Democratizing the Great Books

by Casey N. Blake, Roosevelt Montás and Tamara Mann Tweel

Casey N. Blake is director of the Center for American Studies and Mendelson Family Professor of American Studies at Columbia University. Roosevelt Montás is director of the Core Curriculum at Columbia University. Tamara Mann Tweel is a seminar instructor in the Freedom and Citizenship Program at Columbia University.

In December, some 250 students, professors, university administrators and other citizens attended a daylong conference organized by Columbia University’s Center for American Studies on the theme of “Democracy and Education.” The event took the centennial of the publication of John Dewey’s classic book of that title as an occasion to consider how schools, colleges and universities might reinvigorate civic education with new pedagogies and partnerships with community organizations.

The stakes could not be higher. As Dewey wrote, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” The recent election added urgency to the day’s discussion, throwing in relief the question “What does democratic education mean today?”

Years ago our keynote speaker, the political philosopher Danielle Allen, grappled with that very question as she taught Great Books courses to night students at the University of Chicago. The Declaration of Independence became the sole text for one of those seminars, as she invited the students to join her in parsing each line of the country’s founding document. Allen explained in her book Our Declaration, “I wanted my students to claim the text …. I wanted them to understand that democratic power belonged to them, too, that they had its sources inside themselves …. I wanted them to own the Declaration of Independence.”

Ownership of the democratic tradition is key to a civic education. Allen understood that if students formed a personal relationship with a text, if they acquired it as a work that awakened their own civic intelligence, they would move from passive recipients of a heritage that they didn’t believe was theirs to active participants in shaping their country’s democratic future.

Allen is not alone in this insight. Programs across the country have begun to teach Great Books to underserved populations, be it:

● incarcerated students in Bard College’s Prison Initiative and Columbia’s Justice in Education project;

● homeless students in Bard’s Clemente Course in the Humanities; or

● low-income and first-generation high school seniors in Carthage College’s Humanities Citizenship Initiative, Yale University’s Citizens, Thinkers, Writers program and Columbia’s Freedom and Citizenship program. ...

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