Great Books Redux
SIMMONS, TRACY LEE
Great Books Redux An educator strives to rediscover knowledge. BY TRACY LEE SIMMONS Perhaps we could write off Roger H. Martin’s bizarre decision to the onset of a “midlife crisis” and make...
...Classes as such don’t exist...
...it also needs serious discussants...
...Whatever the explanation may be— and it’s never made exceptionally clear in this book—here before us stands the fantastical fact: Four years ago, Roger H. Martin, 61 years old and a respected historian, snatched a sabbatical from his eminent post as president of RandolphMacon, a fi ne liberal arts college in Ashland, Virginia, and betook himself to wind back his intellectual and emotional clock over 40 years and reenter college for one term as a freshman, as though the trial of his fi rst experience as a college freshman hadn’t been, as we discover it was, horrid enough...
...Knowledge is to be discovered hot, not spoon-fed cold...
...Yes, one may choose to put it that way...
...One can well imagine that academic life in America would become a good deal more spirited and urbane if all institutions took this cue and dispensed likewise with the pompous titles of Doctor and Professor, honorifi c designations that ought, let’s face it, to be limited to perhaps 200 hoary and august people in the country at any one time...
...Surely not, but keeping intensive company with Homer, even if only briefl y, can begin to make us feel our own smallness before the cosmos, and that is no small benefi t. The beginning of wisdom may be the discovery that the sun does not revolve about us...
...But not quite...
...Perhaps he wished to be young one last time before easing fi nally and irrevocably into his decrepitude...
...John’s College in Annapolis, the agreeably archaic institution still hoisting high the banner of the Great Books movement, installed securely at St...
...Martin commits a few solecisms of his own, especially ones seeded with therapeutic presuppositions and blossoming into the soft-focused lingo of the talk show and self-help section...
...practically the whole of the fouryear curriculum of original reading in the humanities and sciences comes rigidly set, from Homer to Euclid to Virgil to St...
...Instruction, such as it is, happens in seminars and tutorials where students learn dialectically, by engaging in guided give-and-take with tutors—the diminutive title for faculty—and, most of all, fellow students...
...It may be true, as some critics of the Great Books method claim, that its pedagogy implicitly licenses the quarterthought and fosters a confi dence that blooms too early and bids fair to hamper plodding patience in the face of complexity, to say nothing of humility in the face of mysteries resistant to exact formulation and easy sloganeering...
...Martin’s lively depictions of his seminars reveal more than he may realize, conveying the effi cacy of the method as well as the intelligence and consistent goodwill of most of the participants...
...As the weeks pass from August to December, some of these young people confi de in this father-like fi gure...
...Here is an academic regimen, in short, for neither the loftily smug nor the terminally lazy...
...he may not participate in seminar discussions, a sensible stipulation...
...No hectoring professor lording it over a roomful of bored, incurious wastrels or neophytes, but a group of fundamentally differing minds reaching, gingerly but inexorably, toward some sort of common understanding...
...John’s, that no matter how much the college may sell itself as a grand exercise in democracy, where the greatest books lie open to all comers, this model works best when its devotees, teaching and taught alike, hunger to excel, to stand apart as singular, unique—a handy standard to sustain these days, lest we forget that excellence too holds a modest place in the American tradition...
...He follows the full fi rst-term freshman curriculum, but the deal is that he may observe only...
...Textbooks are pitched: Students read only what authors of the distant past wrote, not what their later interpreters have claimed they wrote...
...One young woman offhandedly dubs Odysseus and his companions nothing more than “a bunch of macho slobs...
...it’s to be acquired as an earned possession, not purchased as a bankable commodity...
...Even mathematics (through close reading of Euclid, for instance) gets tackled this way...
...Alas, this kind of learning isn’t for everybody...
...Everyone who is not or does not quickly become an inquisitive self-starter is quietly or ceremoniously shamed off the premises...
...Martin, as it turns out, chose well if not typically...
...At St...
...But the lessons emerging from the seminar room are the ones we’ve paid for...
...John’s since 1937...
...Students there declare no majors...
...Wandering back and forth between the seminar room and boathouse, caf?, and Friday-night lecture, Martin observes in passing the lives of the modern iPod-hooked, cell phone-addicted, texting-mad student, and in doing so discovers, without much surprise, that college students now are pretty much what they always were, questing minds and souls trying, by fi ts and starts, to make headway toward some solid sense of themselves that will help them fi nd a secure foothold in the world...
...And upon his rowing efforts he hangs many—maybe too many—of the broader lessons he learns during his months at Annapolis, lessons of patience, perseverance, and humility...
...Tracy Lee Simmons is the author of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin...
...Yet we come to enjoy his tumble of the dice...
...He had been fi ghting a desperate battle with a nasty form of melanoma a few years before embarking on this experiment, enduring the excruciating treatments and defl ations of spirit attending a lingering death sentence...
...The St...
...What remains of this quirky account, once Martin’s compelling story fades, is a brighter, more luminous prospect of what the life of the mind can still be for those discerning and disciplined enough to opt for the harder road...
...And so President Martin goes back to school...
...A serious discussion may require more than a serious subject...
...However that may be, what we know we have here is a tale worth reading...
...Students are “told what to study but not what to think,” as one “Johnnie” puts it...
...Finally, this former runner settles on crew: He’ll row, showing up dutifully for practice on chilly mornings at six along with his bleary, blood-shot classmates...
...This method does not aim at dogma...
...But as he rallied and as the metastasizing cancer lapsed into a blessed remission, he found himself, a tired and grateful survivor, prompted to take an almost spiritual accounting of his life, his accomplishments, failures, and stillsmoldering hopes alike...
...It’s a scheme to conjure with...
...So eager is he to dip down into the false sophistications of our popular argot that he sometimes seems to be rehearsing for an appearance with Dr...
...But aside from this bar, he’s a class member in full standing, one encouraged as much as his young colleagues to delve deeply into campus life—though not too deeply, as he’s married and has two daughters older than his classmates...
...it’s an ancient yearning...
...At least one drops out...
...Let no man in his sixties be advised to “hang out,” talk of being “pumped” for a race, or speak of Socrates being a “pain in the butt” who “turns people off...
...The gods not allowing that, though, he thought he could at least try to see the world as the young see it today and emerge somehow richer for having done so...
...While practically every one of the students he describes (always charitably) acquits himself and herself with an impressive maturity, a few strike us as ill-equipped for an exercise calling for so much steady, self-effacing honesty...
...Then again, one may not...
...A young man proclaims the Oresteia of Aeschylus to be devoid of value and questions the prudence of burning two hours discussing a work that a few minds superior to his own have deemed worthy of reverence for 2,500 years...
...Nor, we should add, must he write punishingly unreadable essays...
...Phil—point taken about infl ated titles?—instead of tracing a sober journey of intellectual rediscovery...
...Martin’s little adventure did not come ex nihilo...
...A gamble, we should think, at best...
...For no matter our ages, we are all students in the presence of Plato and Aristotle, and as we might defi ne a classic of anything as something ineffably inexhaustible, we can also say that the classic book keeps giving and giving, even to multipledegreed college presidents with thinning hairlines...
...Or the move might have been inspired by a costly and elaborate bit of fi eld research designed to astound the trustees...
...BY TRACY LEE SIMMONS Perhaps we could write off Roger H. Martin’s bizarre decision to the onset of a “midlife crisis” and make our facile diagnosis stick, had he not safely passed the moment for that milestone over a decade before...
...Ah, the joys of Youth...
...and the room goes afl ame with claim and counter-claim, assertion and qualifi cation, probing query and statement of faith until we can sense, in the reading, that this vibrant scene fl eshes out what Plato had in mind...
...no one lectures to legions of the drowsily inert...
...He fl irts with the idea of joining a chorus...
...or Ms...
...Conversing formally about a Great Book cannot ensure that any of its profound, fi ner elements will lift anybody in the room out of the torpor of trivia, still less that a few weeks of discussion over translations of Homer can make a sharp, perceptive thinker of anybody...
...Yet, perhaps unwittingly, Martin points up some of the inevitable weaknesses of this rigorous approach...
...But most don’t, and we understand why...
...Never again will the pleasures of reductive thinking be so keen, dear...
...John’s does not pretend to serve slackers...
...As a prescription for seriousness and a cure for the listlessness of what passes for college work at most degree factories these days, this isn’t bad...
...John’s treatment of the Great Books might stand as the intellectual equivalent of chemotherapy in an era of chronic academic lassitude...
...Still, he attends a waltz group and makes a proper ass of himself as he declines to dance out of shyness, much as he did 43 years before as a real freshman...
...But nonsense isn’t an exclusive prerogative of the younger generation alone...
...After negotiations that must have been amusing to witness, Martin gets himself admitted to the freshman class of 2004 at a place prominently mentioned in the previous review: St...
...Or maybe it arose from a gnawing need to take a whack at reality and go slumming for a spell...
...John’s the passion for learning is taken in dead earnest, smoothing manners and elevating tone...
...Decorum dictates that all members of the community, both faculty and students, be addressed as Mr...
...The reading list, while formidable, is admittedly narrow and, according to critics of Great Books teaching, impractically so...
...with surname appended, a courteous practice: Students are credited for the adults they are or should aspire to be, and faculty, no matter how accomplished in the realm of scholarship, are treated simply as veteran fellow laborers in the vineyards of learning, not as experts demanding, or even especially deserving, deference...
...What else are we to make of those oily drops of contemporary thinking of the kind accusing Agamemnon of “severe parental abuse...
...Thomas Aquinas to Descartes to Hegel to Tolstoy to Melville, a daunting course of perennial philosophical and literary works...
...A couple of tutors sit at a large table alongside the students and with nothing more than the book of the day before all of them—they’re apparently discouraged from taking notes—one of the tutors opens each session with a question (“So where does Socrates come down in this dialogue on whether virtue can be taught...
...But we’re still left in the end with the chief paradox of a place like St...
...Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, we have here, it would seem, either a nut case of a loon—or a man, noble and true, who has achieved both a wisdom and humility of Socratic proportions...
...These two may be among those students who, Martin says, “speak with more frequency than insight...
...We can cheer him on even while cringing from time to time over the ultimate silliness of any enterprise whose object has been to transplant oneself in another stage of life...
...Yet the very narrowness of the curriculum sharpens the point of the place, the idea being not to read many works cursorily but to read a few of them exhaustively and emerge with a trained mind that can grapple with anything else on its own...
...He is living out of season...
Vol. 14 • December 2008 • No. 14
