Published by the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas (founded in 1990 by Mortimer J. Adler and Max Weismann)
In association with the The Adler-Aquinas Institute and Aquinas School of Leadership
A Founding Member of the Alliance for Liberal Learning

Saturday, October 25, 2014

Long live Great Books education

Alex Beam wrote in The Boston Globe on his visit to St. John's College in Sante Fe for its 50th anniversary.
"When I asked a group of academics at the St. John’s conference if conservative ideologues had taken the Great Books hostage, they scoffed."
(My thought at this point was How does one take a foundling hostage? But I digress. -ed.)
"The liberal arts tradition is 'thoroughly radical and skeptical of orthodoxy,' Rhodes College professor Dan Cullen answered. 'It can’t work out well for conservatives in the long run.'

"Adler’s biographer Tim Lacy agrees. 'Conservatives no longer champion the Great Books idea as a solution to problems in higher education,' he wrote in an e-mail. 'That curriculum isn’t front and center now. Today the discussion is about lowering cost, disrupting the entrenched education establishment, and promoting basic skills, via the Common Core, for the workplace.'"

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