The book is essentially the story of the creators of the series, Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins, two of the most dissimilar intellectuals one could hope to find. What brought them together, however, was just that: their intellectuality. But long before these two came together, there were already lists of essential books that had been assembled by personalities as diverse as Frederic William Farrar the Dean of Canterbury in 1898, philosopher Auguste Comte, member of Parliament John Lubbock, novelist Wilkie Collins, and Charles Eliot the president of Harvard who was responsible for the first set of great books called the Harvard Classics. But the real champion of this kind of return to a classical education was the great John Erskine, a professor at Columbia University, who saw that classic literature had become lost among the language departments who refused to allow them to be taught in English translations. He was able to institute an honors program at the college that taught the great books to the likes of Lionel Trilling and Mortimer Adler, both of whom went on to teach the course themselves. Hutchins, on the other hand, had gone to Yale on scholarship and claimed to have learned nothing at the institution, but through his own studies eventually became dean of the Yale Law School by the time he was thirty.
What I like best about the book is the way in which Beam attempts to paint the two as throwbacks to an era already gone by, but in doing so he inadvertently demonstrates why their belief in a classical education--and its attendant teaching methods--was not only the answer for education in their day, but the solution for the educational woes that plague public education in our day. There’s a delightful anecdote about Hutchinson hiring a new law professor who would eventually go on to become a Supreme Court justice. William O. Douglas immediately brought a no nonsense approach to his teaching that offended the children of the wealthy who attended his classes.
I said I though it was time they learned that when they stood before a court or a jury, they
would be judged by their perception and fidelity to the law, not by their ancestors. “It’s fine
with me if you fire me,” I said.
“Don’t be silly. I’m merely passing the complaint on to you,” Hutchins told me.
“I’m inclined to bear down even harder on the spoiled brats.”
“That would be revolutionary and wonderful.”
In our current public school system, where children have been seized by an unearned sense of entitlement--much of which has been caused by public school itself--this is exactly the type of wonderfully revolutionary teaching that is needed to allow genuine learning to happen.
But the most damning indictment of current public school practices comes from Hutchins himself, who clearly understood the distinction between knowledge and thinking. “Facts are the core of an anti-intellectual curriculum,” he stated in several speeches he made in the 1930s, “facts do not solve problems.” And that is, in fact, the problem with public schools today. What students are being taught in schools are facts; they are not being taught how to think. Students today are sheep, being led into classrooms that are no more intellectually rigorous than their gym classes, and then led back out again where many of them attend college and the same thing happens all over again. When I was in the last year of my undergraduate work I can remember sitting in quiz sections with thirty kids and only two of us were able to engage the graduate student about the novels we had read for the class. And that was twenty years ago. In reading the work of professors like Mark Edmundson, Joseph Epstein and Michael Roth, things have not changed for the better. And with the profusion of intellect impeding implements like video games, cell phones, and social media, the situation is only getting worse as teachers, without thinking skills themselves, increasingly populate our public education classrooms and threaten to bring down the entire educational system with them.
As I once wrote years ago in my own book on education, what students need today is the same thing they’ve needed since the time of the ancient Greeks: communication. They need teachers to question them, probe their minds, contradict them, make them prove what they believe, and confront them with their own ignorance. It’s called the Socratic Method and again, Hutchins understood how vitally important this is for learning, and not just for the students.
If he uses the great books as the material read and discussed, even the ordinary teacher (if
he properly regards himself as a student of the great books along with his students) can
perform the Socratic function and service--can ask questions which are genuinely questions
in his own mind, because he is still himself a learner in the presence of the great books.
But this will never happen today, certainly not in public schools, because public school teachers today are far too interested in facts, information, and “right” answers. This was also something Hutchins faced in his day, and one point he considered mandating that all of his professors take the great books seminar. “Outside of the Humanities Division, I doubt that three quarters of our faculty members have ever read a single great book.” At least those professors were scholars of something, unlike the glorified daycare workers who claim to be scholars in our public school system today. In far too many classrooms in this country there are students who are smarter than their teachers, and teachers who are utterly unable to answer one of the most often asked questions put to them: “What’s the point of all this?”
When Hutchins implemented his own honors course in the great books at Chicago University, where he had recently become president, he taught it himself along with Adler. His teaching methods clearly began with what he had learned from William Douglas. A former student said of the course, “Never were egos so quickly deflated.” Another student added, “The methods they used often taught you most . . . about standing up to Hutchins and Adler, about challenging them and fundamentally pleasing them by doing it with gusto and verve.” And from yet another alumnus of the course, “What we gained was knowledge that we would never have gained ourselves. These are writers we never would have learned about in a million years.” But the accelerated pace of the course--110 readings in two years--came under fire from a number of critics, not the least of which was the dean of educational philosophy himself, John Dewey. The argument then, as it is today, was between depth and breadth in learning. In a criticism of Erskine’s course a decade earlier, one of the faculty stated, “I firmly believe that it is better that a man should get to know ten authors well in his last two years in college, than that he should learn the names of the eighty-four men presented to him on this list.” It is a criticism that is not without some validity. Where Hutchins’ course was able to succeed, however, was in the exclusionary nature of his course. With only twenty students offered enrollment he was rightly able to counter arguments against breadth by stating that, “our students are bright.”
Hutchins’ move to Chicago had already been preceded by attempts to reform undergraduate studies at the school, and when he arrived he made even further changes. Classes would now be year long, the way they were in public schools, and there would be no requirement to attend lectures or seminars. Courses would be pass-fail, and instead of written exams students would be tested orally by professors outside of the university. Interestingly, freshman attendance in classes actually rose instead of declining. A Time article about Hutchins’ new plan exclaimed, “Given a chance to proceed under their own steam, students have found that learning is exciting. They pile into extra lecture sections just for the fun of it.” Essentially what was being tested at the end of these courses was the students’ ability to become smarter, more intelligent, in a word, wise. “Wisdom is knowledge of principles and causes,” Hutchins wrote. “The aim of higher education is wisdom.”
Through a circuitous set of circumstances, Chicago University wound up owning a third of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s publishing, and because of the dearth of published versions of the great books available in stores they decided to print their own set of these works. Arguments in the selection committee over literature and philosophy were no surprise. But what was interesting was in the selection of scientific works. Science historian George Sarton had this to say about the committee’s choices: “Newton’s achievement and personality are immortal; his book is dead except from the archaeological point of view. It is all right to study English in Shakespeare; it is all wrong to study astronomy in Newton.” Conceptually, this can be extended even further, as Carl Jung once commented in a letter about a different subject. “Mathematics is not a function of intelligence or logic. It is an asinine prejudice that mathematics has anything to do with the training of the mind.” The reality, however, is quite different. Recent studies in the science of neural pathways demonstrate that any intellectual study, even of arcane science, or non-language mathematics, can increase the brain’s ability to use more of its capacity than by ignoring those subjects. So while Hutchins was embarrassed for along time afterward about the inclusion of science in the Great Books, time and science itself have proven his instincts correct.
Finally, Beam weighs in on the Syntopicon, the vast index of ideas that Hutchins insisted on including with the set. Granted, it never became the household reference work that the editor had envisioned, but neither is it anywhere near as useless as Beam contends. For one thing, the essays that accompany each of the 102 great ideas are fascinating in and of themselves. The only issue with the index is that the user would have to have access to the actual set of Great Books rather than being able to reference the individual works by some uniform measure like paragraphs or line numbers as is commonly used in Shakespeare’s plays. One thing Beam does rightly praise is the first volume in the set, Hutchins’ essay on The Great Conversation, an essay which is as accurate about today’s educational crisis as it was in his day: “The products of American high schools are illiterate; and a degree from a famous college or university is no guarantee that the graduate is in any better case.” And his contention that it is only through a lifetime of self-education that this country will produce “effective citizenship in a democracy” that we see the effects today of the lack of that kind of intellectual achievement. His partner, Adler, was no less accurate about the difficulty achieving their intellectual vision as he was about the college climate today: “We were moving against the tide, not with it. This country was pragmatic . . . the whole talk was about how does higher education pay off in jobs and money. We really had ideals and aspirations for education that were thoroughly against the American grain.”
The biggest misunderstanding about the Great Books is that they represent some kind of fundamentalist idea of perfection that people should aspire to. This is a misconception promoted by the likes of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom. But this could not be further from the intentions of both Hutchins and Adler. At the very least, it’s un-Socratic. The goal of learning to think is not to ingest information indiscriminately, it is to question, to weigh one’s own thoughts against the great ideas of history. Adler put it this way: “They indoctrinate their students with the ‘truth’ they find, in the [Great B]ooks . . . But when I teach them, I want to understand the errors.” That, in short, is what the Great Books idea was all about, and those who see it as a pedantic exercise in truth seeking are missing the point, and simultaneously demonstrating their own lack of intellect. John Erskine’s creed was even simpler: “I hoped merely to teach how to read.” Beam’s book is incredibly enjoyable, and even more so when one sees the truth behind the slights. In the end, the irreverence can’t hide the fact that education in this country is suffering from the very ills that Hutchins and Adler were attempting to arrest. In that, Beam seems to have missed the point. But as a book of history it is very well researched and engagingly written, and as a fan of the Great Books, A Great Idea at the Time comes highly recommended.
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