Thursday, March 02, 2006
A minor disappointment
A minor disappointment in my life in the past few months has to do with a pitch for an adult education class I made to the adult recreation services last December. I wanted to teach or facilitate a class on the great books. This was something that I have thought about doing for a long time for two reasons: 1) I really miss teaching literature versus composition. This longing had been staunched somewhat last academic year when I was using the textbook Literature For Composition. Unforutnately, this book was not authorized last spring for use by the textbook committee. 2) I really miss working with the intellectual historical tradition.
The adult rec services programmer met with me for an hour to discuss the proposed class, and there was some chance the class would be a go. But they decided not to go with it. This might not be too bad. The money was probably not worth the effort it would take to do the class. Also, I tend to have utopian ideas which once partially realized make me quite depressed about the less than ideal realization of those ideas.
But I thought I'd post the class proposal that I made because it's something I still think about. The good side of this is that I finally put down on paper an idea that I've pondered for a while.
Course Proposal for City of Eugene Adult Recreation Services
David Bockoven
Title: Great Books, Ages 16 & Up
Brief Catalog Description: Participate in the greatest conversation of all time. Throughout the history of Western civilization writers from Plato to Shakespeare to Woolf have raised important ideas that still speak to us today. Through reading and discussion of primary texts participants will gain a better insight into their underlying values. Cost does not include price of primary texts.
Class Format: Six or seven bimonthly (every other week) meetings to discuss books. Somewhere in between academic formality and the looseness of a book discussion group, these discussions would be guided by both a facilitator’s questions and questions brought by participants. (The Great Books Foundation-- http://www.greatbooks.org/typ/indexgb.0.html --describes this format as “shared inquiry.”) Class size is ideally 15-20, but could be a bit higher or lower.
Proposed Books:
[At first meeting, facilitator would provide list of books and where participants might find them. An effort should be made to include books widely and cheaply available.]
Plato, Republic
Augustine, Confessions
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Descartes, Discourse on Method; Montaigne, selected Essais (to be included in a packet of course readings)
American Documents: Declaration of Independence; selected Federalist Papers; American Constitution; Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”; Baldwin, “The American Dream and the American Negro”; many other possibilities that could be included in course packet
Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
My Experience and Interest: I have a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Oregon. I have taught composition and literature classes at the University of Oregon and Linn-Benton Community College for ten years. Ever since I was a teenager I’ve had a strong interest in a wide variety of subjects and the humanities: philosophy, history, literature, comparative religion, economics. Since teaching at a community college, I’ve come to realize the value of interacting with and engaging the ideas of a broad cross-spectrum of the public. As a teacher of composition, I often feel a bit frustrated that I’m not able to expose my students to these sorts of reading materials. I understand my job as not only helping students become better writers, but also more critical thinkers, too. As someone with a day job and an evening teaching class already, I’m not seeking much of a salary, but I would like some remuneration for being the primary organizer and facilitator of such a class. I would definitely want the cost of the class to be as reasonable as possible. (I don’t know what institutional and administrative costs would entail.)
Rationale and Background: The “Great Books” curriculum was developed at Columbia University in the 1920’s and the 1930’s by professors who sought to reform higher education by focusing on a broad western liberal arts tradition rather than on narrow specialization. Along with their agenda for changing higher education came a populist idea of making this tradition available to all adults. In his 1940 How to Read a Book Mortimer Adler claimed that a direct relationship with the Great Books would enable people "to lead the distinctively human life of reason." Through the years there have been changes and expansions to the initial list of 100 core works. (I ran across a website that features a list of many different such lists: http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/greatbks.html#contemp) Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan now includes works from different cultural traditions. It’s important to realize that there’s no such thing as the Tradition, but a set of different traditions. Also, the notion of tradition should not be a static thing. In my opinion anyways, these are books that possess the unique capacity to interrupt our self-assured view of the world by shattering our horizon of the same as they ask us to attend to what is wholly other. Instead of seeing the humanistic tradition(s) as sealed off in the past as sacred (a dusty museum full of dead white men), I understand it as a contemporary force field of open-ended inquiry and on-going questioning.
Other Possible Readings (among many others . . . .):
Homer, Iliad; Odyssey
Selections from The Bible
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Aristotle, selected works
Dante, selections from The Divine Comedy
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality; Social Contract
Kant, Foundations on the Metaphysics of Morals
Marx, selected works
Eliot, Middlemarch
Freud, Interpretation of Dreams
DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Orwell, 1984
Modern Task of the Artist: selections from Shelley, Defense of Poetry; Dickinson, selected poems; Nietzsche, selected aphorisms, “Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense”; Eliot, “Individual Talent and the Tradition”; Kafka, “The Hunger Artist”; Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” “Is Nothing Sacred?”; Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; many other possibilities
(I’ve limited this to the “Western” canon because that is what I have the most experience with, but I also have a strong personal interest in the great classics from other traditions such as China and the Muslim world)
The adult rec services programmer met with me for an hour to discuss the proposed class, and there was some chance the class would be a go. But they decided not to go with it. This might not be too bad. The money was probably not worth the effort it would take to do the class. Also, I tend to have utopian ideas which once partially realized make me quite depressed about the less than ideal realization of those ideas.
But I thought I'd post the class proposal that I made because it's something I still think about. The good side of this is that I finally put down on paper an idea that I've pondered for a while.
Course Proposal for City of Eugene Adult Recreation Services
David Bockoven
Title: Great Books, Ages 16 & Up
Brief Catalog Description: Participate in the greatest conversation of all time. Throughout the history of Western civilization writers from Plato to Shakespeare to Woolf have raised important ideas that still speak to us today. Through reading and discussion of primary texts participants will gain a better insight into their underlying values. Cost does not include price of primary texts.
Class Format: Six or seven bimonthly (every other week) meetings to discuss books. Somewhere in between academic formality and the looseness of a book discussion group, these discussions would be guided by both a facilitator’s questions and questions brought by participants. (The Great Books Foundation-- http://www.greatbooks.org/typ/indexgb.0.html --describes this format as “shared inquiry.”) Class size is ideally 15-20, but could be a bit higher or lower.
Proposed Books:
[At first meeting, facilitator would provide list of books and where participants might find them. An effort should be made to include books widely and cheaply available.]
Plato, Republic
Augustine, Confessions
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Descartes, Discourse on Method; Montaigne, selected Essais (to be included in a packet of course readings)
American Documents: Declaration of Independence; selected Federalist Papers; American Constitution; Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”; Baldwin, “The American Dream and the American Negro”; many other possibilities that could be included in course packet
Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
My Experience and Interest: I have a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Oregon. I have taught composition and literature classes at the University of Oregon and Linn-Benton Community College for ten years. Ever since I was a teenager I’ve had a strong interest in a wide variety of subjects and the humanities: philosophy, history, literature, comparative religion, economics. Since teaching at a community college, I’ve come to realize the value of interacting with and engaging the ideas of a broad cross-spectrum of the public. As a teacher of composition, I often feel a bit frustrated that I’m not able to expose my students to these sorts of reading materials. I understand my job as not only helping students become better writers, but also more critical thinkers, too. As someone with a day job and an evening teaching class already, I’m not seeking much of a salary, but I would like some remuneration for being the primary organizer and facilitator of such a class. I would definitely want the cost of the class to be as reasonable as possible. (I don’t know what institutional and administrative costs would entail.)
Rationale and Background: The “Great Books” curriculum was developed at Columbia University in the 1920’s and the 1930’s by professors who sought to reform higher education by focusing on a broad western liberal arts tradition rather than on narrow specialization. Along with their agenda for changing higher education came a populist idea of making this tradition available to all adults. In his 1940 How to Read a Book Mortimer Adler claimed that a direct relationship with the Great Books would enable people "to lead the distinctively human life of reason." Through the years there have been changes and expansions to the initial list of 100 core works. (I ran across a website that features a list of many different such lists: http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/greatbks.html#contemp) Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan now includes works from different cultural traditions. It’s important to realize that there’s no such thing as the Tradition, but a set of different traditions. Also, the notion of tradition should not be a static thing. In my opinion anyways, these are books that possess the unique capacity to interrupt our self-assured view of the world by shattering our horizon of the same as they ask us to attend to what is wholly other. Instead of seeing the humanistic tradition(s) as sealed off in the past as sacred (a dusty museum full of dead white men), I understand it as a contemporary force field of open-ended inquiry and on-going questioning.
Other Possible Readings (among many others . . . .):
Homer, Iliad; Odyssey
Selections from The Bible
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Aristotle, selected works
Dante, selections from The Divine Comedy
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality; Social Contract
Kant, Foundations on the Metaphysics of Morals
Marx, selected works
Eliot, Middlemarch
Freud, Interpretation of Dreams
DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Orwell, 1984
Modern Task of the Artist: selections from Shelley, Defense of Poetry; Dickinson, selected poems; Nietzsche, selected aphorisms, “Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense”; Eliot, “Individual Talent and the Tradition”; Kafka, “The Hunger Artist”; Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” “Is Nothing Sacred?”; Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; many other possibilities
(I’ve limited this to the “Western” canon because that is what I have the most experience with, but I also have a strong personal interest in the great classics from other traditions such as China and the Muslim world)
