of current events. The “new math” almost killed acquisition of mathematical skills needed for more advanced mathematics.

(5) There has always been an unfortunate anti-intellectual attitude among most people in the U. S., stemming, perhaps, from frontier days when there was thought to be no time for learning. Those days are gone, and today’s technically and socially complex society requires detailed learning. But the attitude prevails, especially among poorly educated people, and it discourages many American students from making the effort to excel in their studies. In most other countries, solid learning is considered, as it should be, an honor and an asset.

(6) There has never been a moneyed, leisure class in the U.S., like the aristocracies of Europe, which had, as one of their few useful activities, the devotion of their resources to the support and pursuit of knowledge and promotion of culture in the arts. De Tocqueville, in his famous study of American democracy (1835-40), listed the lack of a leisure class as one of the disadvantages of our democratic system that would prevent our development into a truly civilized nation. America has, in fact, substituted for this kind of excellence another standard --- a high standard of living for a large fraction of its people. While this is a praiseworthy standard and one that the world has sought to imitate, no degree of prosperity compensates an intelligent man or woman for a lack of culture and knowledge.

(7) Because the U. S. has enjoyed a high standard of living, poorly educated people have usually been able to find relatively highly paid jobs, and this has led to the widespread belief that education is not necessary to be able to live a comfortable life, and also to the equally fallacious belief that the only purpose of education is to obtain training for some kind of job. As a matter of fact, no one, until the last 40 years in the U.S., ever had the strange notion that education had much to do with preparation for employment. Education had as its goal cultivating the mind to prepare a man or woman to enjoy the culture to which he or she was an heir (instead of living a barren life that a primitive being who had no heritage of culture might have led), making it possible to enjoy the fruits of civilization’s great accomplishments in literature, the arts, philosophy, and the sciences. Only recently, and primarily in the U.S., where larger and larger fractions of high-school graduates who have very few intellectual or cultural interests are attending colleges, have the colleges converted themselves into vocational or professional training institutions.

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There are strong arguments in favor of diversity in college courses rather than a degree of uniformity produced by some system of minimal requirements in the liberal arts. One such argument is that the schools in a democracy should reflect the wishes of the people who support them, and if the people want the schools to be low-culture, high-vocational institutions, their wishes ought to be considered. But there is a stronger argument for not compromising true principles of education --- for not converting the colleges, whose primary duty is the transmission of the cultural heritage and the teaching of the basics needed to provide the foundation for specialized professional work (engineering, medicine, law, etc.), into institutions for the correction of social evils, community recreation centers, vocational training centers, special-interest-groups’ indoctrination courses, etc. at the expense of the established liberal-arts, traditional, cultural curriculum. The stronger argument is that schools are charged with the preservation of the democratic way of life, and they have the obligation to produce an informed, literate citizenry who have been educated in the liberal principles of truth with respect for honesty, justice, democracy in practice, and humanity, without which a free society cannot survive. The restraints that a government imposes upon its people must increase and become more irksome in proportion to the extent to which its citizens depart in their thinking and living from the high principles of the traditional liberal-arts education. Students who go through college and learn nothing except how to ear a living --- who learn nothing of beauty, culture, history, humanity, who think that it is all right to cheat their customers and cheat on their income tax and cheat on the quality of their goods or services --- surely contribute to the downfall of our free society.

B. WHY YOU SHOULD DO SOME READING

Here are some remarks touching upon the need for students to undertake a conscientious program of cultural reading and self-education.

1. You are probably a victim of a sub-standard education.

If you are a U. S. high-school graduate, you are, regrettably, a victim of a sub-standard education. While students in most of the other leading nations of the world have been learning the basic facts of history, literature of their own (and other) countries, mathematics, science, music, art, religion and philosophy, and how to write and speak their own language with style and eloquence as well as how to get along in one or two foreign languages, from grades 7 through 12, U.S. students spend most of this time, when the mind is most acquisitive and retentive, in acquiring and retaining very little --- learning very few facts of history, art, science, or mathematics, reading almost none of the great literature of their own language, acquiring almost no ability in speaking or writing effectively or even correctly, not learning to recognize or appreciate great music or even to read music, not learning even the names of the great philosophers whose writings European students are expected to be able to discuss with some understanding, gaining no information about the structure of their own language or any other language

An average European 8th grade schoolchild speaks and writes better, and has more information about things that matter (the solid basic subjects upon which other knowledge is built) than ¾ of American high-school graduates have. Although the U.S. spends more per capita on education than other nations do, American high-school graduates are rather laughingly regarded throughout the world as ignoramuses --- happy, probably, with a lot of material goods, but sadly uninformed, childish in knowledge and understanding, primitive or naïve in emotional responses, incapable of grasping or discussing any serious issue. (This does not mean that American college graduates are considered ignorant in their fields of specialization; especially in business and technical fields, U.S. graduates are among the best, partly because their training depends upon some expensive equipment and progressive methods, of which the U.S. has a lot). What the graduates do not have is true education or cultural background.