Proof that the classics speak to everyone

Star Tribune
February 20, 2002
Katherine Kersten

For 35 years now, we've been hearing that "the classics" -- the great books of the Western world -- are largely irrelevant in today's classrooms. Why? Most were written by dead white males. Obviously, then, they can hold little meaning for females or for black or Hispanic kids. Everyone knows that if young people are to be moved or inspired, they need books whose authors "look like them."

Try telling that to the students at Wilbur Wright College, a two-year community college in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago. Students at Wright are predominantly black, Hispanic or from immigrant families. Wright is for kids who aren't ready for four-year colleges. Yet students there are flocking to a Great Books program and lining up to read authors like Plato, Cicero and Dante.

Wright's Great Books Curriculum is the brainchild of English Prof. Bruce Gans, who started the program five years ago. In Gans' view, students at Wright -- like students everywhere -- deserve the chance to encounter "the best that has been thought and said." Those who earn 12 credits in Great Books courses, where at least half the syllabus is composed of classics, receive a special, highly coveted certification on their transcript.

Gans says that watching students come alive intellectually in Great Books classes is one of the most exciting experiences of his life. Reading Thucydides and Dostoevski, students begin to believe for the first time that they are capable of serious thought. They grow in confidence and, to their surprise, find themselves conversing about important and profound ideas. As their minds expand, they gain new insights into their own existence and form new ideas about the society in which they live.

Gans gives the following example. Recently, he taught a course on Jonathan Swift's masterpiece, "Gulliver's Travels." The work, a political allegory, is divided into four books. As Gans' students read the first book, they grumbled, "Why are we reading this? It makes no sense." By the time they reached the last book, however, the students were conducting the discussion themselves, eagerly disputing about matters of politics, justice and good and evil. Gans asked whether the students thought Swift had written the fourth book in a more accessible style. Yes, the students replied. With emotion, Gans responded, "It's not Swift who's changed; it's you."

Buoyed by the success of Wright's Great Books program, Gans recently founded the National Great Books Institute, which assists institutions that wish to establish similar curricula. (It can be reached at bmg1030@earthlink.net.) Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley will chair the institute's advisory board.

What's happening at Wright College should surprise no one. There's a reason that the Great Books have formed the foundation of a liberal education for centuries. These books "liberate" human beings from the conventional wisdom of their time and place. Wright students are merely the latest in a long line of individuals whose lives have been transformed by the classics, and who have transformed their societies as a result.

Though Wright students may not know it, their intellectual predecessors were the miners, weavers and milkmaids of 18th-and 19th-century England. These were ordinary folk who -- like Wright students -- achieved personal and political liberation by reading the classics. Historian Jonathan Rose tells their story in a fascinating new book entitled "The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class."

In the 1500s, English law barred common people from reading even the Bible. England's rigid class system was grounded in the conviction that commoners were incompetent to think for themselves. The upper classes maintained a closely guarded monopoly on the knowledge required to interpret law, politics and religion for the lower orders.

But as literacy grew, many working people began to yearn for intellectual independence. To guide their quest, they chose the very books that the elite had appropriated as their own: Homer, Virgil, Plutarch and Bacon.

In the 1800s, weavers often read Shakespeare as they worked at their looms. According to Rose, shepherds "maintained a kind of circulating library, leaving books they had read in designated crannies in boundary walls." In mines and factory towns, informal discussion groups sprang up. Many aspiring readers paid a serious price for their uppity ways. Francis Place, a tailor, lost most of his upper-class customers when they discovered, with horror, that he owned a library of more than 1,000 volumes.

What did England's common people find in the classics? Like Wright students, they found the tools they needed to begin to answer what Rose calls life's most basic question: "What is it that's going on here?"

Less-than-great books can't perform this function. Ordinary works of fiction, for example, tend to follow stereotyped formulas that limit their value. But the classics, in Rose's words, "offer a hundred ways of understanding the world, and a hundred plans for changing it." Over time, British workers who read Milton and Locke began to grasp that they deserved educational and political equality. Eventually, they demanded -- and got -- both.

Today, we often hear that the Great Books are musty tomes that those in power try to use to shore up the status quo. The truth is different. For generations, the classics have been among the world's most potent agents of change.

-Katherine Kersten is a senior fellow of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis.