A Summer With Aristotle

From The Wall Street Journal
By Emily Esfahani Smith

On a summer day, inside a Stanford University classroom, a blonde, 12-year old girl rises to confront her professor. “You’re wrong” she cries and storms out in tears. The professor, an ethics teacher at the school, is trying to make the case that it’s morally permissible to kill one innocent life to save five. Still later that night, over dinner, the professor and the girl sit side by side, working out their ethical differences thinker to thinker. The young girl even smiles.

Welcome to book camp. With the close of this summer, the Great Books Summer Program, as it is formally called, will have had its most successful year according to Peter Temes, its academic director. Each summer, students ages 12 to 17 gather against the idyllic backdrop of either Stanford University or Amherst College. They attend lectures, participate in discussions, eat meals, and live together as a community of precocious ­thinkers.

Reading the works of Homer, Virgil, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson and so many others, the students are pushed to grapple with questions that have preoccupied the great thinkers of the past 2,500 years. What is the good life? How should I face injustice? What do I owe my neighbor?

The program started eight years ago with a group of 30 students, many of whom were underprivileged, meeting on weekends. Today, the camp enrolls around 600 students and its overlapping one-, two- and three-week sessions run from late June to the beginning of ­August.

Mr. Temes recalls the inspiration he had to start the great books initiative. “There was a brilliant middle schooler in the South Bronx whose teacher one day said to him, ‘I bet you’re really excited for high school.’ The kid stared back at her blankly and said ‘I don’t think I’ll go.’”

Realizing that there were many young students who shared a love of literature and ideas but lacked the “carrot of college dangling in front of them,” Mr. Temes and several others began the Great Books Summer Program “to give these kids a precollege college experience.”

Unfortunately, a great-books curriculum is in short supply even at many colleges today. But recently a small but vibrant group of important professors have been working to restore the great books’ prominence in a liberal arts education. In the past decade, educators at Princeton, Dartmouth and Brown (to name just three schools) have erected centers specifically designed to give students an education in the fundamental texts of the Western canon. Princeton’s James Madison Program, Brown’s Political Theory Project and Dartmouth’s Daniel Webster Project offer or sponsor classes on Medieval and Renaissance political thought, Civil Liberties, Politics and Religion, and so on.

The mere existence of these programs suggests an important trend in student learning habits. The academic radicalism of recent decades is receding, and students are ready to be serious again. Flaky courses—such as Sociology of Heterosexuality (Yale), Philosophy and Star Trek (Georgetown), or Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism (Mount Holyoke)—no longer interest them. Instead, students from book camp and Princeton are interested in “sitting down with Plato, St. Augustine, and James Madison, to think through the perennial issues of politics and citizenship,” says Robert George, a professor and director of Princeton’s James Madison Program.

Since its birth nine years ago, the James Madison Program has dramatically grown in its offerings and influence on the Princeton campus. That’s only been possible because “students are very interested in learning about founding principles. Our class enrollments are very high,” says Mr. George. “In the Constitutional Interpretation class, which has the reputation of being the hardest non-science class at Princeton, 100 to 125 students are typically enrolled.” To put that in perspective, most classes at Princeton hold fewer than 19 students. The James Madison Program’s numbers, along with the Great Books Summer Program’s, say it all. Students want to learn this stuff.

Still, too many colleges are not meeting that demand. Mr. Temes and Mr. George’s programs are one step in the right direction. But without more efforts like theirs, says Mr. Temes, many students will be condemned to “live in a world created by thinkers they don’t know nor understand.”

Ms. Smith is a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Journal this summer.