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Has the Death of the Great Books Been Greatly Exaggerated?
I saw this article in my news feed, lamenting the collapse of interest in The Great Books. Articles much like this one show up often in my news feeds. The collapse of interest in The Great Books, the Classics, traditional curricula, etc., is “common knowledge” amongst conservative intellectuals.
I don’t have sufficient data to disprove that this “collapse” is occurring, but anecdotal evidence makes me skeptical. In the past, there were essentially three ways to be exposed to The Great Books: 1) They were assigned in a classroom. 2) They were assigned by parents who owned a high-quality home library. 3) A reader would stumble upon them in a public library.
Now, it may be true that if you only look at those three vectors you might indeed see a decrease in the rate of exposure to The Great Books. Maybe they aren’t assigned in class as much as they once were. Maybe they are included in fewer home libraries. Maybe they aren’t featured as prominently in public libraries.
Thanks to the popularization of the Internet, however, those are no longer the only exposure vectors available. It’s doubtful that they are even the most important exposure vectors any longer.
My social media feeds are chock-full of posts quoting great literature from history, which encourage me to seek out the sources of these quotes. This is easy to do thanks to modern search engines. I can then download the source material for free from sites like gutenberg.org.
One could counter with the old line, “yeah, but how many kids are really going to do that? You can’t say that your experience is typical.”
Firstly, this is the same sort of argument that people made against Andrew Carnegie’s mission to build public libraries across the continent. “What’s the point of spending all this money on libraries for people who aren’t motivated to read?” The idea that people won’t learn unless forced to do so has little empirical basis. In fact, the opposite is often argued, that people are less likely to learn when forced to do so.
Secondly, I’m not arguing that my experience is typical. Instead, I argue that experiences akin to my own may be trending upwards rather than trending downwards.
I cannot prove that people are reading The Great Books at greater or lesser rates than they did in the past. However, I can prove that people are downloading The Great Books at relatively high rates.
First, we need to define The Great Books. For convenience, I’m going to use Mortimer Adler’s reading list.
The #1 title on the list is The Iliad. According to Gutenberg.org, The Iliad has been downloaded over 11,000 times in the last 30 days alone. The #2 title on the list is the Old Testament. According to Gutenberg.org, the King James Bible has been downloaded almost 4,000 times in the last 30 days.
Here are lists of Gutenberg’s most-downloaded titles. Most of them are on Mr. Adler’s reading list. The top download is Pride and Prejudice, which was downloaded almost 50,000 times in the last 30 days.
Furthermore, the article which provided the impetus for this rant laments that the kids don’t learn Latin these days. According to Gutenberg.org, Latin for Beginners has been downloaded 1173 times in the last 30 days.
I don’t think I need to go through the download stats from Gutenberg for all the books on Mr. Adler’s reading list to make the point. If the thesis is correct that interest in these sorts of books is on the decline, would it not mean that in previous decades Pride and Prejudice was purchased and/or borrowed more than 50,000 times per month in the United States? I’m skeptical that retail and library records would bear out that statistic.
I also note that Gutenberg.org is just one source for these books. There are other sites where one can download classic works, like feedbooks.com and archive.org, not to mention good old Amazon.com or the website operated by one’s local public library. In the case of the Bible, there are plenty of online sources for every imaginable translation. BibleGateway.com is the 308th top-ranked website in the USA, according to Alexa, out of the millions of websites that exist.
Considering that the US literacy rate is at an all-time high, I would not be at all surprised if I was shown data that suggests readership of The Great Books is also at an all-time high.
After all, what percentage of the population even had access to The Iliad in 1900?
Published in Education
Let’s do the math here.
The Iliad has been downloaded 11,000 times in the past 30 days. That’ll be about 1.3 million over the next 10 years. That’s 0.4% of the US population.
Pride and Prejudice, at 50,000 in the past 30 days, would reach about 1.8% of the US population in 10 years.
I know that this is only one site. On the other hand, I’m using only the US population.
Yeah? So? “most-downloaded” doesn’t equate to “most read.” I think most people download the classics for the same purpose most people bought the hardcover: just to say They have it and appear smarter than what They truly are.
“A ‘classic’ is a book people praise and don’t read.” Twain.
I think those Gutenberg stats are a little questionable. They seem really high to me. I wonder if these books are being consulted by students of all ages for their various research and writing projects. I also wonder if Gutenberg is counting as “downloads” partial downloads–a chapter or a poem, for example, or a title page. Also, editors would be apt to consult the site to check quotes and references to these works. I wonder about the “download” counters anyway. I used to edit a website, and I was always shocked to see the “pages downloaded” figures. They were way higher than I had any reason to believe could actually be happening.
I’ve always been fascinated by St. John’s College. My daughter was interested in it at some point, and she went on a tour. She loved the idea. Its curriculum is based on Great Books. Here is their list.
I believe Ben Sasse is a graduate of this college.
A good education can be had independent of a college, or university syllabus. There are schools out there that offer the classics, and good professors that teach the classics, but a good bookseller should not be ignored.
One of the benefits of attending a boy’s Catholic high school was my Lit classes, and our high school bookstore that not only sold the novels we had to read, but the note attached to the stack of books that stated; “Please read the first 100 pages of Don Quixote for the first day of class, and be prepared for a class discussion.”
I never needed Euclid. I got it in one, thanks to Mr. Paulson in 9th grade.
When I was in Fourth Grade I remember my sainted mother crying after a parent-teacher conference. She had been told that I was a likely high school drop-out. The next year in Fifth Grade (1965-6) I was lucky enough to have my first male teacher Mr. Ellsworth. My desk was next to the Encyclopedias. Our implicit agreement was if I did not disturb others, I could read the encyclopedias all day long, which I did.
My brother had dyslexia, and a tremendous drive to succeed. He bacame a neurologist, yes, treating people with learning disabilities including dyslexia.
I teach literature (and English) at the middle school level. Here are some titles (though not necessarily Great Books) that students have overwhelmingly enjoyed reading and discussing:
Bradbury – F-451 and The Martian Chronicles
Antigone and Prometheus Bound
Steinbeck – Of Mice and Men (lots of boys who aren’t “readers” ate this one up and asked for more; two went on to read Grapes of Wrath)
Orwell – Animal Farm
Get ’em started early, talk with them about the books as they read, and help them “get it” whenever they need the help. Of course, it helps to teach in a school where I have the freedom to teach these kinds of things, which is another topic unto itself.
The Harvard Classics (a set of the Great Books published early last century) is available on the Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics_(Bookshelf)
As Encyclopedia Brittanica was going out of business, I was able to pick up a set of the Great Books of the Western World for a couple of hundred bucks. I’ve slowly working my way through the ten-year reading list.
That explains it.
You know, Hillsdale graduates and St. John’s graduates can sense each other from about a mile away.
Sniff. Sniff. Pheremones…
Or the sweet sound of the word Wittgenstein wafting over the autumn winds.
(This actually happened, by the way. At a camp deep within Appalachia. It’s a long story.)
Not just homeschoolers. My students download pdfs because it’s easier to copy & paste quotes into essays or presentations for analysis instead of typing them out.
I do it, too. Searchable pdfs make creating exams and prompts involving style or extended metaphor analysis, for example, much easier. I love copying and pasting an extended quote and challenging my students to explain why the author wrote that text in that manner. I can also test the same skills using different quotes for different periods.
No doubt. Though I was particularly thinking of Latin for Beginners. Definitely Homeschooler material.
Agreed on the Latin. Too few schools offer it.
My high school offered Latin, and it was a public school. Every time I think of that, it makes me feel 100 years old.
My high school still did too, but I think they ended it as I was leaving. I should have taken it instead of German.
I wish I had too. Knowing Latin instantly increases your English vocabulary and spelling ability. The Romance languages based on Latin, such as French, can do that too, to a degree.
Mine did, too, in the 80s.
I took Latin in college to fulfill the foreign language requirement; no language lab.