I am really enjoying this book. The author treats the principle characters, Hutchins and Adler, with respect but a lot of irony. I had a set - which remained mostly unread but a great source of quotations - and their tiny print and double-column layout of 443 all-white-male works reinforced one quip: "The Great Books were icons of unreadability."Nevertheless, over a million sets were sold for hundreds of dollars each, at a time when hundreds of dollars was a lot more than today. By the seventies, sales had fallen off a cliff even after an attempt to make them more "relevant" by adding some women authors.
The book has all sorts of interesting tidbit about the evo9lution of our educational system. Hutchins and Adler, along with Dewy and Eliot really dragged Yale and Harvard kicking and screaming out of the 17th century mold of only Latin, Greek and Rhetoric classes, by introducing -- horror -- electives.
Only St. John's College force-feeds the Great Books' through all four years of its curriculum today. James Payn, now a forgotten novelist, said of the set "Here are the most admirable and varied materials for the formation of a prig." Perfect description of William Bennett.
Hutchins, and presumably Adler, believed that metaphysics should play the most important role in undergraduate education. He wrote in his book The Higher Learning in America that "the aim of higher education is wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge of principles and causes. Metaphysics deals with the highest principles and causes. Therefore metaphysics is the highest wisdom." Perhaps a weak logical string. Nevertheless, students could not gain this wisdom by sitting in class listening to teachers lecture, nor from textbooks. That became the great role for (sound the trumpets) THE GREAT BOOKS.
"Adler and Hutchins had transformed a technique of general education into a vision of salvation; they believed their Bildungsideal could save mankind and the modern world from moral decay and physical destruction.... The Great Books movement, in short, offered an intellectual surrogate for, or supplement to, attendance in church.
Interesting review in NYTimes Book Review Nov 16, 2008
Christian Science Monitor review at http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2008/11/20/a-great-idea-at-the-time/
