Education: Great Books for Grown-Ups

The “100 Great Books” had long ago scored a smash hit before the undergrads on the University of Chicago’s Midway ‘TIME, Oct. 24,1938). Last week it was on he road, to play to adults, on a four-city circuit. Chicago’s Chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins expects the idea to spread, within five years, to 150,000 people in 36 cities.

To speed its way, its students learn without paying, then teach new students without pay. The man who runs Chicago’s experiment in adult education is slim John Barden, 32, assistant dean of Chicago’s extension school, who is just out of the Army. On Monday he expounds the Great Books in Chicago; Tuesday he dittoes in Detroit, Wednesday in Cleveland, Thursday in Indianapolis. Housewives, steelworkers, stenographers, teachers, doctors and businessmen study with him one night a fortnight.

Each class has two instructors. Explains Barden: “We want teachers to be like a couple of synchronized spotlights. First one asks something, then the other chimes in, keeping things going. You gang up on one guy, firing questions at him as fast as you can. . . . Some people don’t come well-prepared, but by the time the two-hour discussion is over, they wish to hell they had.”

Usually around go sign up; after the first couple of lessons about a third drop out. Those who survive the first shock of culture generally stay with it. Chicago, which began with one class a year ago, now has 31 classes, will jump to 70 next year. Detroit, Indianapolis and Cleveland, with one class each now, plan to expand to 30 apiece in 1947.

Some of the Great Books are hard to get, or expensive. The university has printed 50¢ paperbound editions of such titles as Rousseau’s Social Contract.

Instead of tackling all the 100 Great Books at once (actually a misnomer: there are fewer than 100 authors, many more than 100 titles), the extension school has picked out 15 authors to start with:

Plato: Apology, Crito, Gorgias.

Thucydides: History.

Aristophanes: Lysistrata, Birds, Clouds.

Aristotle: Ethics, Politics.

Plutarch: Lives.

St. Augustine: Confessions.

St. Thomas: Treatise on Law.

Machiavelli: The Prince.

Montaigne: Essays.

Shakespeare: Hamlet.

Locke: Of Civil Government.

Rousseau: The Social Contract.

Madison et al: Federalist Papers.

Smith: The Wealth of Nations.

Marx: Communist Manifesto.

Anybody who gets through these will find five more lists waiting, each tougher than the last. Says Barden: “The Great Books program ends only in desertion or death.”