Feb

19

A Great Books program is designed to teach history by having first-hand experience reading the primary works of thinkers upon whose shoulders the edifice of Western Thought rests. The works are to be read in chronological order, to the ideas are arranged and built in the mind in the order by which Western Civilization was built. They are like building blocks.

Listening to a re-digested synthesis of all that material, selected and edited and interpreted according to some unknown theory (but likely, given today's academic gestalt to be a form of Marxism) and regurgitated into your earphone by a for-profit company undermines the very idea of the program.

Fortunately most of the Great Books are out of copyright, and so may be downloaded and read at no cost from Project Gutenberg, and that reading greatly aided by the electronic resources for learning and contextualizing available at one's fingertips in most capable ebook readers (highlighting with auto-compiled indexes of highlights, wikipedia search, web search, Google Maps).

The reasonable excuses for ignorance in this world, apart from apathy, sloth, incorrigible stupidity, and willfulness, are quickly becoming endangered species in this Brave New World, and are on the brink of extinction.


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2 Comments so far

  1. Rl ellison on February 19, 2013 5:08 pm

    You got to love the academics who mostly with their obligatory scruffy greying beards and phony ruffled blue denim work shirts spend a fruitless lifetime hiding behind those ever-so safe walls in the Land of the Naive.

    Society indeed has its classes: those who prey and those who pontificate. Both pushers in the same business.

  2. Ed on February 20, 2013 4:55 pm

    It would be much more worthwhile to study African Negros in mud huts and how wonderful tribal life was before the white man stole it all away - Just as they teach in any modern education program of merit.

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