In the last video, I talked about Dorothy Sayers’s watertight bulkheads, the great defect of modern education which teaches students “subjects” but fails to teach them how to think.
In this video, I want to show you the alternative. And to do that, I need to tell you about two men and a very big idea.
In 1952, Robert Maynard Hutchins, who was then president of the University of Chicago, and the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, published a fifty-four-volume set called the Great Books of the Western World. The first volume in the series was Hutchins’ introduction to the set. There is something he wrote in that introduction that I want to draw your attention to. Hutchins wrote:
Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition.
He called the great books the road to education; neither a supplement nor an elective. The identified them as the road, the pathway, the means of acquiring one’s education.
What Hutchins and Adler understood is that the great books of the Western world are not simply artifacts in a museum collection. They are a long, sustained conversation, the written record of the poets and philosophers throughout the West who have discussed and debated, for nearly three millennia, the perennial questions that relate to the human condition.
We encounter Homer speaking, Plato answering and Virgil building on Homer. St. Augustine answers Plato and Dante gathers all of them up into a single vision. Hobbs disagrees with Aristotle and Rousseau borrowing from and nuancing Hobbs, puts forth his own vision. And, Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien shine the whole inheritance bravely and brightly into the darkness of the modern, progressive twentieth century.
Hutchins called this the Great Conversation. And the remarkable thing about this conversation is that it has never ended. It only waits for the next generation to join it.
To read the great books is to engage in the Great Conversation, to discover how generations of people understood the answers to the perennial human questions, and to see how ideas have consequences, and which of those ideas have shaped our present moment.
The Great Conversation Course
Now, here is what I am offering your family.
My Great Conversation course is a six-year, integrated humanities course for students who begin at twelve or thirteen years old. I’m inviting twelve to sixteen students of this age to spend six consecutive years in a single cohort, where we will read, discuss, and write about the primary texts of the Western tradition in chronological order. We will engage these works not as museum artifacts but as what Chesterton called, “the democracy of the dead,” living voices in a long and lively conversation.
Each year of the course is anchored both chronologically and thematically, structured around one of the six great ideas Mortimer Adler identified in his book Six Great Ideas as threads running through the whole of Western thought: Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Liberty, Equality, and Justice.
Year One: Creation, Cosmos, and the Heroic Soul. The big idea is Truth. We read Genesis, Homer, the Greek tragedians, and Plato, etc., and we ask: What is real, and how do we know it?
Year Two: Reason, Virtue, and the City of Man. The big idea is Goodness. Plato’s Republic, Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero, the New Testament, etc. What is virtue, and how is it cultivated?
Year Three: Faith, Reason, and the City of God. The big idea is Beauty. St. Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Dante, Chaucer, and the Beowulf-poet, etc.. What is the transcendent, and how does it draw us?
Year Four: Renaissance, Reformation, and the Collapse of Christendom. The big idea is Liberty. Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare, Milton, Pascal, Rutherford, etc. What is freedom, and what does it cost?
Year Five: Revolution, Romanticism, and the Modern Self. The big idea is Equality. Locke, Burke, the Federalist Papers, Tocqueville, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, etc. What does it mean for all persons to bear dignity?
Year Six: Postmodernism and Cultural Recovery. The big idea is Justice. Chesterton, Eliot, Lewis, Tolkien, O’Connor, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Pieper, Sowell, etc. What do we owe one another, and on what basis?
Along the way, students will study the flow of big ideas in the historical narrative: for example, how beauty was conceived in Athens, transfigured on cross in Jerusalem, encoded in the Gothic cathedrals, then fragmented in the modern era.
Together, we will read history, geography, civics, economics, art, music, architecture, even some astronomy and natural science. And, all of it will be synchronized to the civilization we’re reading, because that’s how the tradition actually holds together.
The Most Significant Component
Now let me tell you about the part of this course that I believe matters most; it’s the part almost no other program offers.
The students who begin this course together will finish it together. The same cohort for six years. Why does that matter? Because the Great Conversation cannot be had alone, and it cannot be had well with strangers.
Students who join this cohort will learn to read with increasing depth and breadth, write with increasing sophistication, reason with increasing rigor, and speak with increasing eloquence; and they will do so together, as a community of Christians whose understanding and wisdom incrementally grows deeper precisely because the community of learners does not change from year to year.
By year four, these students will share an intellectual vocabulary. By year six, when they read Nietzsche, they will answer him with the Plato and Augustine they read together years before. That is what it means to join a conversation rather than take a class!
By the time a student graduates from The Great Conversation, he or she will have read more primary texts deeply, written more substantive prose eloquently, and engaged with the perennial human questions more seriously than the vast majority of students entering America’s finest universities.
More importantly, students who complete this six-year course of study will know how to think wisely and act virtuously, which is really the only kind of education worth committing six years of their lives to.
In the next video, I’m going to get practical. I’ll talk about the weekly schedule, the credits, the reading load, the writing your child will produce, and exactly what this course covers so you can see how it fits into your family’s plan.
I’ll see you in the next video.
