Guiding the Perplexed

...What accounts for the neglect of mathematics and the natural sciences...

...Although many academic institutions have abandoned their responsibility to formulate programs of study, Henrie shows how one of the symptoms of decay—the elective system—might be self-consciously used to provide oneself with the foundations of Western civilization...

...For the ISI guides, the more modest aspiration is—as Harvey Mansfield puts it in his volume, A Student's Guide to Political Philosophy—to be "a subordinate guide, one with the office of introducing you to the true guides...

...What does the fracturing of the university mean for the universe...

...The authors of the eight small volumes of the "ISI Guides to the Major Disciplines," published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, assume an audience not of "complete idiots" but of "students" who yearn for a liberal education and who have at least a vague sense that their yearning is not being answered by the academic institutions supposedly devoted to that high aim...

...Writing in the hope of bridging the distance separating him from Rabbi Joseph (and other promising students, "however few they are"), Maimonides enjoins his pupil "to approach matters in an orderly manner" and thereby reverse the "stupefaction" caused by having "acquired some smattering of this subject from people other than myself...

...I suspect it is the latter, in which case, this student self-reliance project strikes me as insufficiently radical...

...To seek a guidebook, whether on the mystery of the divine or the mystery of the carburetor, requires awareness of one's perplexed condition...

...Is the assumption that those parts of the university are in better order and, thus, students can do without supplemental guidance...

...Who knows what's possible with a good guidebook in hand...

...Mark C. Henrie's A Student's Guide to the Core Curriculum remains more securely within the horizon of university offerings...

...This guide is not intended for other professors," Mansfield notes, "so it is not equipped with footnotes...

...In A Student's Guide to Philosophy, Ralph McInerny does condemn the lamentable direption of philosophy and science...

...I fear that these pamphlets are a bit too much like those ambitious summer reading lists that high-school teachers prepare for the college-bound kids...

...exaggerates the deficiencies of its purchasers...

...Although billed as guides to the major disciplines, covering "the most important fields of knowledge in the liberal arts," the project might be faulted for having a rather blinkered vision of which studies count as liberal...

...It's a great pleasure to observe the way in which powerful and acclaimed minds craft elementary discourses, bringing what they do and why they do it within the ken of the average eighteen-year-old...

...But the project as a whole doesn't challenge those fortresses in the midst of the modern university: the departments of biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics...

...The popular series entitled The Complete Idiot's Guide to...

...For individuals still in school, the guides offer a sort of compass, enabling them to navigate even the most treacherous curriculum and locate those courses that promise better sailing...

...Maimonides dedicated his famous Guide to his "honored pupil Rabbi Joseph," who unfortunately could not remain by his teacher's side...

...Diana Schaub is chairman of the department of political science at Loyola College in Maryland...

...Moreover, I'm just not sure how reasonable it is to expect very many students to become "self-reliant...

...Perhaps these guides should be required reading for professors to rescue them from the narrowing clutches of research agendas, professional development, and what goes by the name scholarship...

...Since true teachers are rare (even in those places where a profession is made of teaching), there arises the makeshift solution of "distance learning...

...He provides background briefings to help students find solid courses in a number of different departments and suggests supplemental readings that might act as a counterweight to ideologically skewed syllabi: "If you find your philosophy professor uninspiring...

...Will the intended audience really read these guides...

...It may be that the soul can be fully alive and present to another through the written word—and thus that great books are true teachers—but the vast majority of American college students aren't readers yet...

...Students need teachers...

...Perhaps additional guides could be commissioned opening up these fields to those who want to understand the fundamentals of the ancient and modern pursuits of scientific knowledge and what those fundamentals mean for human life—which is to say, my criticism amounts to a request for more guides...

...We shouldn't forget, however, that America is a nation of do-it-yourselfers...

...The students must undergo the difficult labors themselves, but they need someone else there to help them...

...Idiots who buy guidebooks aren't complete idiots...

...Each of the six guides to a particular discipline is well done...

...For more independent and lifelong learners (whether in school or not), they offer overviews of significant fields of study and suggest suitable readings...

...Why buy an item for $6.95 that seems to call into question the $100,000 just paid for a college education...

...In A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning, Father James V Schall, S.J., writes with the sort of charming and quirky earnestness that awakens the desire for liberal learning even in those whose desire had been unfelt—and students may find it more fascinating to plunge into "Schall's Unlikely List of Books to Keep Sane By" than to trudge through their assigned course work...

...As science has progressed in its technical mastery over man and the world, we see daily that science conceived simply as method cannot yield wisdom...

...Most intriguing to me were the guides on the discipline I know the most (Harvey Mansfield on political philosophy) and the discipline I know the least (the late Paul Heyne on economics...

...Or is the assumption that the natural sciences can make no contribution to liberal learning, that they are not (although they may once have been) humane endeavors...

...It is, in its way, a Socratic spur...

...Neither parents nor colleges seem likely to welcome the notion that such supplements are necessary...

...You could start with Maimonides's twelfth-century Guide of the Perplexed and end with the 32,000 books the keyword "guide" brings up on Amazon.com...

...The ISI guides would seem to have their genesis in the conviction that today's pedagogy and curriculum are impoverished, but that the souls of the young remain resilient and receptive, outfitted by nature with perdur-ing longings...

...I have written it to tell you what I really think (up to a point...

...It's important to hand out such lists, but one can't expect many takers, even among those who thrill to the aspiration the lists express...

...Regardless, I came away from each book chagrined at the gaps in my education...

...It accepts the ghetto of the humanities, when it ought at least to make the case for the unity of knowledge and the reintegra-tion of the sciences into the liberal fold...

...None of the natural sciences is included, none of the fine arts, and aside from economics, none of the social sciences (political philosophy—an honorary member of the humanities—is included, but not political science or government...

...you might want to talk to a classics professor or to a professor of political science who teaches ancient political theory...

...The authors' irony, when it appears, is directed more toward their wayward peers than toward the readers and learners...

...While the aim of education is to make individuals who are capable of learning on their own, it's pretty tough to tell the woefully miseducated that they must deliver their educations by themselves...

...The condescension in these essays is not the false sort manifested by lording it over the beginners, but genuine outreach...

...Readers who take up the guides would be well advised to read the two general volumes first, before turning to the tours of specific disciplines...

...they at least know they don't know...

...Socrates famously described his teaching as midwifery...

...It is undeniable that there are obstacles in the way of securing a wide and willing audience...

...And, more important, will they be guided by the guides...

...There is barely a nod to the medieval quadrivium of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy...

...These slim volumes, helpful though they are, are not teachers...