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Note from the Editor
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Tim Lacy's article on the spread of the great books idea from Great Britain to the United States may provoke personal responses from readers, depending on their experiences with education as a vehicle for selfimprovement. The outlines of Lacy's story are familiar, but he does an exceptional job of fleshing out the tensions between the democratizing and elitist sensibilities behind great books lists and programs. For some advocates, as Lacy explains, a background in great books would indeed mark out a cadre of cultivated gentlemen from the masses. But for determined proponents from Matthew Arnold to Mortimer Adler, the great books idea entailed an ambitious and unbelievably idealistic—given the realities of access to time, patience, and reading materials in different social classes—to cultivate first-rate intellectual habits and sensibilities throughout society. In recent years—in part in reaction to Alan Bloom and others who indeed saw the great books as a device for inculcating a canon that presumes Western intellectual superiority—many critics have bought into the red herring that the great books are mainly about impressing a fixed set of culture-bound values upon young people. On the contrary, as Lacy also explains, the great books were at least as much about expanding readers' ability to handle large ideas from any source as they were about pressing into people reverence for Western philosophy and literature. Plato, Augustine, and Descartes most certainly present complex thoughts in a compelling way, but so do Du Bois or de Beauvoir, to cite works outside the customary canon on the current required list of Columbia's famed Contemporary Civilization sequence. |
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