Joseph Shaw reviewed How to Keep From Losing Your Mind, by Deal Hudson, at the Catholic Herald (London).
"In the 1920s, some influential academics were dismayed to find that many graduates of elite American universities were, not to put too fine a point on it, culturally illiterate. They lacked the knowledge that could be taken for granted among cultivated Europeans at the beginnings of their tertiary education, let alone at the end.
"The academics’ natural response was to attempt to address this lack, and so the 'Western Civilisation Course' or 'Great Books Programme' was born...
"Under increasingly intense attack since the student protests of the 1960s, the system finally collapsed for all practical purposes in the 1980s. ...
"Nevertheless, it must be said that the Great Books system disappeared not because of external pressure on institutions, but because students and faculty no longer believed in it. They were no longer convinced of the objective superiority of the works it championed, or its implied story of the universality of human nature, the immediate comprehensibility of art, and human progress. Any attempt to revive a Great Books approach, even if only for private edification, must confront these issues, because the critics had a point. ..."
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