Conference on the program "Great Books"

Dear Mr. the Director, dear fellow colleagues, dear listeners,

I would like to begin with a few observations concerning today’s problems in education. I think all of us here are convinced that there is a true problem in modern education, and one might even say a true crisis. Problems in a certain sense have always been, but the scope and magnitude of today’s problems are not so much material, not so much a question of difficulties but rather a crisis of identity. Today it is not so much a question of lack of means or money for education, but rather what does it mean to be an educated man.

Yet it is one thing to diagnose an illness, it is quite another to find a cure. We all, I think, are certain that the educational system is sick, mortally sick, and so our task should not be so much as to criticize as to provide help and remedy. However the remedy must be proportionate to the disease if it is to bring the patient back to health. What I would like to do in this short conference is to give a brief summary of an experience in America that one could characterize as a healthy reaction to the present crisis, and in many ways a help as it corresponds in a large measure to what might be called a classical education.

In a certain sense the present malady we see in Poland is actually quite late in comparison to the rest of the world. America, which has often been the vanguard for all that is modern, has also unfortunately been the experimental ground for all that is revolutionary. The current educational system now being imposed is following in large measure the educational system in America, and thus it is only natural that the same results follow: a lack of discipline, lack of authority, lack of standards, lack of demands on the children, lack of respect for the past, lack of any formation of character, lack of anything more elevated than simple pragmatic necessity - in brief, a lack of everything that we call civilization.

Yet there were certain academic voices in America, especially connected with Columbia University in the 1920’s and 1930’s, that saw as it were the future where education was heading. There were teachers and professors, especially in higher education, that already recognized the extreme dangers threatening the youth and their education. Amongst them was Prof. John Erskine, who in turn would influence such notable personalities as Mortimer Adler. The primary concern at that time was that education was becoming so specialized that universities were no longer forming human beings but rather parts of them, or that rather the system of education had forgotten what a human being was. It was a healthy reaction against what is called pragmatism today, a system propagated by such American educators as John Dewey which emphasized that all education had to have practical use, or to work properly, for it to be of value. It was the radical empiricism of such philosophers such as William James that in many ways signaled the death knell of true education. By concentrating all human worth on what worked or what was of practical application, it eliminated whole branches of knowledge by reducing them to a practical consensus of opinions of a pluralistic society. Gone was the search for truth, or rather truth was reduced to what was expedient or what was practical or what simply worked correctly. Of course such a philosophy never makes very clear what ‘working correctly’ implied, and completely ignored the fact that human beings are not so much machines for the state, but rather have immortal souls.

The great books program was a reaction against this empty philosophy by a return to what were deemed the primary sources of Western civilization. It aimed to return to what they called “the Western Liberal Arts Tradition”, and the essential component of the program is a profound study of primary texts which were called “the Great Books”. The curricula is formed upon a canon of texts considered more or less essential to a student’s education. There are at present several programs that are modeled on this Great Books movement, the selection of texts of course varies. I would nevertheless like to give you a list coming from Mortimer Adler’s book: How to Read a Book, which is considered as a classic introduction to this program. This list is typical of such a curriculum, and from it we can form a first assessment of its strengths and weaknesses, especially with reference to a Catholic school.

Since the program uses a list of texts, and not a syllabus, the students rely almost entirely on the primary sources. The emphasis is on open discussion guided by a professor or tutor. The students are expected to write essays and reports on what they have read, and this consists the large portion of their grade. The use of primary texts dictates an interdisciplinary approach, as most of the books in the so-called Western Canon do not really fall into a certain category or discipline. Even if books such as Plato’s Republic could be called philosophy, Plato himself therein speaks of music, of government, of virtue and countless other things such that he cannot be truly categorized but rather is himself the founder of a whole school of opinions.

This universal vision or personal understanding encompassing every subject is very much the end desired by the Great Books program. What is desired is not so much a great mathematician or a great historian, but rather something of the Renaissance man who has a universal knowledge of everything that is around him, or as the Roman playwright Terence once said: I am a man, I hold that nothing human is alien to me. An educated person, according to this conception, should have at least an elementary knowledge of every human science and art. One should know at least the core of what is called Western civilization. It would be rather the initiative of the student and his particular talents to excel in a certain domain, not the chief obligation of the school.

It might be added in passing that it is often the mark of an educated man is that he cannot really be categorized or labeled with an epithet. The labels such as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ are actually quite modern and stem more from this philosophy of Pragmatism or more specifically from Hegel, with the idea of conflicting or contrary opinions somehow meeting together to form a practical consensus or synthetic truth. A truly educated man cannot be pigeon-hold into a category, rather he is inclined towards the objective truth which is a conformity with reality. He is not imprisoned or held to hold what is “practicable” or built upon the consent of others. We are far gone from the days where one could debate the relative merits or moral consequences of some legislation - instead everything has to fall into a category as being ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’, ‘popular’ or ‘unpopular’ with absolutely no regard as to whether it contributes to the common good or not. This is just a consequence of a lack of culture, or rather of a new anti-culture invading every aspect of public life, the fruit of today’s present system of education.

Although many schools modeled on the Great Books program have lectures concerning the works to be read, the primary method of instruction is rather through discussion. The professor is more of an arbiter of a debate upon a theme more than an actual lecturer in the modern sense. There is much to be criticized in this approach, which I will touch on later, but the general principle is the engagement of the student in all aspects of the text - that the text should be assimilated, understood, even questioned and criticized. The aim is not so much a memorization of opinions and details but rather to encourage the student to think.

The method is largely Socratic in the true sense: one starts rather with a series of questions, and the discussion is supposed to lead to some conclusion. A gifted professor will gradually lead the questioning until the students themselves come to the same opinion as Plato himself. For instance, the text of the Republic concerning the qualities necessary for government [q.v. Republic 473c-d], the professor will not begin with listing the various doctrines of Plato, but rather ask the students what the ideal president or governor would be. Gradually the questions would be talking about government in general, and lastly some sort of conclusion similar to that of Plato: that kings must be philosophers if they are to rule well. You can see that such a technique requires a great deal of preparation from the professor and can often just lead to random discussion without any real education at all - and this is one of the greatest weaknesses of such an approach. With a good professor it is truly ideal; with an ill-equipped teacher it is little less than empty discussion.

This is only a small outline of the Great Books program, and perhaps I would do best by giving some sources where you can find more about the program itself as well as several Universities and schools in America where this program is implemented. However, what I think most important is to highlight the strengths and weakness of this approach to classical education in a Catholic school.

Firstly, let us look at the strengths. The return to the sources, to primary texts, is absolutely Catholic in the truest sense - for it is to the sources that one will always find the clearest expression and the most authoritative voice. We must always return to the Holy Scriptures, the words of Our Lord and to the decisions of the Councils to constantly renew and reaffirm our faith. Likewise in human learning there is no better voice than those who are truly masters of their domain. Reading is in a certain way having a professor speak to us through the distance of time and space. Thus to read the works of Isaac Newton is to learn from him, though second hand. All the great theologians, of whom we must especially make mention St. Thomas Aquinas, always had enormous respect for the ancient authorities, and it was always deemed impious to differ from their opinion, and if one did so one never criticized one’s master. This Catholic spirit must be kept in all domains, not just in divine Tradition but even in what might be called human tradition. Regardless of whether one likes Shakespeare or not, his command of the English language demands respect and his mastery of the description of all facets of human nature and frailty is something eternal in that it is a faithful echo of reality and even of eternal beauty. That there should exist a “Canon of Western Civilization” is certain, from the simple fact that there are souls who are more gifted than others, who have worked in union with their talents to produce works of eternal worth that have stood the test of time.

However, as you can see from this list of books, there is much to criticize. This ‘Canon’ of works cannot be separated from the Magisterium of the Church in a Catholic school. It is nonsensical to try to form the intelligence of students with books that are patently false. Many of these books on this list are not only harmful, but even destructive of the very end of education itself. For instance, one can only imagine the confusion given to the students of placing on the same list the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and Bertrand Russell or Karl Marx. There is a huge difference between the influence that an author has and whether or not he speaks the truth. In placing them all on the same footing one only ends up with an intelligence that has read everything but understood absolutely nothing.

Like in the question of Sacred Scripture, we have Tradition as witness to what is the Canon of inspired works. Likewise, in the natural realm, there is a certain tradition - the works of authors that have been used in schools since time immemorial. For instance even for the teaching of Latin the orations of Cicero are always used as a model, Virgil is still studied, as well as Caesar and Ovid. They form as it were the backbone of what can be called the highpoint of Latin literature. Certainly other authors have merit, but when there is so little time to form a good style, one should stay with what is certain and true. The same could be said of each subject.

We can see in this list of books given by the Great Books program the Protestant influence of many of the initiators of the program - the entire selection is devoid of a guiding principle or magisterium. In a sense even these educators could not escape the true source of the problem - In reality the crisis in education really began with Protestantism which set the human reason independent from the objective truth. In this sense the list of “Great works” provided by this program must be heavily modified and even rejected as non-Catholic. Nonetheless, as said before, for each study there is a certain tradition that must be held and respected, and it is a question of simply being more selective - and not less - in the choice of great works, that they be great not just in name but in value. WIth some substantial modifications there could be drawn up a similar list of elementary works that are best echos of what we often call the philosophia perennis.

What is perhaps the most profitable however from this approach advocated by the Great Books program is building the core of the syllabus around these pillars of the past. There is something in the reading of Newton himself that you cannot get by simply having the facts laid out in an outline. For instance, you often read in a book of physics that we can take the movement of a large body such as the earth and treat it as the entire mass was concentrated in a single point. From this point you can describe its movement with a mathematical equation which then allows you to predict its future movement. In modern textbooks this is treated as an assumption, and no proof of it is given. Yet Isaac Newton did not take this as granted. He goes even at length to prove this assumption with an elegance that is as admirable as the result. He even says that any object’s movement follows the same trajectory as what we call its ‘center of mass’, an even more general result that can be applied to everything that moves. He then proves that any mutual force whose strength diminishes in the inverse ratio of the distance between the objects will move in an ellipse. Then there are the enormous tables of observations of the planets, literally hundreds, to show the reader that reality corresponds to this fact. All of this is completely missing in a modern manual, as the modern manual will only teach the equations and ignore entirely the reason why they work.

In this return to the great minds of the past we can see this why which is so important to education. Education is not simply the memorizing and using of formulas, it is fundamentally understanding why the universe is the way it is, and not otherwise. Unfortunately so many manuals are only content to give us a syllabus, a series of facts that one has to know in order to pass an exam. There is no sense of wonder, no sense of discovery or trying to find out why. To give another example, it is often stated that the earth goes around the sun, and yet there is no effort at all to prove that this is true. We only read that in ‘ignorant times’ people thought otherwise, but really, if you think about it, there is nothing so non-intuitive as the movement of the earth. The earth that we see and feel and live on doesn’t move - rather the sun and the stars move around us. It took many great minds to prove this, and not without reason - and yet we are supposed to take all this on faith, without question. In a certain sense we are even more ignorant than people of the past who at least followed their instinct and observations. Yet today the modern student is asked to accept this fact which is in a certain sense completely contrary to our own observations - for none of us have ever seen the earth move or rotate, it is rather deduced from other observations.

Thus classical education must never ignore the saying of Aristotle that knowledge comes from causes, that science is built upon the principle of causality. To truly know something is to know the cause of something, to know why it is. Sometimes the causes are historical, sometimes they are simply from human free will, but nonetheless everything has a cause. Education is boring and repetitive today because there is no attempt to give the reason why, only to memorize and do as the book says. In this aspect the original initiators of the Great Books program have much of value to say - and in reality they are only echoing the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle before him: scientia ex causis. The first thing a child will ask is not “what” but rather “why” - and a true education has to be able to answer his question.

Likewise the Socratic method is entirely traditional, and one might say even scholastic. St. Thomas himself does not begin the articles of his Summa Theologia with a series of facts, but rather with a series of questions and objections. The reason for this is that there can never be the desire to know unless there is first something to be found out. If you know the answer there is no need for a professor. It is the series of objections which provide the motor, as it were, for the mind to engage itself and to find the solution provided by the master. This method is absolutely vital and even necessary for a truly Catholic education, as education is not simple the parroting of phrases, but the assimilation of the truth and making it one’s own.

However there are two major extremes that must be avoided, to which the Great Books program is not immune. Firstly, the complete absence of a manual or fixed program. Simply giving a reading list is not really realistic in a school, especially a school that is very limited in the number of hours it can give for each subject. To simply give original texts and to read them through would really mean trying to relive the past few centuries of human knowledge in the space of a few years. There simply isn’t enough time to follow the entire arguments of Newton for example establishing the different ways that motion can be added and subtracted, especially since the theory of vectors has superseded these discoveries. Thus there does have to be some sort of summary and the student will simply have to believe the professor for much of the material that he is given. And actually, historically speaking the manuals were created exactly with the limits of time as being the primary concern - that the student assimilate as much as possible in the short time allotted for the subject. Thus no school can hope to fulfill its obligations without some sort of syllabus and outline of the material. Nonetheless there should be a constant and continual effort to refer to the past and to the reason why the facts given in the manual are what they are.

This first extreme, of working without a fixed syllabus, is actually very easily avoided in our system of education as there is already a certain minimal standard given by the state that we have to fulfill. Thus there will be basic manuals. What I would encourage however is the addition of material, to return to the sources of your subject and give the texts that prove and establish the assumptions given. For instance, in treating of electricity, to go back to the basic texts of Maxwell and see how his observations that electricity is not only positive but also negative, that electric force decreases over distance and so on. I would like to show you a sort of manual that is used in seminaries which best illustrate this idea: the Elements of Philosophy by Gardeil. You can see that the first part is the manual, the stuff the students have to know. Yet for each major point of the manual there is a reference to back of the book, where you will find the original text of St. Thomas Aquinas. One can also think of the old catechisms that would have questions and answers and the appendix reserved for the decrees of the Councils or citations from the Fathers. This sort of solution really does allow the best of both worlds: having a basic outline of the material and yet still a reference to the great texts, and what is more the gifted student will know where to look for some of the same.

Concerning the second danger of this program, we must say that the Socratic method is really only as good as Socrates. If the professor has the gift of being able to lead by questions, it is a very powerful tool. However most professors do not have this gift, and usually asking questions just leads to a chaotic discussion that is more of a distraction than learning anything. Also simply questioning can just put more doubts in the mind of the students that knowledge. Thus, the Socratic method is best used in the hands of Socrates, that is to say, in a professor with a depth and breadth of knowledge as strong as his desire to lead his students to the truth. Nonetheless nothing prevents oneself from a little healthy introspection from time to time. For instance, in the preparation of your courses, really ask yourself the question: how do I know this is true? For instance, a physics teacher will teach the theory of Einstein that the speed of light is constant in all frames of reference. How do I know that this is true? What is a student doesn’t believe me, could I prove it to him? You can be sure that it is true - in fact your little GPS device wouldn’t work if it wasn’t - but how does this little gadget work? You should be the first to ask yourself why, and if you can give the answer, let your students also ask why, or even challenge them by asking the question first. You will find that this classical method of questioning and answering, especially at the beginning of a lesson, is often very rewarding and will naturally engage the curiosity of the students. Instead of simply giving them facts and equations to memorize you will have them wanting to find out, wanting to discover, in short, wanting to learn.

Let me then bring to a short conclusion with a Catholic assessment of what one should call the “Great Books program”.

Firstly, the return to the sources is something absolutely essential to a classical education, and even to what one must call a Catholic education. There are, and there will always be, works of human genius that surpass others and which in a certain way codify the natural gifts of man. It should be the obligation of each teacher to be able to give to his students at least a sample of these great thinkers and a coherent list of works that are the best in the domain of study. A great thinker is not only someone who happens to discover a truth, but especially one who can effectively communicate it to others. Newton in large measure took from others, but his presentation, form and logic are what make his work a classic. There are similar in each domain. I would propose that a concrete exercise for you as participants is to at least draw up a list of those works that are absolutely essential to understanding one’s subject of competence. Not manuals, not syllabus, but source texts.

Secondly, that a truly classical education really can’t be satisfied with a simple reading of texts. There must be a search for causes, of the reason why things are the way they are. Even in literature there are causes: why does Shakespeare use such a word in such a context, what are its consequences for rhythm, alliteration, and all the other literary devices that make the dramas not only convincing but beautiful. A teacher should not, and cannot, be content with just giving information. The child wants to know why, and a school that cannot answer his question will have failed in its purpose.

For this reason our school does not apply the Great Books program, though it admires it, but rather attaches itself to the schema given by the great medieval thinkers of the seven liberal arts - the seven arts being the causes or answers to why things are the way they are. For this I can refer you to the brochure of our school which gives a small synopsis of this idea.

Thirdly, the fundamental reason why we know from our catechism: why we are here is to serve and love God and by this means enjoy eternal happiness. If there is one great problem with the Great Books program is that it does not have a unifying thread or purpose, so often its graduates will be highly intelligent but still be searching for something. They will be much like the pagan Greeks who knew almost everything about every subject and yet the most important questions were still a mystery. Yet a Catholic school has the enormous advantage, the infinite advantage, in that it already knows the end to be achieved. The model for the classical education is already incarnate in the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and the fruits have already been seen in the lives of the saints and the martyrs.

The true problems of education today fundamentally began in the 16th century with the advent of Protestantism, that separated men from the guiding light of the magisterium of the Church, and the consequent loss of discipline, of subjecting oneself to reality, is only a natural and inevitable consequence of this revolt against Tradition. Thus, in bringing back to the school the love of Tradition, of the wisdom of the ancients, of all that is eternally true and good and beautiful, we can be assured of transmitting the treasures of civilization to the next generation. It is only a matter of being consistent and especially asking the grace of God for persevance

For such graces you may be assured of my prayers, and happily will answer any questions that you might have.