There Are Places Where Great Books and Ideas Are Still Taught

A statue of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides outside the Austrian parliament in Vienna. (sianstock / Shutterstock)

Commentary

While leading public and private universities still seem to refuse to have students absorb the best parts of our history and traditions, there are, however, diamonds in the rough, places where great books and ideas, masterpieces and heroes, and beauty and sublimity are still imparted to young minds.

They are often found in lesser-known spots, certain small colleges, and independent centers at larger universities that maintain the wisdom and excellence of the past. At these places, education in civics, for instance, is done through the examination of ancient classics, the American State Papers, and crucial historical episodes from former times, not through activism in the service of ideological causes. English classes assign novels and poems that stand the test of time, not contemporary works that satisfy certain political tastes but have uncertain literary merit.

One example is the graduate program in the humanities at Faulkner University, a private Christian school located in Montgomery, Alabama. The doctoral track is “Rooted in the Great Tradition of the Western world,” the webpage says, with the materials understood within a Christian framework (there is also a Master’s track). Faculty have degrees from the University of Chicago, U of Wisconsin, U of Dallas, and Florida State, while most of the 64 students in the program come from the professional ranks, many of them working teachers in high schools and community colleges aiming to earn an advanced degree. The director of the program, professor Jason Jewell, tells me that the people who started it a dozen years ago did so with the explicit aim of maintaining the kind of traditional formation they themselves underwent years earlier.

It’s an online program well suited to part-time students with full-time jobs. The courses show exactly what a humanities education ought to be. One of them at Faulkner is “Historical Investigations,” which includes works by Thucydides, Plutarch, Augustine, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Marx. (People who criticize Great Books curricula as conservative or reactionary overlook the number of liberals and radicals in the canon—Marx, Voltaire, Rousseau, Nietzsche ....) Another course, “Examining Fine Arts,” has students study the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Wagner, G. B. Shaw, and John Dewey. One course called “Literary Analysis: Great Ideas and Authors” runs from Plato and Aristotle to Cicero and Longinus to 20th-century literary theorists.

These are daunting syllabi, but the program is popular. Enrollments have more than doubled in recent years, Mr. Jewell says, and the unit pays for itself (in his words, it’s a “net revenue generator”). The webpage foregrounds “intellectual rigor and spiritual engagement,” tradition and greatness, which apparently appeal strongly to attendees.

We find none of the phony buzzwords so common in elite program descriptions such as “cultural logics” and “gender theory,” terms that indicate the low value those departments place on the acquisition of tradition. Indeed, some might regard the vision of Faulkner University and other traditionalist institutions as backward and closed-minded, the opposite of the cosmopolitan awareness to be found at elite colleges. I have heard the snobbery expressed many times during my own academic career. “Very well,” we might reply, “you do your thing and we’ll do ours.” As long as students come once we’ve built it, we need not care about what’s happening among the rich and famous.

I cite Faulkner University and Mr. Jewell as reassurance to people in despair over the decay of the humanities in higher education. If we base our judgment on what the elites say and do, we have good cause for dismay, to be sure. The situation at Faulkner is a strong rebuttal. It says that education free of 21st-century politics and committed to erudition and heritage still exists. As has been frequently noted, one of the big stories in K-12 schooling in the last few years is the growth of high schools committed to classical education. More and more kids are leaving 12th Grade with a little Latin and lots of ancient and modern philosophy, literature, religion, and history. They and their parents like the traditionalist approach.

If they wish to continue it after graduation, they should be encouraged to search for higher learning beyond the Ivies, large public universities, and expensive liberal arts colleges. We have prominent classical schools such as the University of Dallas and Hillsdale, and we have many more not-so-prominent institutions such as Faulkner, Belmont Abbey, Thales College, and many more. In those places, the humanities are thriving, and the kids are, too.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.