At Great Hearts Irving, you’ll frequently encounter the phrase “Great Books” when discussing our curriculum. That phrase isn’t unique to our campus, or even to Great Hearts as an organization, though we do have a clear stance on how highly we value the Great Books tradition.
The 20th-century educational philosopher Robert Maynard Hutchins, who served as the President of the University of Chicago, spoke of the necessity of “injecting new life into good ideas.” Together with his friend Mortimer Adler, Hutchins began teaching an honors course that quickly blossomed into a movement across the nation. Throughout the American Midwest in the 1940s, thousands of Great Books groups sprang up in which men and women would read and discuss the great works of Western Civilization that they had not previously read. Conversations that had been happening in Oxford nearly a thousand years prior were now happening in postwar St. Louis, Missouri.
In these groups, members would read timeless works by Sophocles, Cervantes, and Shakespeare and discuss what they had read. Not modern books about these great works, but the original works themselves, for one of the fundamental principles of the Great Books movement was the notion that truly great books, rather than being opaque to the modern reader, have riches and goodness waiting to be reaped by any earnest reader who desires to take them up.
At Great Hearts Irving, we strongly believe in the value of such books as have stood the test of time, and of discussing them with our students even long after the ideas contained therein were originally penned. We believe that all students are rightful inheritors of the entirety of the Western Tradition, and our curriculum is filled with perennial works that have held up over the years.
Rather than being swayed by the vicissitudes of our contemporary age, we seek to guide our students into the deep truths that have endured despite the ebbs of flows of civilization. With our students, we all seek after what is good and beautiful, and there can be no better place to start this search than in the books that have sustained and contributed to the “Great Conversation.”
With our students, we read and discuss the Great Books that push us to think harder, to wonder more deeply, and to grow in humility. We believe that our students deserve to read Euclid rather than only a trigonometry textbook. We believe that our students will know the nature of justice in a civilization far better by reading and discussing Tacitus than from a modern political commentary. And we believe that our students will learn immeasurably more about real friendship by reading the work of A.A. Milne itself rather than watching a cartoon.
At Great Hearts Irving, we are proud to carry on the tradition of reading great books with each and every one of our students.
In “The Great Conversation,” the Preface to the series of volumes entitled Great Books of the Western World published by Encyclopedia Britannica, Robert Maynard Hutchins writes, “Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was very much doubt in anybody’s mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western mind.”
“[Culture] make[s] the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere.” –Matthew Arnold
Great Conversation
In this light, Robert Maynard Hutchins described our interaction with these books as the “great conversation.”
“There is a melody sung in unison by the spirits of the spheres, which are the great philosophers. This melody, philosophia quaedam perennis, is not a body of truth revealed once for all, but a living thought whose content, never discovered for the first time, is progressively determined and clarified by every genuine thinker.” – Robin George Collingwood.
“Civilization too has its common principles, and views, and teaching, and especially its books, which have more or less been given from the earliest times, and are, in fact, in equal esteem and respect, in equal use now, as they were when they were received in the beginning. In a word, the Classics, and the subjects of thought and the studies to which they give rise, or, to use the term most to our present purpose, the Arts, have ever, on the whole, been the instruments of education which the civilized orbis terrarum has adopted.” -John Henry Newman
“The great books are those which are capable of reinterpretations, which surprise us by remaining true even when our point of view changes.” -John Erskine
Great Books in the Lower School
The Great Books of Western Civilization include such works as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Plato’s Republic, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Cicero’s On Duties, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, and Newton’s Principia. It goes without saying that Great Hearts Lower School students are not reading these texts for themselves. In the elementary grades, our approach to putting students into an encounter with the Great Conversation must differ.
John Senior of the Integrated Humanities Program wrote that “the seminal ideas of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine and St. Thomas thrive only in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes and adventures…. Western tradition has given us the thousand good books as a preparation for the great ones—and for all studies in the arts and sciences. Without them all studies are inhumane.” The Kindergarten-5th Grade reading list at Great Hearts attempts to include as many of these thousand “good books” as we can possibly fit into the school day, including titles such as The Velveteen Rabbit, Winnie-the-Pooh, Charlotte’s Web, Little House on the Prairie, The Hobbit, The Jungle Book, Peter Pan, The Chronicles of Narnia, Robin Hood, King Arthur, A Wrinkle in Time, The Secret Garden, Where the Red Fern Grows, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, A Christmas Carol, and many, many more.
Additionally, while ordinarily we prefer to give students “the thing itself,” in some select instances, a text is so seminal that it becomes crucial for students to have familiarity with the basic narrative. In those cases, we opt to share a high-quality children’s retelling of the story. At the Great Hearts Irving Lower School, students will be receive an introduction in this way to Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Beowulf, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, and selected works of William Shakespeare.
Many of these titles have been selected as our Classics to Keep, which students read and analyze in class and collect over time to build their own personal library of the very best children’s literature. Visit greatheartsirving.org/booksandsupplies for the current list.
For more on the Great Books, visit this article on “The Great Books at Great Hearts” found at greatheartsamerica.org.