Connecting Great Books

In the September 8th, 2006, Chronicle of Higher education, Jonathan Brent tells us that "Freedom Depends on the First Person Singular". This also happens to be the title of his article. In this article Brent recounts teaching a class on Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The focus of the day's discussion was on Shukhov, a gulag prisoner who had basically most, if not all, of his animal desires satisfied for the day. Brent asked his class what was wrong with this and it took almost an hour for these students to hit on the idea that what was wrong was a lack of freedom and individuality.

What hit me about Brent's article was his surprise that bright students who had taken the college's First Year Seminar and had read "Locke, Rousseau, Kant and other great thinkers in the Western tradition" took an hour to come to this realization. Yet, is it so surprising? If these books are simply read in isolation from each other, then it is no wonder the students took so long to arrive at the idea that freedom may be important. One class meeting discusses natural rights, another the education of the young and the third the Categorical Imperative. Individually these are all reasonable aspects of the texts to teach, and in a survey course that concerns itself with great ideas these are the ones likely to be distilled and conveyed to students. Individually great, they do not tell the student why freedom is important.

This is not a repudiation of the great books, nor is it to say they are the alpha and omega of education. Rather, it is to ask what we want students to learn. If we don't at least ask this question, we will continue to be amazed that students who are reading difficult texts ,with no overarching guide, fail to see any connection between these authors let alone their connection with freedom.