First published in 1909, the Five-Foot Shelf was conceived by the Harvard president Charles W. Eliot as "a good substitute for a liberal education" for a growing middle class eager for knowledge. All the big names and important ideas were here: Sophocles, Chaucer, the Constitution, three treatises on smallpox for good measure. Ordinary men and women who had never set foot in Harvard Yard could now stake a claim to the peaks of Western civilization.
"In much wisdom is much grief," counsels the book of Ecclesiastes, and in Christopher R. Beha's tender intellectual memoir, we find plenty of both. By the time he set out to read all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics — known as the Five-Foot Shelf — Beha had already survived blood cancer and seen his identical twin brother nearly die after a car accident. And in a year that would take Beha from ancient Greece to the 20th century, illness and death returned once more, reminding him that no amount of learning can efface what Pascal called the "eternal silence of these infinite spaces."
A product of Manhattan private schools and Princeton, Beha seems an unlikely candidate for such earnest self-improvement. But like the working masses who were Eliot's intended audience, he was desperately seeking a retreat from the mundane.
--A NYT Sunday Book Review (6.24.09) by Alexander Nazaryan of The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else, by Christopher R. Beha.
I haven't read this book. And it may be awhile before I get to it. But the story affirms again the value and power of a classical education, a Great Books Curriculum, or reading the classic literature of the ages. Ironic then, isn't it, that one reads again and again of colleges dropping the major in classical studies because of a lack of student interest and enrollment.
During my six years in the Marine Corps between high school and college, I organized my own self-help approach to an experience of higher education. I took upon myself the task, often the joy, of reading as many classics of different scholarly disciplines as I could manage to identify and acquire. For me, to this day, they are among the most important, most useful books I have read.
But, I had not heard of Charles Eliot's "Five-Foot Shelf," this being the first reference to it I've encountered. Still, I understood what a classical education entailed: the Latin and Greek languages, the history, literature, philosophy, science, mathematics and arts of Greece and Rome. Then, more generally, there were the classic works of literature and other disciplines which spanned the millennia from ancient Greece and Rome through the 20th century AD/CE. And recognizing the threat to a sound education in the classics, however defined, some colleges organized their undergraduate liberal arts curriculum around the "Great Books," the classics.
The idea of the Great Books curriculum emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. The University of Chicago is probably best known for trying to implement it, although the ideal was never fully realized there. Still, Chicago today retains a Great Books component to its core curriculum, and several universities offer a form of Great Books curriculum as an alternative. In addition, there are several small colleges that have adopted a Great Books approach to their liberal arts curriculum.
The best known and most respected Great Books program today is likely the 70-year-old curriculum at St. John's College, which has campuses at Annapolis, MD, and Santa Fe, NM. When my son and daughter were considering colleges, I at least acquainted them with St. John's as an alternative. They were not interested, but in the process I received some interesting information from the school. They listed 104 authors of classics from the Greeks to the 20th century. I couldn't help but take inventory of how well I had done against their list. Of the 104 authors listed, I had read 44. Not great, but not bad either. But most interesting, I had first read 38 of those 44 authors in my self-education process in the Marine Corps. Later in college, in a liberal arts program self-crafted to be as broad an exposure to the arts and sciences as I could organize, I would add only nine more of them.
A few years ago, in reading the book John Adams by David McCullough, I was reminded again in the letters of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and other luminaries of their revolutionary time, how powerfully their classical education had informed them and served them. It provided the needed knowledge and intellectual discipline, the philosophical and political foundations, for planning and organizing the most enlightened democracy and effective market economy in the history of the world. America's best and brightest today could do worse than avail themselves of that same foundation of knowledge. And the universities that define how a broadly instructive and enlightening liberal arts education is constructed and taught might revisit these considerations as well. (Although we do understand, don't we, that universities now more often tailor curricula to what students want and will pay for, and students want what society and the marketplace value.)
But I am also reminded that I have unfinished business. I still have 60 authors to go, don't I? And while I have no illusions of reading them all, there are still many on that list that I truly want to read--perhaps now more than ever. Anyone care to join me?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/books/review/Nazaryan-t.html?_r=1
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