Louis Menand recently undermined great books education with his piece "What's So Great About Great Books Courses?" He concludes that he has read most of the great books and teaches them, but he does not credit them for all the things he purports to understand better now than he did before. Surely, the great books should receive some praise for his admitted progress.
The phrase "great books" describes those works that have surpassed the test of time to continue speaking into contemporary problems; they still inspire readers with their depictions of human nature or their reflections on truth, goodness, and beauty. In 1921 John Erskine created a great books syllabus to become the Core Curriculum at Columbia University, assuming that all students of every major should read the works that created the foundation of liberal education. He assigned a classic to be read in translation weekly. In 1952 at the University of Chicago, Mortimer Adler composed a great books list drawn from the Western tradition and centered on the enduring questions, such as "What is the role of the individual within society? What does it mean to be a male or female? Who is God?" These lists have come under attack for their limited focus on Western, white, male authors. However, if we approach the lists as starting points for a fuller list, we need not throw out Homer, Dante, and Tocqueville, but we should add Murasaki Shikibu, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Frederick Douglass, for instance.
These great books are the legacy of wisdom that have brought us to where we are today. If we scrap the tradition, we will be cutting the legs out from under us, destined to repeat mistakes and move forward blindly in the dark. The great books act as guides on our path, so we can discern better what is freedom, justice, love. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot responds to the person who argues, “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did" by insisting, "Precisely, and they are that which we know." We would not be who we are without the writers that we have read from the past. Americans would not be Americans without Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton. Frederick Douglass would not have written "What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?" without reading Washington, Charles Dickens, Cato. As C.S. Lewis has said, how can one join a conversation at 11 o'clock that began at eight without knowing what came before?
The great books are not only what precede us, but they shine a light on the present, and they grant us vision for a hopeful future.