[The great books aren’t just a collection of “dead white
males,” and teaching or reading them isn’t elitist or Eurocentric.
On the contrary, they are a treasure that should be made available and
accessible to working-class people everywhere.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE LEFT SHOULD DEFEND CLASSICAL EDUCATION  
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Liza Featherstone
December 6, 2021
Jacobin
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_ The great books aren’t just a collection of “dead white
males,” and teaching or reading them isn’t elitist or Eurocentric.
On the contrary, they are a treasure that should be made available and
accessible to working-class people everywhere. _

,

 

_Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They
Matter for a New Generation _   
Roosevelt Montás
Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691224398

“Fuck George Orwell,” the student was saying. “And fuck his
middle-class, _British_ values.”

Teaching political writing at Brooklyn College, I’d (unoriginally)
assigned Orwell’s famous essay, “Politics and the English
Language.” The student was incensed by Orwell’s hostility to words
and expressions with Greek and Latin roots, which the
twentieth-century English writer considered pretentious. For Orwell,
such language was clutter crying out for Marie Kondo–like
simplification. My student begged to differ.

“I took a class in classical literature,” he said.

He tallied up for us, per credit, exactly how much tuition money that
course had cost him. Reading those books had taken time and effort,
too, yet he’d done it. Like many of my Brooklyn College students,
this young man sometimes missed class or assignment deadlines due to a
sudden shift change at his retail job.

“And I’m really fucking proud that I know the meaning of
‘Achilles’ heel’ and where it comes from,” he fumed. “I want
to show that off!”

Teachers live for moments like this, when students use what they’ve
learned to show _us_ a whole new way of looking at things. That
student’s outburst gave me a fresh reading of the text I’d
assigned, and I now think of him every time I teach it. Unwittingly,
he also reminded me not to take my own classical education for
granted.

Yet among noble causes, the “great books” seem to have the worst
adherents. Generally, people defending this type of liberal education
have a pseudo-intellectual right-wing agenda. Allan Bloom, in his 1987
polemic, _The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has
Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students_,
saw the classics as a counter to the 1960s radicalism he believed was
still pervasive on college campuses (even deep into the Reagan
Revolution). Today, the idea of a “Western” canon has some
fascistic appeal to the far-right desktop warriors defending white
civilization from the global majority. Contemporary conservatives see
classical education as a counter to “critical race theory,” a
nebulously defined bugbear of the Right and a dog whistle to racist
voters.
That’s why the perspective of Roosevelt Montás, author of _Rescuing
Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for
a New Generation_, is so badly needed. Montás is as passionate about
the great books as Allan Bloom and his present-day intellectual
descendants, but there’s an important difference: For Montás, the
classical curriculum isn’t part of a proxy war against egalitarian
politics. In this part memoir, part call to action, Montás argues
that reading great literature and philosophy can make working-class
people’s lives more meaningful and that everyone should have the
opportunity to read great books. Instead of ceding this issue to the
Right, as we often do, the Left should heed his arguments.

A Left Tradition

Montás was born in a small village in the Dominican Republic, where,
he writes, his liberal education began with his father’s
Marxist-inspired activism. A committed opponent of Joaquín Balaguer,
the United States–backed, right-wing, authoritarian president of the
Dominican Republic at the time, Montás’s father had only a
sixth-grade education, but his left-wing political activism placed him
within a venerable intellectual tradition, which was, for his son, a
lifelong gift. Montás immigrated to Queens at the age of twelve, a
rough transition for him as well as for his impoverished family. He
first encountered classical literature when he rescued a Harvard
Classics volume of Plato’s _Crito_ — dialogues with Socrates in
the last days before his execution — from a pile of trash on his
block. Later, he studied the famous Core Curriculum as a student at
Columbia University, where he fell in love with the classics and never
left: After directing Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum for
a decade, he now runs its Freedom and Citizenship program, which
introduces low-income high school students to foundational canonical
texts.

_Rescuing Socrates_ chronicles Montás’s search for truth and
meaning as a young man. He describes how the Great Books have helped
him thrive and make sense of difficult challenges in his life:
recovering from childhood traumas (poverty, abandonment, and
immigration itself), alienation among rich kids at Columbia, loss of
his evangelical Christian faith, and the dissolution of his first
marriage. He’s infectiously passionate about making liberal
education available to all, not just wealthy Ivy Leaguers confident
about their comfortable futures.

Montás goes beyond the usual human capital arguments — _reading
Plato will help you get promoted at McKinsey!_ — making the case
that college is not just about making a living, but also making life
_worth_ living. In advocating the canon for all, Montás is arguing
for a more egalitarian model of schooling than our current one, which
too often reserves liberal arts as a luxury for the few, while the
working class is supposed to be grateful for a vocational education
and a pile of debt. (Let them eat STEM!) Montás argues that the great
books should be incorporated into every course of study, even the
preprofessional.

Montás is a voice in an ideological wilderness here: We don’t see
many on the Left making the case for classical education. On campus,
the student left tends to oppose these kinds of core courses as a
stance against Eurocentrism, patriarchy, and racism, and much of the
academic left agrees. But there is no reason why great books courses
can’t be diverse; Montás devotes chapters in his book to African
(St Augustine) as well as Indian (Mohandas Gandhi) thinkers. In any
case, it’s anti-intellectual to reject “dead white men”; we
would miss out on thousands of years of literature and philosophy, and
thus, centuries of truth-seeking and inquiry. As my Brooklyn College
student was suggesting, too, the culture we live in today has been
formed by these works (without them, we don’t even know what an
Achilles’ heel is). College administrators often reject great books
programs to avoid the culture wars they inspire and out of professed
commitment to “student choice,” which sounds progressive but is
just another way of reducing education to customer service.

As early as 2003, a student editorialist for the _Harvard Crimson_
complained that it was possible to graduate from that august
institution without reading Aristotle or William Shakespeare. True,
students bothered by this tend to be conservative little shits — but
they are right to complain. More important than the decline of
Harvard, however, is the need to address the structural barriers to
great books for regular people, through free higher education, more
equitable college preparation in K-12 schools, and a far less
cutthroat economic system, in which survival is a human right and
everyone has leisure time.

Encouragingly, some institutions are trying to democratize liberal
education. Montás’s own program sounds commendable, and he points
to others, including the Columbia Core Curriculum at Hostos Community
College, a public institution in the South Bronx. Montás rightly
envisions a decommodified education, in which not everything you learn
increases your earning power and the customer is not always right —
but your life will be better and more meaningful.

_Rescuing Socrates_ is long overdue. It has been predictably
well-received by right-wing outlets like the _Wall Street Journal_
— but I hope _Jacobin_ readers will embrace it, too.

Liza Featherstone is a columnist for _Jacobin_, a freelance
journalist, and the author of _Selling Women Short: The Landmark
Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart_.

* pedagogy
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* Education
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* Socrates
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* Great Books
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* Plato
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* Classics
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* Classical education
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