Or so it was said.
The real problem with this argument is that the Great Books never fulfilled the function that their proponents wanted to claim for them. This Wikipedia article on the Great Books makes a telling mistake, locating the source of the tradition in “the result of a discussion among American academics and educators, starting in the 1920s and 1930s and begun by Prof. John Erskine of Columbia University, about how to improve the higher education system by returning it to the western liberal arts tradition of broad cross-disciplinary learning.” However, by the 1920s, there were already series that purported to represent the tradition of the Great Books, most famously “Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf” of the Harvard Classics. Clearly the explanation that this tradition arose out of the optimistic 1920s notion of everyone being able to avail themselves of “lifelong learning” through the Great Books of Western Civilization is wrong or incomplete.
So when did the Great Books tradition start? Like other aspects of the canonization of Western Culture, it began in the 19th century. Go to preserved collections of the private libraries of some of America's nouveau riche, like the Huntington Library in Southern California, and you'll find scores of books, in series, that predate even Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf. These represent the first stirrings of the Great Books tradition.
In the late 19th century and turn of the 20th century, new fortunes were being made throughout America. The Old Money families regarded these interlopers with suspicion and disdain, even if a few of the families whose Old Money had gotten a little ragged over the years welcomed their infusions of ready cash with new allegiances and marriages of convenience. The Old Money had a common culture, full of its own private signifiers, unstated but potent rules of conduct, and so on. The “New Money” interlopers had to make their way in the midst of a complex network of norms, codes, subtle snubs, and cultural commonalities. A sherry glass was never just a glass that happened to have sherry in it, and you mistook the one for the other at considerable social peril. If you showed up in black-tie to a white-tie affair, you might as well have come in overalls with a sign tacked to your chest reading “Hick”. Edith Wharton's scathingly funny and tragic observations of the clash between New Money and Old Money in the late 19th c. form the primary context for most of her novels.
Naturally, this led to a great deal of self-consciousness on the part of America's nouveau riche, and they sought to make up their deficiencies as best they could by holding lavish balls and banquets, seeking out experienced manservants and ladies' maids who could instruct them in the unwritten codes of conduct, and patronizing all the most fashionable gentlemen's clubs and cultural events. However, there was one deficiency they couldn't cure: their lack of conversational skills. Old Money women went to finishing schools and Old Money men to elite universities. They sought the source of Western culture in their tours of the Continent. The New Money men and women had no such educational background and at the end of every lavish dinner party, when the men had retired to brandy and cigars in the study and the women were refreshing themselves with tea and fresh fruit in the salon, there would be a horrible moment when a gentleman began discussing Marcus Aurelius or one of the ladies dropped the name of Charlotte Brontë, destroying New Money's pretension to sophistication. Something had to be done, and fast.
Enter the Great Books tradition. Culture by the yard, suitable for any richly-paneled library. One read through of these and you need no longer fear the embarrassment of having witty banter dry on your tongue. Even being seen having this set, whether the pages remain uncut or not, entitles you to be considered as one of the cultured elite. Then the Great Books tradition became twinned with the tradition of liberal education already in place at the Ivy League universities because Junior New Money was going to need the same predetermined intellectual background as New Money Senior in order to fit in with the Old Money elite, and if the university wasn't going to deliver it then, by God, what were they paying tuition for.
According to Allan Bloom, author of the sleeper bestseller The Closing of the American Mind, that's where things stayed until the 1960s. Then... crisis! revolution! revolt! Liberal education gave way to the pernicious demands of feminists and militant Black and Chicano activists, and the reckless, Dionysian influences of “rock and/or roll” (in the words of Rev. Lovejoy). Bloom's book is more than an absurd tirade against more than twenty-five years of popular culture, though it doesn't come much more absurd than equating Woodstock to Hitler's Nuremberg rallies. It is a profoundly undemocratic book, and thus in keeping with the Great Books tradition. Bloom complains that “Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are not what they used to be—the last resorts of aristocratic sentiment within the democracy” (p. 89).
Bloom yokes this “aristocratic sentiment” to his vision of liberal education through a Great Books tradition, and yet his views are profoundly at odds with liberal education itself. He sees young people in misanthropic terms that are indistinguishable from Ayn Rand. He invites us to
Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy (pp. 74-5).Is this not simply a way of asserting that the child is a “moocher” and that contemporary culture has produced a proliferation of like “moochers”, who benefit from the intellectual life they do not partake in, wouldn't understand if they tried to, and therefore do not deserve? Allan Bloom seems to think so. His prescription for higher education is that humanists must “Go Galt”, withdrawing from the corrupting influences of popular culture, feminism, and multiculturalism and establish a priestly caste at a few top-tier universities where the life of the mind can be fully pursued.
It's clear that the Great Books tradition never shed its aristocratic, elitist biases, but it also violates the spirit of liberal education in several other ways. Great Books advocates claim that reading these works will provide us with a common context necessary for understanding and deploying allusions, references, similes, and help us to understand the present in light of the past, a common and I believe plausible justification of liberal education. However, the Great Books pedagogy treats the books themselves as if they were completely transparent, context-free, and shorn of history. If the Great Books require reading other books for full understanding and comprehension, then the justification for presenting these as representative of the sum total of all worthwhile knowledge of Western Civilization disappears. Despite the fact that works like Don Quixote, one of the perennial picks for the Great Books, requires the background of contemporary chivalric literature to be fully understood, it is read as an isolated work of Cervantes' solitary genius. Bloom claims this is the way “the authors wished [the Great Books] to be read” (p. 344).
Lastly, liberal education is, according to its defenders, a means of synthesizing and reasoning about a broad range of knowledge, but the same standard is never applied to the Great Books tradition. Reasoned arguments over the inclusion or exclusion of certain books is not welcome because the list is a reflection of the combined wisdom of Western Civilization. Attack the list and you attack civilization itself. Using knowledge of the Great Books as the basis of and test for “cultural literacy” implicitly but clearly affirms that anyone who does not share in the knowledge of the Great Books is to be stigmatized—their “outside” knowledge doesn't matter. Far from being a synthesis, the Great Books tradition is a reactionary invalidation of every form of knowledge not immediately derived from study of the so-called classics.
It's obvious why these were appealing arguments to be making in the midst of Reaganism. The Great Books pedagogy disdained the contributions of women, ‘minorities’, appealed to Eurocentrism, and established easily imposed and arbitrary curricula that students ‘needed’ to know, further contributing to the de-professionalization of teaching which could then be used to justify lower wages for teachers and less investment in public schools. Anyone who remains serious about liberal education must reject the Great Books tradition and all its baggage for these reasons. This doesn't mean giving up on teaching Shakespeare or Austen, but on the assumption that any arbitrary selection of authors can give a complete and comprehensive view of anyone's culture. If the defenders of liberal education fail to distance themselves in the public eye from this elitist and undemocratic tradition, then liberal education will deserve its derision, marginalization, and opposition.
