Philosophy and the College Curriculum
IT HAS been remarked by President Hutchins that a student can go through college in the United States and receive a degree, without having read a single great book. While this, if not an exaggeration, is a statement of lamentable significance, it is one which ought not to surprise anyone familiar with the recent course of educational change. To philosophers, so well aware of the meager place held by the works of eminent thinkers, and accustomed to the inversion of intellectual goods in the educational program, such an indictment gives no disturbance. Others also have taken it with no reaction, perhaps because they are convinced it is quite true and nothing can be done about it, or perhaps because-such is the state to which some have fallen-they see nothing in this to remark about anyhow. Evidently there is no general expectation that a Bachelor of Arts or a Bachelor of Science should have read a great book, or that colleges should see that great books are read by those whom they decorate with the insignia of the educated. If a youth has fair capacity and has been taught in childhood to see clearly the objects which school puts before him, there is a good chance that he will have developed both interest and the power of critical discrimination by the time he reaches college. Normally he will then proceed into a number of the great fields of knowledge under his own intellectual incentive, provided college life does not lead him astray by surrounding him with tempting distractions. Suppose he learned mathematics and history while in the schools, by which I mean that he grasped certain concepts, such as numbers, classes, or forms, and their relations, and in history the concept of sequence in events. Today one must admit (though in other days he would not have had to) that if the youth did that much in school, it was unusual. Let the schools explain that. Assuming, however, that we have such a pupil, I wish to note a few things about his intellectual career in college. He will probably take courses in English, foreign language, the sciences, and history. In English he already has proficiency, so far as grammar and reading are concerned, and he will now be studying English literature. He finds himself constantly called upon to examine and appraise,