In previous posts, I outlined some connections between the
founding fathers and early liberal education in the United States. During the
nineteenth century, there was an educational boom that led to the founding of hundreds
of colleges including our own beloved Susquehanna.
It was not only colleges and universities that slaked
America’s thirst for enlightenment. In 1874, John Heyl Vincent and Lewis Miller
founded Chautauqua Institution. They took their inspiration from the Lyceum
movement that flourished in the earlier decades of the 19th century.
The original function of the Chautauqua Assembly was to provide training for
United Methodist Sunday-school teachers. Vincent and Miller (the latter was
Thomas Edison’s father-in-law) recognized that for many adults and older
children, Sunday school was the only continuing education available, so from
the beginning, their summer sessions included lectures on moral philosophy, the
newest scientific developments, literature, artistic performances, and even
religion. What began as a church camp with participants staying in tents on
wooden platforms transformed into a village of Victorian gingerbread cottages
and a non-sectarian center of American intellectualism in only a few years.
Mini-Chautauquas soon popped up all over the country, and
for about fifty years traveling tent Chautauquas ranging from very legitimate
intellectual revivals to little more than vaudeville shows were the sole
cultural events in many rural towns.
An early and important initiative of the original Chautauqua
Institution was the founding of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
(C.L.S.C.) during the summer of 1879. The C.L.S.C. was a four-year course of
assigned home reading. It was the first organized reading circle in the
country. The Chautauquan was
published as an anthology of course readings, old and new. Its charter states
that:
This new organization aims
to promote habits of reading and study in nature, art, science, and in secular
and sacred literature, in connection with the routine of daily life, especially
among those whose educational advantages have been limited, so as to secure to
them the college student's general outlook upon the world and life, and, to
develop the habit of close, connected, persistent thinking.
The participants received study guides. Regional discussion
groups were formed. Initially all participants were expected to return to the
Institution for four summers for lectures and discussions of what they had read
the previous year. Material was offered in a four-year sequence, and new
students could join in at any year. Exams were administered, and at the end of
four years, diplomas were awarded.
The C.L.S.C. still exists, and one of its contemporary
features is that the authors of each year’s books, which are often best
sellers, appear on the Institution’s program and lead additional discussion
sessions for the C.L.S.C. students.
The C.L.S.C. became the foundation of the Continuing
Education program at the University of Chicago, and I am convinced helped prime
the pump for the “Great Ideas” project that would begin there soon after. An
online history prepared by University of Chicago Library states:
[In 1921,] an
education centered on the classics first entered the modern college curriculum
at Columbia University…[In 1917,] Professor of English and noted poet and
novelist John Erskine had proposed a two-year course where students would read
one classic in translation each week and discuss it in a seminar. Erskine hoped
to clear the barrier students perceived between themselves and the classics
while providing them with a common tradition lost in the modern elective
system. He reasoned that all classics were originally written for popular
audiences, but their haughty reputations combined with faculty members' obtuse
scholarly interventions made the texts daunting to students.
To Erskine,
"A great book is one that has meaning, for a variety of people over a long
period of time," and a true classic ought to speak to the modern mind as
effectively as it spoke to its original audience. The faculty at Columbia
rejected his proposal on the grounds that students could not be expected to
master so many works in such a short time and that the essence of most classics
was lost in translation. As one of the first volleys in the battle that would
rage through twentieth-century academic history, the faculty rejected Erskine's
liberal arts ideal. They maintained that it was far superior for students to
specialize and read a few books deeply than it was for them to acquire a
general knowledge of a wide range of texts. The University should cultivate the
expert devoted to a narrow subject—after all, some members of the faculty at
Columbia had spent their careers commenting on only one or two of the texts
Erskine wanted his students to breeze through.
World
War One gave Erskine a chance to test his theories as Director of the Education
Department for the Y.M.C.A. and the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe.
Flush from his success on the front, he persuaded the faculty at Columbia
University to allow him to teach General Honors, a two-year seminar devoted to
the Great Books.
Among
Erskine's early students at Columbia were future University of Chicago faculty
members Richard McKeon, Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, and Mortimer Adler.
During his first year as president of the University of
Chicago, Robert Hutchins hired Mortimer Adler as a faculty member. Adler
suggested replicating the two-year Honors Seminar of his own Columbia student
experience. Beginning in 1931, Adler and Hutchins led the seminar at Chicago
for two decades. It was in Chicago that the course drew national attention for
its use of Socratic method and for the many celebrity guests the course
attracted, including Lillian Gish, Orson Welles, and Gertrude Stein.
At Columbia and Chicago, the “Great Books/Great Ideas”
curricula were an elective track for a select group of students, and in Chicago,
the curriculum moved into the University Extension program in the 1940s, a
berth created decades earlier by the C.L.S.C.
At St. John’s College in Annapolis the great books were
successfully expanded into a universal curriculum. St. John’s is one of our
nation’s oldest academic institutions, but it struggled for many years to
remain viable. To quote their website:
Rather than
close the school the board decided on one last desperate measure. In 1937, they
brought in Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan, two academics [from Erskine’s
class at Columbia and then the faculty at Chicago] who had revolutionary
educational ideas, to completely revamp the curriculum. Buchanan, who was
appointed dean, thought that the traditional liberal arts could be used as a formal
structure for learning; he devised a course of study with the great books as
the basis for discussion classes. Another important feature of his plan was the
inter-relatedness of the disciplines; he proposed a college with a unified,
all-required curriculum and no departments or majors.
St. John’s, Columbia, the University of Chicago, and the
C.L.S.C. pushed all of our institutions into thinking more intentionally about
the intersections of knowledge and the advantages of applying a variety of
traditions of inquiry to a single question. In the ensuing years, America’s
liberal arts colleges have prepared students to be problem solvers and leader
by exposing them to a broad range of ideas and ways of thinking. Our goal must continue
to be a focus on intellectual integration.
In the next installment, I will address some of the short-sighted
historical tensions between liberal education and applied studies.
The Great Ideas: The
University of Chicago and the Ideal of Liberal Education, found on the University of
Chicago Library’s website.
