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A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books. Alex Beam. New York: PublicAffairs Publishing, 2008, 256 pages, $24.95 hardcover.
Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again. Roger H. Martin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, 280 pages, $24.95 hardcover.
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
—Emily Dickinson
Two new books about the Great Books tell their subject “slant,” as Emily Dickinson recommends. In A Great Idea at the Time, Alex Beam, columnist for The Boston Globe, romps breezily through the surprising cultural history of Great Books programs for undergraduates and adults, while Roger Martin’s memoir, Racing Odysseus, takes us to the home of the Great Books curriculum at St John’s College in Annapolis, where he enrolled as a freshman while on sabbatical from his post as president of Randolph-Macon College in fall 2004.
What makes these books so interesting, even self-contradictory, is that the pedagogical tradition they describe is anything but slant. Instead of being mediated, the Great Books are supposed to reveal their truths directly to their readers, without benefit of “explanation kind.” (That Emily Dickinson is not among the authors included in some versions of the canon should not, perhaps, surprise.)
While A Great Idea at the Time and Racing Odysseus confront the Great Books themselves only fleetingly (Martin does meditate a bit on the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Oresteia, Herodotus, and several works by Plato), both address deep, enduring conundrums about liberal education. What is it? Who is it for? When should it occur? What are its benefits? The recent culture wars succeeded in branding classical (and Great Books-style) curricula as elitist, and in fact such programs play only a small role in undergraduate education today.
But the two books reviewed here remind us that there’s a different way to think about liberal learning of this kind. Indeed, it is hard to be unmoved by the democratic vision of the Great Books’ advocates: enlightened “citizen-readers” grappling together with intellectually serious texts.
Mary Taylor Huber is a senior scholar at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where she directs the Integrative Learning Project and works closely with the Carnegie Academy of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. She has written extensively about changing faculty cultures in U.S. higher education and is coauthor, most recently, of The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons (2005).
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