Others have a fancy for a good horse or dog or bird: my fancy, stronger even than theirs, is for good friends. And I teach them all the good I can and recommend them to others from whom I think they will get some moral benefit. And the treasures that the wise men of old have left us in their writings I open and explore with my friends. If we come on any good thing, we extract it, and we set much store on being useful to one another. – Socrates (Xenophon’s Memorabilia, I.6)
Homer. Plato. Shakespeare. Augustine. Dante. Kant. Dostoyevsky. Morrison. Imagine filling in a couple hundred more recognisable authors, representing the classic texts, or “Great Books,” of Western civilisation. Can we responsibly compose a twenty-first-century college education around the reading, careful study, and discussion of those texts, complemented by careful study of languages, writing, mathematical demonstration, music theory, and laboratory science?
At St. John’s College, Santa Fe and Annapolis, probably the best-known pure Great Books college (also, notably, not religious despite the name), we believe not just that you can pursue education this way, but that it is one of the very best ways to achieve all the most important aims of a college education.
Having just completed my ninth year as Dean and twentieth on the faculty, I have faced again and again a catalogue of sceptical or anxious questions and challenges to our model. These include questions about liberal education and the liberal arts (often mistakenly taken to be synonymous with the humanities) and, of course, questions about the Great Books.
In my world, there is constant handwringing and debate about cost and affordability (and institutional sustainability); about the politics of race and gender and the current academic (and broader) culture wars; about safety, violence, and self-harm on our campuses; and about the deleterious effects of technology (notably smartphones, social media, and generative AI) on student mental health, socialisation, and academic preparedness and integrity. These concerns point to the need for greater commitment to our schools and colleges and greater investment, both financial and moral, in education at all levels.
They point to the need for renewal, inspiration, and ambition within our educational culture. They point to the need to recentre education on the human person and on the humane values embodied in the traditions of the liberal arts and liberal education and their analogues in primary and secondary education — that is, education on a human scale, with teachers and students, parents and friends studying and learning together, in small communities, in small classes, in relatively de-technologised environments. And finally, they point to the pressing need to cultivate habits of mind and character, both intellectual and moral, that will equip students to navigate and address the growing challenges we face as a society.
In my experience, among open-minded students and parents, the salient challenges to “the most contrarian college in America” (and to the liberal arts more broadly) come under a few headings. I cannot pretend to fully answer them here, but I can sketch where more thorough answers and arguments might go.
Cost and Return on Investment:
College is too expensive. I (or my child) will be burdened by student loan debt.
This can be aimed at all higher education, but is particularly projected onto seemingly high-priced private and liberal arts colleges. Yet for most students receiving financial aid, private colleges can be as or more affordable than public ones. Our graduates’ debt loads prove moderate by national standards and are easily eclipsed by the expected difference in earnings both short- and long-term.
The average lifetime financial benefits of a college education, including in the humanities and liberal arts, make it a wise investment for the overwhelming majority of students and their families, moderate student debt loads notwithstanding. Even when we rehearse these well-known data, financial anxiety, especially among low- and middle-income families and among first-generation college students and their households, remains understandably high. Attending college is a high-stakes decision in every way, including financially. Higher education at all levels needs to continue to work toward greater access and affordability and greater transparency. However, we also need to be willing to defend patiently and thoroughly the cost, the investment, and the value proposition of a liberal arts education.
Practicality, Specialisation, and Majors:
What will my child do with this liberal arts degree?
Our answer has long been “whatever they want.” It is a preparation for life and, in principle, can lead them on toward almost any area in their career. Educational “consumers,” reflecting our broader social discourse, overestimate the necessity and value of early specialisation and career focus in higher education. Data have long shown, and in some cases increasingly show, that many students will end up with a different major from what they predict as incoming students (or they will change their major altogether).
More generally, an increasing number of college graduates work in areas not directly connected to their majors. This is tied to the (perhaps paradoxical) fact that technological and economic evolution means that workers will change jobs and types of jobs more now, over the course of their careers, than ever before. This fact puts a premium on transferable skills and generalisable abilities and versatility, for instance, skills like verbal and written communication.
There are understandable, if unfortunate, economic and cultural reasons why career and income anxiety weigh heavily on the minds of college students and their parents. Ironically, however, the most far-sighted among us see that many of the trends driving that anxiety point to sustaining or renewing the values and achievements associated with a liberal arts education, while devaluing potentially transient technical or narrowly specialised training at the undergraduate level.
The impact that technological disruptions and economic uncertainty are having on career prospects and stability heightens the value of the broad-based, transferable skills inculcated by a well-balanced liberal education (which includes mathematics and natural science). Technical training is increasingly “perishable.” Aiming at a narrow career path, however trendy, is an increasingly high-risk strategy. The more fluid our career lives become, and the more dynamic and disruptive technological and economic forces and innovations are, the more we should anchor our undergraduate education, at least in large part, on broad, secure, lasting foundations and goals.
Presentism and Scientific Progress:
What can Plato or Ptolemy teach us about our world today?
This challenge is so deeply embedded in our cultural consciousness that responding to it requires us to excavate our widely held assumptions. The model of historical progress is right at the heart of our modern Western, now global, civilisation. Experience does better than arguments here, but we should accept that we cannot really understand our contemporary world, or its achievements, without understanding how we got here. This inquiry includes, perhaps above all, the foundational works–of philosophy, literature, theology, and science – that have shaped our world, that have given us the horizons of language, values, and knowledge that we inhabit.
We can find forms of beauty and virtue and knowledge in the classics of the past. We may find that we have lost understanding of some things, even as we have gained understanding of others. Yet challenging the assumptions of one’s own time and place is perhaps the key to becoming a free mind capable of making sound judgments. Careful reading and exploration deepen our understanding of our current world by showing its roots. They also sharpen our self-knowledge and self-understanding and open us up to consider genuine alternatives that reflect different individual and cultural achievements of the past.
STEM for All:
I want my child to pursue a STEM major or career, or at the least, be versed in the STEM disciplines.
The orientation of higher education toward what we now call STEM education represents a long (decades-, even centuries-long) arc of evolution. But we are living at a moment when several factors have converged to intensify this trend: the dazzling effects of contemporary technology, the related concern about sustainable career paths, economic anxiety, and scepticism of the substance of what is taught in the humanities all loom large.
We need to calm the fever around STEM. The “S” (science) and “M” (mathematics) should simply be part and parcel of a well-balanced liberal education. All liberal education advocates should staunchly defend a traditional balance of the liberal arts (reflected, for example, in the classical “trivium” of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the “quadrivium” of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). The liberal arts may be anchored in the humanities today, so be it, but the liberal arts must be broader than that.
Liberal education requires deep engagement with math and science, and this too can be done in a way that is “humane” and liberating and valuable for all students, not just for those oriented toward STEM careers. And for those who are so oriented, most students will do better and go further in their careers if they expand the broad basis of their education and delay to some extent the technical specialisation they may know or think they want to pursue.
