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THE CORE CURRICULUM AND THE GREAT BOOKS PROJECT

The Core Concept

In the period after World War II American universities debated a proposal to restructure postsecondary and secondary curricula around a "core" of courses devoted to the humanities. The foremost proponent of this idea, University of Chicago president Robert M. Hutchins, hoped it would cultivate a public familiarity with what he called "the tradition of the West." Educational curricula prior to the 1940s included many humanities disciplines—literature, art, music, political and social philosophy—but the dominant curricular tendency was toward the sciences, economics, and psychology. Curricula at the time also tended toward specialization and fragmentation; many progressive educators, for example, argued that education could be streamlined by having engineers study engineering rather than take classes in music appreciation. Hutchins criticized such a philosophy as simplistic, arguing that narrow, specialized education undermined tradition and led to a technical, mercantile culture without a strong set of values. His core-curriculum idea was designed as a corrective to what he believed to be an overly materialistic society. It was designed to instill a sense of values in a culture preoccupied with sheer monetary advancement.

Great Books

Hutchins and several associates, including Clifton Fadiman, Mark Van Doren, Scott Buchanan, Jacques Barzun, and philosophy professor Mortimer Adler, hoped that Hutchins could introduce the core curriculum to the University of Chicago, one of the nation's centers of specialized study. Adler, who had studied with Columbia University literature professor John Erskine, suggested a core curriculum much like Erskine's classes—one oriented around the "Great Books," the classics of Western culture. Erskine had his students read a classic a week—literature, philosophy, theology, political theory—for the duration of a semester. Hutchins and his associates argued that a similar curriculum would provide the necessary common experience to bind educated people to the traditions and values of Western culture. Hutchins proposed a two-year core curriculum at Chicago, followed by specialized graduate study. The faculty at Chicago vetoed the project, but the Great Books idea did become a regular course at the university, and Hutchins's colleague Stringfellow Barr left Chicago and took the idea to Saint John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where it became the basis of the school's curriculum. Barr also abolished electives, survey courses, standard texts, and books about books from the course of study. While the core curriculum was not adopted nationally, it became a model of instruction to which educators in the future often turned.

Tactics

During and after World War II Hutchins and his associates changed their argument in support of the core curriculum. In some celebrated books, including Hutchins's Education for Freedom (1943), Van Doren's Liberal Education (1943), and Adler's How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education (1940), supporters of the Great Books concept argued that fascism had descended upon Germany and communism upon Russia precisely because both societies had lost their educational compass, sacrificing the humanities to a utilitarian, science-oriented curriculum. Perhaps out of a sense of frustration with their inability to advance the core-curriculum idea, Hutchins and his associates also began to attack progressive educators, arguing that progressive education would lead to authoritarianism. In an incendiary speech, "God and the Professors," given at a 1940 New York conference on philosophy, Adler charged John Dewey and other progressive educators with subverting American society. He argued that Dewey and the progressives' rejection of fixed ends in philosophy and espousal of experimentation in education would lead to disaster, equating these concepts with moral bankruptcy and nihilism. "Democracy," he charged, "has much more to fear from the mentality of its teachers than from the nihilism of Hitler. It is the same nihilism in both cases; but Hitler's is more honest and consistent, less blurred by queasy qualifications and hence less dangerous." That Adler would deliver this address after Hitler had stormed through France shocked many and occasioned a sharp rebuke from Dewey and other educators, such as Sidney Hook. But the tactic was persuasive, and it stuck. After the war educational traditionalists unconnected to the core-curriculum project would make similar charges against progressive education—this time inverting the formulation and charging the progressives with Communist subversion.

Problems

Though the attack on progressive education opened the way for later Red-baiting, it failed to gain the field for the core-curriculum idea, in no small measure due to inherent flaws in the concept. First, the issue of which books were classics, as well as seemingly endless lists of candidates for inclusion among the classics, generated disputes among instructors. Adler was scarcely troubled by this problem, arguing that a classic was that which endured the test of time and gave insight into the unchanging characteristics of human nature. A chronic list maker who described his habit as an "analerotic compulsion—the need to order and arrange things and keep them rigidly fixed in the order I have imposed on them," Adler generated a list of 175 titles to govern the teaching of the Great Books course at Chicago. Critics were not reassured, attacking the program for the works it included (they wondered about the universal value of Michael Faraday's three-volume Experimental Researches in Electricity [1839, 1844, 1855]) and those it omitted (there were almost no classics from the twentieth century). Second, critics argued that the proposal was elitist, an attempt to force a select set of values on all students, an attempt which was only available to wealthy individuals capable of attending expensive schools such as Chicago.

Great Books, Door-to-Door

The charge of elitism deeply troubled Hutchins, a committed democrat. He responded by farming the Great Books idea out to junior colleges and off-campus extensions of universities in an attempt to reach larger groups of people. He also attempted to popularize the concept by getting Britannica to publish the Great Books as a reference set, available to the general public. In 1943 Gen. Robert Wood, head of Sears Roebuck, had given Britannica, which it owned, to the University of Chicago as a gift. Hutchins set the Britannica staff to work compiling the Great Books to be published along with the encyclopedia set. Adler assembled a staff of graduate students to prepare an index to the series. The result, publicized with a seven-page spread in a 1948 Life magazine article, was less than astonishing. Adler's index cited the 102 great ideas of Western civilization, which, according to him, could be found in 432 Great Books written by 71 men from Homer to Sigmund Freud. Britannica was contracted to print 54 volumes of the Great Books, as well as Adler's The Great Ideas: A Synopticon of Great Books of the Western World (1952). The book subdivided the 102 basic great ideas into no more than 30 subdivisions, a technique one reviewer found akin to "a footnote that went bersek for two thousand pages." The divisions only highlighted the arbitrariness that so maddened Adler's critics. "Woman, not a main idea," noted Life sardonically, "is included in Family, Man and Love." The series was initially a financial disaster, ultimately saved by being marketed, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, door-to-door. Hutchins's ambition to make the Great Books idea into the foundation of a more humanistic, civilized culture disintegrated into the type of mercantilism he despised. The Great Books concept, born in high-minded idealism, died a coffeetable concept and middlebrow fad.