Summer with Aristotle

The Wall Street Journal had an article in its Opinion Section on 7.22.2009 entitled “A Summer With Aristotle”. The article details a Great Books Summer Program with 1, 2, and 3 week overlapping programs running at Stanford University or Amherst College.

“Reading the works of Homer, Virgil, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson and so many others, the students are pushed to grapple with questions that have preoccupied the great thinkers of the past 2,500 years. What is the good life? How should I face injustice? What do I owe my neighbor?
The mere existence of these programs suggests an important trend in student learning habits. The academic radicalism of recent decades is receding, and students are ready to be serious again. Flaky courses—such as Sociology of Heterosexuality (Yale), Philosophy and Star Trek (Georgetown), or Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism (Mount Holyoke)—no longer interest them. Instead, students from book camp and Princeton are interested in “sitting down with Plato, St. Augustine, and James Madison, to think through the perennial issues of politics and citizenship,” says Robert George, a professor and director of Princeton’s James Madison Program.
Since its birth nine years ago, the James Madison Program has dramatically grown in its offerings and influence on the Princeton campus. That’s only been possible because “students are very interested in learning about founding principles.”

Once upon a time graduating from a school like Michigan with a Liberal Arts degree actually meant something. It meant that you were prepared to do anything, become anyone, it was degree that was invaluable. Not any more, liberal arts degrees have become virtually worthless academic degrees which signify that you have been intellectually abused by schools offering nonsense like “Sociology of Heterosexuality (Yale), Philosophy and Star Trek (Georgetown), or Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism (Mount Holyoke).

It is great to see some schools starting to return to the roots of education that have served mankind so spectacularly over the past couple of millennium. Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, CA describes the Socratic method of the great books style: “There is a vital aspect of teaching that can never be implemented so well by lectures as by dialogue. Each one of us brings certain fundamental ideas to education which must be made explicit before learning can advance. Discussion is the optimum means to bring them forth. The student must, as it were, give them birth; the teacher, as a good midwife, only assists the labor. Tradition calls this the Socratic maieutic, from the Greek word for obstetrics, because the basic ideas we use in education come forth from our own minds, not from the teacher's.”