We are close to having to reconstruct our civilisation from scratch, but it is not all doom and gloom. As long ago as 1998, Peter Hitchens remarked that people who had been to school in the Soviet Union between the 1960s and the 1980s were far better educated that their Western peers because they had never experienced the New Left, but only the Old, with its rows of uniformed pupils facing a teacher who was right and to whom it would never have occurred to have been afraid to say so. As a result, for example, Russians finished each others’ sentences because they were quoting the Great Books that they had all done as teenagers. If your essay was to write a Marxist critique of Anna Karenina, then you had to have read Anna Karenina. Recalling that, this, by Professor Daniel Walden, is gorgeous in itself, as well as chiming with Cornel West’s membership of the Board of Academic Advisors of the Classic Learning Test, and as well as pointing to a better way after the University of Austin:
The American left is a pretty cerebral lot: it contains a lot of grad students, underemployed humanities majors and hyper-literate autodidacts, and this educational glut is often grounds for criticism. We are, according to the usual line, too much in our own heads, too busy building castles in the air to relate to people on the ground. But despite our eggheaded reputation, the American left has failed to articulate a broad and unified vision for education. We are generally successful at toeing a line on issues of policy—robust funding for public education, opposition to charter schools, strong support for teachers’ unions, etc.—but the left, having painted a compelling and persuasive picture of a political life that should empower ordinary citizens and of a working life that ought to be a source of pride and dignity, has not been able to make a similar case about what education is for.
As a leftist myself and a university professor, I find this failure particularly galling—especially at a time when the various symptoms of post-industrial capitalism have leeched away the university’s public financial support, pushed students into ever-narrower vocational training for ever more uncertain job prospects, and so inflated tuition rates that a four-year degree can cost as much as a three-bedroom house. What is being offered as education is so far removed from any recognizable articulation of the good life that an alternative is not merely desirable but necessary for education to be considered part of the good life at all.
The American right also recognizes that there is a crisis in education—and has responded to it in a variety of ways. The most substantive of these responses generally goes by the name of “classical education,” although the term encompasses a great variety of visions and practices. In some cases it seems to mean nothing more than a preference for old books and discussion-driven teaching, in some it puts a Montessori-like emphasis on creating a beautiful and stimulating learning environment, and in others it decries liberalism, communism and gender theory as the harbingers of social collapse. The movement’s contemporary shape and name can be traced back to Susan Wise Bauer’s 1999 book The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home. Bauer’s book views the medieval trivium—grammar, logic and rhetoric—as a framework for moving cyclically through subjects as a child matures: first learning a subject’s basic elements and how they fit together (grammar), then learning argumentation and causality and abstract thinking across various domains (logic), and finally how to make arguments that are elegant and persuasive in addition to being valid (rhetoric). The various practitioners of and advocates for classical education share a commitment to teaching accepted canonical texts (drawing largely on the “Great Books”), to education as inseparable from character formation, and to the thesis that the abandonment of the two prior commitments by K-12 schools and universities has hollowed out their ability to effectively educate students. Many proponents of classical ed draw on the ancient distinction between liberal education, suitable for free persons who are to govern themselves and others, and servile education, suitable for those who are to be useful to others, noting that education in a democratic society ought to prepare all people to lead meaningful lives in pursuit of a vision of the good, not merely to work as someone else’s employee or to serve a particular social function.
Education like this, based on “great books,” has a somewhat unsavory reputation on the left. This is due, in part, to its recent association with conservative or reactionary political movements. It’s also because we do not wish to be elitists or chauvinists. Great-books advocates have been guilty of both; it is all too easy to slip from reading things because they are recognized as good to reading them because they are merely recognized. A long-running cynical joke at Columbia holds that the university’s signature course on political and moral philosophy, Contemporary Civilization, is abbreviated “CC” because its real purpose is to furnish “cocktail conversation.” The University of Chicago’s Mortimer Adler, one of the twentieth century’s most fervent advocates for great books, was convinced that there were exactly 102 “great ideas” and that his particular canon of Great Books of the Western World contained all of them.
Yet the underlying theses of classical education do not strike me as baseless, nor even particularly right-wing. I have always found the distinction between liberal and servile education to be compelling, and the idea that value-free education is desirable or even possible strikes me as absurd on its face. The notion that students should mainly be acquiring “skills” or “competencies,” so prevalent in high-level discussions of education policy and in ranking school systems, rings hollow to anyone who has ever cared enough to become a teacher: one teaches because one has fallen in love and, like any lover, one wants to shout it from the rooftops, because in loving something we come to see that it is good, that it is something a person should want for themselves. We on the left generally agree that education is for the student’s benefit, not for the benefit of their future employer, and that students go to school not merely to acquire skills but to develop an entire social and intellectual life: to have something good and to have it forever. We are sometimes embarrassed to say this, I think, out of misplaced or excessive courtesy: we have seen too many snobs tell people what they ought to like. But we shouldn’t be. It is not snobbish to say that a person with lungs must breathe or that a person with a stomach must eat, nor that a person with a mind must think. It is not snobbish to show someone how to love something new—it is a gift.
There are, to be sure, writers on the left who have articulated critical alternatives to the general state of education. Perhaps the most famous alternative is Pedagogy of the Oppressed by the Brazilian Marxist educator Paulo Freire, which is the third most-cited book in the entire social-scientific literature. It appears regularly on syllabi in schools of education and social work around the country, and not without reason: it presents a vision, in clear and forceful terms, of education as a means of improving the lives of the people who need it most. In my experience, however, it is rarely assigned or cited in its entirety: the most commonly cited excerpt, by a pretty overwhelming margin, is its second chapter arguing against what Freire calls the “banking” model of education—in which an authority (the teacher) merely transfers information to a recipient (the student). Instead, he proposes a cooperative model, in which teachers and students are engaged in a joint enterprise and the teacher is not so much an authority as a more experienced student. Much less commonly cited is the book’s first chapter, in which Freire lays out his philosophy of education more broadly: “The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization.” The process of education, then, is the process of becoming human.
Reading Freire’s introductory chapter a couple of years ago, I found myself surprised not only at how strongly his vision overlapped with those found in more conservative “classical ed” materials, but also at how strongly they resembled the ethos of a “great books” seminar. My own teaching has confirmed the resemblance. The great books have their own pedagogical tradition, one from which classical ed draws to greater or lesser degrees but which has a history and institutions distinct from those most commonly associated with classical ed. I’d like to make the case that a great-books model at the undergraduate level is, in fact, so consonant with Freire’s radical critique that it represents a far better path forward for a left-wing vision of education than virtually anything else currently on offer in the United States.
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In the fall of 2016, early in my teaching career, I was in graduate school teaching a section of a course called “Great Books,” a survey of mostly Greek and biblical texts, at the University of Michigan. My section was scheduled to meet at 9 a.m. on Wednesdays and Fridays, and on Wednesday, November 9th we were scheduled to go over the Eumenides of Aeschylus, the final play of his Oresteia trilogy. The events of November 8th shocked the country, and having soothed my nerves on that night with generous pours of Dalwhinnie, I came to class braced for disaster. There was no shortage of dark glasses or downcast faces, and I had no idea how I would go forward. The text itself, however, furnished us with a providentially timely question: What does one do with the losers in a democratic contest? Bit by bit, as the discussion unfolded and students whom I knew to be in different political camps spoke about a fundamental question of democratic legitimacy, I could feel the tension in the room unwinding. The questions in the text were not gathering dust in fifth-century Athens but present and alive in the room, filling an intellectual and emotional need that nobody could have predicted. Something happened in that room that I cannot fully describe and did not intend, but I have not forgotten it and never will, because those students showed me what an intellectual community can do for one another.
For Freire, education is fundamentally about freedom, which is “not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.” An educated person is in some sense liberated from the blinkers and boundaries imposed by their social position, freeing them to evaluate and judge for themselves, among equals, rather than merely accepting what they are given. This understanding is fundamental to the seminar model: there is not a predetermined conclusion about the text at which I expect students to arrive. My own academic specialty is Homeric studies, and I have taught the Iliad and Odyssey in both Greek civilization courses and great-books courses. The two are fundamentally different. In a Greek civilization course, there is an outline of scholarly consensus on the subject, and my task as an instructor is to convey that outline—about Bronze Age Greece, about the forms and composition of epic poetry, about the place of Homer in later Greek education and self-conception—to the students, to the best of my ability and theirs. In a great-books seminar, that material is not neglected, but the focus is on the kinds of questions that the poems raise and the students’ reflections on them. The conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon, for example, presents a dilemma about whether one should reward individual achievement or preserve the stability of a larger enterprise; meanwhile, the Homeric deities force the students to reckon with the all-too-common human experience of being treated as a pawn by persons or forces too powerful to oppose. These are not questions to which any honest instructor can pretend to have a definite answer: they demand serious thought from many people who can take one another’s ideas and test them or turn them in a different direction. In this way, the contributions of each student help their classmates step into larger, more thoughtful versions of themselves: like my students did on that post-election morning, they step through and beyond their present concerns into what they didn’t know they needed. They see more sides of the question; they take in a greater share of humanity; they are, in Freire’s understanding, more free.
When we sit down in a seminar to explore a text and the questions it poses, we are not doing it for an employer or in the service of some idea of social utility, but for ourselves and for one another. Indeed, it is only by divesting ourselves of the trappings of expertise and social hierarchy that a seminar becomes possible at all: we must meet and speak as equals. This includes both the people in the room and the author of the text: all may be criticized, but all must be understood. Plato knows this perfectly well: the Symposium is one of the greatest works on education because it shows human beings at leisure, divested of political obligations and social rank, exploring the question of what eros means to them. Only at a private party can they throw off what sets them apart from one another and pursue the truth in common. We can follow their conversation because we are like them: far from being cut off by the chasm of history, it is through history that they can speak with us; to believe otherwise is to hold communication with and understanding of other persons impossible and to foreclose the solidarity that forms the basis of our politics.
For Freire and for anyone who teaches great books, what is shared, our humanity, is the most important part of education. And in Freire’s account, it is precisely what structures of oppression seek to cancel out: “The solution of this contradiction between oppressor and oppressed is born in the labor which brings into the world this new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom.” It is not enough to recognize this fact theoretically: we reclaim our humanity by laboring, by doing what is proper to rational and social creatures, and what is most proper to us—what is most uniquely our own—is the depth of cognition made possible by language and the extended social life to which language gives birth. We are most human when we are thinking together, and only by doing this and habituating ourselves toward doing it can we change the circumstances that deprive us of this shared humanity.
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This being-together doesn’t happen only in the classroom. The secret ingredient behind the most successful great-books programs is not only the syllabus but the intellectual community that is formed. A community is necessary because it lets people who have begun to recognize their common humanity develop new ways of relating to one another that have nothing to do with the scripts handed to them by their social context, and this new community must be insulated in some way from society at large so that the compulsion to follow these omnipresent, ready-made social scripts loses some of its force. I might be accused here of advocating that students be put inside a bubble and disconnected from the real world, and I would answer that yes, that much should be obvious. It is precisely the world, understood as the social and economic structures into which we are born, through which we secure the necessities of survival and which hedge the boundaries of our social worlds, that an educational community must shut out, for the same reason that a monastery must do so: there is common work to be done that demands the cooperation of free and equal human beings.
This is why a really good college is a little bit of a cult—not because we ought to ignore the world but because there are encounters between persons that the world does not allow. The disasters of the Iliad could have been avoided if Agamemnon had simply apologized to Achilles as an equal, but Agamemnon is a high king who recognizes no equals, and so the very thing that would save him is precisely the thing that he cannot do. The assemblies of kings were supposed to be places in which all were equal and could speak their minds, but the poem shows us in the first two books, first through the argument between Achilles and Agamemnon and then through the beating of the outspoken commoner Thersites, that this is a paper-thin lie: the distinctions of rank have already made their way in. Freire insists that these distinctions must be overcome “objectively,” that is, in real conditions: it is not enough to say we are in a new kind of community. Instead, we must actually build one, with money and staffing to support the community’s work. This world does not afford us space to work out and rehearse the relationships that we could and ought to have with one another in the world that has yet to come: those spaces must be claimed and built and defended.
The formation of a new community with new kinds of relationships does not extend only to the students, but also to the faculty who teach them. Resolving to teach outside one’s specialty, as a great-books program demands, puts faculty members back into the position of being amateurs and so brings them closer to the intellectual position of their students. This is why it aligns so well with Freire’s famous critique of the “banking model of education,” which positions students as empty containers for knowledge given by an expert instructor who is the arbiter of what they do and do not need to learn. My own teaching benefits tremendously from being unable to pretend to any kind of expertise: texts outside my disciplinary wheelhouse have become some of my favorite material to teach precisely because I can explore them alongside my students rather than insisting that I have something they need. I can do this responsibly because I have recourse to colleagues who can save me from gross factual blunders. This is expertise in the service of a community: rather than a source of authority for telling other people what they must learn and who they must become, it becomes a resource for the students to draw on in their own exploration of the world and themselves.
That said, there’s a reason why it’s called “great books”: the texts you read together in class still need to be good ones. The most important criterion is that the books should bear rereading: ideally you could triple the amount of time you devote to each one and still not have enough. I don’t think it’s reactionary to concede that something with a millennium of unbroken readership is probably worth reading for anybody. Certainly there are issues of representation, but these very issues make for excellent discussion material—the sorts of conversations that are challenging and edifying for students and teachers alike. (It also bears noting that as soon as women or formerly enslaved people began reading and writing in significant numbers, first-rate writers emerged from among them, many of whom are now long-established presences in these courses.) In any case, academics are prone to seriously overestimating the political significance of a syllabus. You aren’t helping anybody get health care when you omit Dante from your syllabus, but you are denying an opportunity to read Dante. Given all the alarms being sounded about how little students read, shouldn’t we try to give them the best we can offer?
And what makes a great-books program truly contentious is something else: the freedom of the student to set their own goals for their study and to relate to the texts as they choose. It means that there is no guaranteed outcome: successful completion of the program means only that a student made it to the end. They have probably read most of the required texts and acquired some facility with writing and speaking. But it is perfectly possible to go through a great-books program without its making so much as a dent in your soul. You can read everything and write decent essays and emerge as a good American university graduate: you will have been trained, as Achilles was, to be “a speaker of words and a doer of deeds,” well prepared to argue your case and act in the world. That is a fine outcome by many standards; indeed, I think most college deans would prefer that we make more of those people. But there are easier ways to do that. When we teach great books we aim at the transformation of a person’s relationships to themselves and to others: as Plato would put it, we aim at a full turning of the soul toward what is good. This is not a reliable formula, and it is not something we can do without the student’s own commitment. But it happens, and I’ve seen it happen: I’ve seen students follow Alcibiades into mad love for Socrates, become captivated by the romance of Tristan and Yseult, and get thrown into spiritual crises by Kierkegaard or artistic crises by Virginia Woolf.
None of these crises was especially smooth or easy for anybody involved: there isn’t a manual for how to talk a student through the realization that the life they had planned out is no longer compatible with the person they’ve become, but it’s far better for them to figure that out now than to find themselves with a mortgage whose payment depends on living out a contradiction that sheer will can no longer hold together. Our elite colleges have already perfected the formula for confidence and polish: it’s not hard to produce people who think that the world is their oyster and might be able to dash off a few choice lines from Homer or Montaigne at a party, and if that’s all someone wants from an education, there is no way to compel them to do more. How, after all, are we to assess the turning of the soul? All we can say is, here is a program and a community, and we have seen wonderful things happen here, and many people have said that it was very good for them even when it was hard, and perhaps you, a student, may decide that it will be good for you as well.
We are very far from the world that we on the left would like to live in, the world in which simply living is possible for everyone, and building that world demands difficult work. But it also demands thought, and perhaps we can carve out a little bit of time to think and rehearse for a world in which we can all be more human. If you do not believe that it is possible for someone’s life to be changed by reading and thinking together then I wish you well, but I do not think we are in the same profession and I am not sure we’re on the same side. I can tell you that some years ago now, a young man who was still a convinced atheist read Augustine’s Confessions and found in its pages an account of evil and responsibility that overturned his entire moral picture of the world. That same young man took in Plato and Machiavelli and Hegel and Marx in great gulps the following year and felt like he had fewer and fewer solid places to stand but a much better sense of where he was. He was fortunate enough to know other young men and women who felt the same way around the same time, and their late-night conversations (including several genuine toga-clad symposia) changed how they all saw the world and one another. This story is mine; it also looks a lot like the stories of a lot of people who’ve seen that it’s possible to teach and learn in a way that does not speak to making a living but simply to living.
