"School's Out for Summer!"

Okay, technically, my school is not out forever; I have one term to make up which I expect to do this summer.  But my four years spent studying classic literature and philosophy have been a remarkable journey, and I’ve loved almost every moment.

I’m taking about my four years in the Basic Program for Liberal Education for Adults.  What a singularly silly name: it sounds like a remedial program.  But it’s part of the University of Chicago’s Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.  Add those two together and that’s a mouthful.  What it is is simply a four year program for studying the Great Books.

Great Books is capitalized, as it was a compilation of important western literature and philosophy developed out of the University of Chicago in the early 20th century by, among other, Jacques Barzun and Mortimer J. Adler.  I first ran across it when my grandmother subscribed, for me mostly, to the Great Books from Harvard University arriving regularly in 51 green volumes (I have no idea where she ran across this subscription but I am grateful).  I had them for years, but now they are gone.

The program consists of three terms for each of the four years.  There are no exams nor papers to write.  There is simply a group of interested people led by a professor in the program.  The student body is varied; in my class there were three lawyers, two retired, two public school teachers, me and a retired librarian, a retired nurse with a PhD, a semi-retired priest, and a retired, although only around 50, air traffic controller, among others.  It was as varied a group of people as one could pull together.  There were Liberals, moderates, and Conservatives, religionists and pagans.

The curriculum is set by the department.  There's a link at the bottom where you can get all the information about the program including a complete reading list.  But I want to mention a few works I’ve studied and my reactions to them.

The works probably wouldn’t surprise anyone, although some are better known than others.  Sometimes the authors are well-known but the selection of the work is not what one might expect.  For example Nietzsche is on the list, but we didn’t read Thus Spake Zarathustra; rather, we read his Genealogy of Morals.  Other works are totally expected:  Machiavelli’s The Prince and Hobbes Leviathan, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid.  One term rotates a work of literature each year, reading either War and Peace, Don Quixote, Moby Dick, Tom Jones, or, the year I went through, Middlemarch.  We read six dialogues of Plato, but that’s hardly a surprise (The Symposium was my favorite).

Some of the works I had read before, some I had even taught.  A few I had read before and either didn’t remember or didn’t like them originally: Pride and Prejudice, for example, was a book I hated when I read it as an undergrad over 40 years ago; this time I loved it.  Some works came easy; some I struggled with; I never really got my mind around Aristotle (except his Poetics, which I read in college and later taught); his Nicomachean Ethics is mostly a blur.

If I had to pick a favorite it would Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War.  But going back to Dante’s Inferno was a delight; and I was reintroduced to the amazing essays of Montaigne (about which I wrote an earlier blog).  The least favorite would probably be Aquinas and Pascal and the aforementioned Aristotle.  But I intend to revisit Aristotle to wrestle with him again.

I’ll miss my friends in the program and the regularity of the process.  Fortunately, the Basic Program offers a wide range of alumni courses, which I plan on taking as long as my mind--and my knee--holds out.

It has been voyage of great discovery, and I am grateful for the opportunity to have gone through this.  And my reward?  A certificate to hang on the wall. And an extraordinary introduction to some of the great minds of human history.
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Web site for the Basic Program:  https://grahamschool.uchicago.edu/content/about-basic-program