The past decade or so has seen a striking rise in the desire for real learning, rooted in the Great Books, and a hunger for real meat and gravitas instead of the thin gruel of relativist “relevance”. One recent example at the University of Oklahoma illustrates this healthy hunger. A course in the Great Books which was described by those teaching it as “the hardest course you’ll ever take” has received “sky high” enrollment as students rose to the challenge. 

We live in a pathetically dumbed-down culture. Levels of literacy and numeracy plummet and levels of ignorance rise. Knowledge of the past disappears, its lessons unlearned, as the present shows its contempt for the wisdom of the ages and its sages. In short and in sum, and to put the matter bluntly, we live in an age that is characterized by the arrogance of ignorance, which knows nothing but is certain nonetheless that it is smarter than every age that preceded it.

Five minutes with Homer and Sophocles, or Plato and Socrates, could show us that we know less than we think, or, for that matter, five minutes with Dante or Shakespeare, or a few minutes with the inimitable Miss Austen. The problem is that we no longer spend any time with these paragons of wisdom, and we certainly don’t spend time with them at school, from which they have been unceremoniously banished.

But there is good news on the horizon. As a latter-day Bob Dylan might say, the times they are a changing.

The past decade or so has seen a striking rise in the desire for real learning, rooted in the Great Books, and a hunger for real meat and gravitas instead of the thin gruel of relativist “relevance”.

One recent example at the University of Oklahoma illustrates this healthy hunger. A course in the Great Books which was described by those teaching it as “the hardest course you’ll ever take” has received “sky high” enrollment as students rose to the challenge. Inspired by a syllabus taught at the University of Michigan in 1941 by the British poet, W. H. Auden, the course requires 6,000 pages of reading: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Horace, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Pascal, Racine, Blake, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Ibsen, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Henry Adams, Melville, Rilke, Kafka and T. S. Eliot. And that’s not all. For good measure, the course also includes opera libretti from Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Bizet and Verdi.

Wilfred McClay, who designed the course based on Auden’s original syllabus, was initially inspired to do so by the negative reaction to the discovery of Auden’s syllabus in 2012. The universal response to the demanding nature of Auden’s syllabus was that today’s students could never survive such a course and would not tolerate the level of work that it demands. Reacting to such negativity, Prof. McClay thought that students might rise to the occasion if set the challenge. Prof. McClay and the two colleagues working with him broke “every rule of the postmodern academy” in designing the course, “creating a highly demanding sequence of classic works, setting high expectations, and eschewing the grayness of theory and the reductionism of identity politics in favor of an intense engagement with the texts themselves.”

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