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CLASSIC
COMEBACK AT WRIGHT COLLEGE
GREAT
BOOKS COURSE HAS GIVEN STUDENTS A LOT TO THINK ABOUT
By Meg McSherry Breslin
Tribune Staff Writer
March 2, 2000
Following a pivotal moment in
a film production of Shakespeare's "Henry V," students in
Perry Buckley's Great Books class are still taking it all in when
Buckley's questions start streaming in.
What is honor, after all, in
the view of Henry V and of Falstaff, a leading character in the
play?
What can be said about the
quest for power from Shakespeare's monarchs, who spend their
lifetimes seeking prominence and glory, yet inevitably complain
about the burdens it brings?
The questions from this recent
lecture are posed to a somewhat unlikely crowd: students at Wright
College in the Chicago City Colleges system, many of whom had never
dreamed of studying Shakespeare with such precision before they
enrolled in Buckley's class.
Certainly, City Colleges
students have the intellectual might to tackle the subject, but many
are immigrants or first-generation college students who had long
been intimidated by such works. A good number arrive in the Great
Books course shortly after completing a remedial English or writing
class and may still be struggling to master the language, much less
tackle some of literature's most celebrated and complicated works.
But Wright is now at the
forefront of a growing movement to revive the so-called Great Books
curriculum, which highlights the classics of Western civilization,
including literary landmarks by Homer, Sophocles, Aristotle,
Descartes, Darwin, Marx, Freud and Shakespeare, plus a range of
other works designed to provoke discussion of timeless intellectual
ideas. Most of the Great Books are drawn from a list compiled by
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Until recently, the trend in
higher education had been to reject many such books by dead white
men as largely irrelevant in a modern, multicultural society. The
so-called politically correct movement has held that more room needs
to be made for modern writers, women and minorities whose works have
an equally powerful message.
But now a backlash has
emerged, with some scholars arguing that the classics need to be
revived because students are being deprived of some of the Western
world's best literature. And in some cases, the push is being waged
in surprising places--not at bastions of intellectual thought such
as Harvard and the University of Chicago, but at the community
college level, including City Colleges. There, the majority of
students are the very minorities the politically correct movement
was designed to reach.
Wright is among at least a
dozen schools that have introduced Great Books programs over the
last four years. Like many of the other schools' officials, Wright's
leaders did so at the urging of the National Association of
Scholars, a Princeton, N.J.-based group that has long been urging a
return to the classic liberal tradition.
"These programs are one
way of providing, among the great mass of courses that has now
proliferated, a very distinct product of a special type--the type
that gives you a challenging liberal education," said Stephen
Balch, the association's president. "It's significant because
no one has been trying to do this in a long, long time. We're the
first people in a long while to launch an organized effort to let as
many institutions as possible know about this."
Wright College's program was
founded by English teacher Bruce Gans, a veteran of City Colleges.
"When I got here, what
was being done is what's being done across the country," Gans
said. "You ask the kids to choose a topic and come up with a
thesis. But the problem is we have kids who are culturally
illiterate. When they walk into these classes, they don't say,
`Let's write about Socrates.' Instead, they say, `Should I write
about the Ricky Martin phenomenon?' They'll just do what they
know."
At first, some faculty members
were strongly opposed. In addition to concerns that minority and
contemporary writers would be unfairly ignored, some argued that the
largely minority, working-class student body in the City Colleges
wasn't up to the tough coursework that a Great Books curriculum
entails.
"People on my own faculty
will say, `Why are you teaching these kids this? These kids don't
have the skills to appreciate it.' I get that very frequently,"
Gans said. "It's all part of the resistance, the idea that
`Let's teach easier things, things in their immediate environment.'
"
Gans won the debate by
conceding on some of his original plans. At first, he envisioned
that at least 80 percent of the works would be from the
Encyclopaedia Britannica's list. But he later agreed to take only
half of them from the list and have the rest chosen by the
professor. That let the staff pick more modern authors, such as Toni
Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Students pursuing an
associate's degree in any subject area must complete at least four
courses in the Great Books to earn a special certificate in the
classics.
Gans has won some important
supporters, including City Colleges Chancellor Wayne Watson, who
recently drafted a letter to City Colleges presidents urging them to
follow Gans' lead.
Still, there are lingering
concerns. Fewer than half of the faculty in the English Department
have agreed to teach the Great Books, along with a smattering of
teachers from the humanities, social sciences and science
departments, Gans said.
Though she was pleased to see
the adjustments to the original proposal, Romell Murden, dean of
student services, is worried that the emphasis on Great Books
authors will be overblown.
"I think balance is
always key," she said. "Do you have to be dead and do you
have to be white and do you have to be male to be called a classic?
It's ridiculous."
On the other hand, some of the
roughly 1,500 students who have taken Wright's Great Books courses
say the race or sex of the authors is inconsequential.
"There's a whole bunch of
issues in the Great Books that really need to be applied to today,
like family, God and citizenship," said Juan Santiago, a
student in Buckley's Shakespeare course. "Even though they were
written by white authors, they still have something to say. I
believe we should not look at the race, but rather the ideas behind
them."
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