Great books programmes

It is no secret to my students that in my political theory classes, beginning already with Introduction to Political Ideologies, I like them to read the primary sources. I suppose this comes from my own education and, at least indirectly, the influence of Leo Strauss, under whom some of my professors at Notre Dame studied at the University of Chicago. My two history of political theory courses have students reading large chunks of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx, with smaller selections from other writers.

There are, of course, a number of colleges and universities in North America that either are built entirely around what might be called a great books programme or at least feature this as a major course of studies. Probably the best known of these is St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the whole curriculum consists of western classic texts.

More common are such universities as Notre Dame, whose General Program of Liberal Studies (now simply the Program of Liberal Studies) was established half a century ago and still attracts students interested in an education in the classics. Similar programmes are found at Mercer University and, here in Canada, at Brock University. Despite the efforts of deconstructionists to debunk the subject matter of such curricula as little more than the ruminations of Dead White European Males, there is a small, dedicated core of students who long to engage in the great on-going conversations represented by the likes of Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Ethics, Augustine's Confessions, Pascal's Pensées, and so forth.

Ought Redeemer University College to embrace a great books programme? I was asked this by some of our students not long ago. I would certainly favour the establishment of such a major course of studies here, assuming sufficient student interest, although I wouldn't wish to see the entire institution given over to this. The task of understanding God's world and finding our place within it can hardly be reduced to the reading of so many texts from the (western) past, as important as these might be.