4 ms·

A former partner of mine was a St. John's alum (and champion), so I heard a lot about and thought a lot about their undergraduate program. Of course this is a

by wk_end 4y ago

A former partner of mine was a St. John's alum (and champion), so I heard a lot about and thought a lot about their undergraduate program. Of course this is a wonderful list of brilliant works. I don't know if reading nothing but primary sources is the most efficient way to become a critical thinker or knowledgeable (e.g. reading Euclid might be a treat for those who know geometry, but is it the ideal way to learn geometry?), but it certainly sounds like a great way to become cultured and a great way to spend four years, given the chance. My feeling was also that such a heavy emphasis on classical (Western!) thought and works does its students a bit of a disservice. This is a little dramatic, but I'd say a very serious view in the postmodern, post-WWII academy is that the culmination of 3000 years of Western culture, in the country that was considered by many to be at the height of Western civilization, turned out to be the Holocaust, and that so deeply fetishizing "the canon" is problematic for that reason and others. Without dismissing the greatness of anything on this list, it's unfortunate that it's not until the third or fourth years that you start to see stuff from outside the European tradition, in very limited numbers, often just as electives. There seems to be a decent selection of works reckoning with American slavery, which is good, but if I recall and AFAICT not much about European colonialism, the Holocaust, CIA-backed coups in South America, the horrors of Stalinism, rising Asian powers, the postmodern condition, any post-sexual revolution gender politics...a robust knowledge of the Greeks is all well and good, but I don't know if that's enough to be a well-rounded citizen of the world, these days.

tgv 4y ago
> a very serious view in the postmodern, post-WWII academy is That's just a load of edgy nonsense to get attention. Unfortunately, it seems to have worked.
- daseiner1 4y ago
  Which part, exactly, is “””edgy”””?
  - tgv 4y ago
    Do I really need to spell it out? Or do you consider it all equally edgy? The obvious candidate is "the culmination of 3000 years of Western culture [is] the Holocaust". Although, I must admit, the weird mixture of other points also makes good candidates. E.g., the relation between education and "CIA-backed coups in South America" is one which seems to spring from a conspiracy theory. And, it completely ignores the achievements of "Western thought", as well as the barbaric actions that have taken place elsewhere, from Turkey to Japan, while simultaneously suggesting their thinkers should be read.
dr_dshiv 4y ago
I really disagree with the implication. It’s not like Hitler or the slavers were well read in their Greek philosophy. Traditionally — and I hope going into the future — the classical works of western civ have been a source of enduring liberalism. They show the value and meaning of freedom — and nuanced, complex, non-black/white thought. But of course I’m biased because I’m deeply immersed in the classics—and I draw from it regularly. I find it troubling that people feel comfortable portraying classical civ as Nazi fodder…
- wk_end 4y ago
  Which "slavers" are you referring to? Almost all of the American Founding Fathers owned slaves, and they were of course very familiar with the tradition of liberal thought. I can't speak for Hitler's knowledge of the Greeks specifically, but he was democratically elected by the nation of Germany, which - like I mentioned - was considered to be one of the most "civilized" in Europe (and thus the world). It's easy enough to draw a line from Hegel or Nietzsche - both on this list - to Nazism, after all. It's even easier to draw a line from Heidegger to Nazism, and he's also on this list.
  - thow4533566 4y ago
    Hitler was only sort of democratically elected. He lost the direct vote for president by a landslide against Hindenburg. Later, his party became the largest in parliament though without a majority (37%). He was only made chancellor after another election were his party lost ground (33%), through a backroom deal. Hitler's highest formal education was finishing secondary school.
    - neaden 4y ago
      That is just how elections work in a parliamentary system though, it's not unusual to have a ruling party without a majority of the vote.
      - thow4533566 4y ago
skottk 4y ago
The greatest weakness of the school is that the list of works was compiled in 1922 and has changed only incrementally since. It's also a great _strength_ of the school, but you could enter the world in 1988 from SJC knowing absolutely nothing about it. I'm sure that that's still true now.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  And, for all the talk of timelessness, the list was already quite reactionary in 1922. Vaguely Amish, in some sense, tbh. I do really like the pedagogical approach. I just wish that approach to learning and teaching could move on from a very particular cultural moment in pre-war Britain/America. All those crusty Oxbridge guys who had Strong Feelings about reading tons of Euclid were reacting to their own cultural moments and have now been dead for half a century :)
drstewart 4y ago
> There seems to be a decent selection of works reckoning with American slavery, which is good, but if I recall and AFAICT not much about European colonialism, the Holocaust, CIA-backed coups in South America, the horrors of Stalinism, rising Asian powers, the postmodern condition, any post-sexual revolution gender politics Not much about Japanese horrors in WWII, Chinese imperialism, Mongol raids, African-originated slave traders, African tribal genocides, machismo anti-homosexual Latino culture either. Just seems you forgot to mention these for some reason. Maybe because the culmination of 3000 years of Asian, Africa, and South American history isn't utopia either?
- wk_end 4y ago
  I certainly wouldn't imply that it is! I think the read that you and some others are getting out of my post is that "the Western tradition is bad", which wasn't the intention - I repeatedly praised the works, after all! And to be fair there's lots of outspoken, stupid voices in the so-called culture wars that do say things like that, so I see why you might've made the assumption. The point I was trying to make is that - contra to many prevailing modernist attitudes at the time - is that the Western tradition alone won't lead us to utopia, shield us from atrocities, make us enlightened and peaceful, bring us to The Blissful End of History. This is not to say that the Western tradition is bad; it's to say that it's still a work-in-progress, a thing to be interrogated and questioned, something we can look outside of; not a calcified list of hundreds-of-years-old Great Works which, upon reading, will automatically confer greatness.
a_techwriter_00 4y ago
You're right, that view is "a little" dramatic. The Holocaust proposition was maybe more defensible 20 years ago when we could still look at Third World with rose-colored glasses. Nowadays, I think if someone argues along the lines of "3,000 years of Western culture culminated in the Holocaust," they should also consider that the same logic leads to "5,000 years of Chinese culture culminated in the ongoing genocides in Xinjiang and Tibet" or "1,400 years of Muslim culture culminated in 9/11" or any number of other such propositions that I think most thinking people can see are problematic. Those things happen in spite of, not because of, the broader cultural/intellectual canons.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  The notion that there exist, to any meaningful degree, philosophies or cultures that will not produce atrocities on a pretty regular schedule, is something a decent education ought to rid one of. Nazi Germany is what made it clear European civilization could incubate monsters? Absurd. Europe's entire history is one of atrocities. Hitler just applied what everyone else had been doing to Africa, to Europe—where and to whom it happened was the shock, not the dehumanization and mass murder and wanton destruction and boundless greed itself. Look elsewhere and you'll find the same—the powerless, and the abusers. Even the friggin' Buddhists were loan-sharks and remorseless murderers, from time to time, and educated plenty of brutal heads of state. That's not enough to indict a vast millennia-long philosophical, cultural, and intellectual tradition—it's the fucking human condition. People've stacked high the skulls of The Other since before civilization. One might hope civilization counters that—and there's strong evidence it does—but we've been at this civilization thing for like 10,000+ years and haven't figure out how to get rid of it yet. That's not Western Civ's fault, it's just... us. Humans.
  - wk_end 4y ago
    > The notion that there exist, to any meaningful degree, philosophies or cultures that will not produce atrocities on a pretty regular schedule, is something a decent education ought to rid one of. This is precisely what I'm saying, though. It was a predominant mood in the pre-war time that European society was enlightened and modern and superior to all others, and that this was a consequence of a Great History of Ideas starting from The Bible and Plato, finally coming to fruition in the then-present. It's absurd to believe these things about European civilization - or any known civilization! - but that's what people did. I think it's clear by all the times I praised this "wonderful list of brilliant works", calling it "a great way to become cultured and a great way to spend four years", that I'm not trying to "indict" the Western tradition. There's a vast gulf between arguing that "deeply fetishizing [it] is problematic" and condemning it outright.
yamtaddle 4y ago
> There seems to be a decent selection of works reckoning with American slavery, which is good, but if I recall and AFAICT not much about European colonialism, the Holocaust, CIA-backed coups in South America, the horrors of Stalinism, rising Asian powers, the postmodern condition, any post-sexual revolution gender politics...a robust knowledge of the Greeks is all well and good, but I don't know if that's enough to be a well-rounded citizen of the world, these days. Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, most college grads (let alone non-grads) from traditional programs that weren't poli-sci or philosophy would receive a better "citizen of the world" education from reading and understanding the first couple books of The Republic than they evidently picked up in 17 or more damn years of formal schooling. They could literally exceed all that education in a lazy Sunday afternoon, because despite all those years they somehow failed to appreciate what the questions even are and that those questions aren't as easy to dismiss as many pop-understandings and pop-philosophies suggest, so they end up with these embarrassingly-bad ideas about it (and are often weirdly confident that they know it all!). They're in exactly the same position as the targets of Socrates' "what is justice, actually?" question at the very damn beginning of the book, thinking they have a simple answer for the question and that their answer's more-or-less adequate. That's how far all that education got them. No-where, in other words.
- leephillips 4y ago
  I was about to say something along the lines you did. The idea behind a curriculum like this is that, after studying the Greeks, you will be far better equipped to grapple with something like “post-sexual revolution gender politics” than a graduate of a more mainstream school who majored in gender studies or something. The problems never change, only the labels we attach to them. The thing is to know how to think and how to talk.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Right, it's about foundational concepts and frameworks. Sure you can jump to Rawls (not that the folks who've been arrested so far back that a skim of a few pages of Plato would be enlightening are likely to have done that, either) but you'll miss a bunch and won't wrestle with him as well, if you do. You can always read him, and de Beauvoir, and et c., et c., later—and you'll be so much better equipped to read them if you've got a half-decent foundation in the basics, in the very language and idiom, of intellectual Western (at least) writing—of how to read, how to really read—first. There's nothing stopping you from digging deep into modern social justice or anti-colonialism or whatever after you graduate—and I'd wager St. John's grads are more likely to do exactly that, and to do so more profitably, than most. Anyway, it's not as if either of those began in the 20th century....

by wk_end 4y ago

tgv 4y ago

> a very serious view in the postmodern, post-WWII academy is That's just a load of edgy nonsense to get attention. Unfortunately, it seems to have worked.

daseiner1 4y ago
Which part, exactly, is “””edgy”””?
- tgv 4y ago
  Do I really need to spell it out? Or do you consider it all equally edgy? The obvious candidate is "the culmination of 3000 years of Western culture [is] the Holocaust". Although, I must admit, the weird mixture of other points also makes good candidates. E.g., the relation between education and "CIA-backed coups in South America" is one which seems to spring from a conspiracy theory. And, it completely ignores the achievements of "Western thought", as well as the barbaric actions that have taken place elsewhere, from Turkey to Japan, while simultaneously suggesting their thinkers should be read.

dr_dshiv 4y ago

I really disagree with the implication. It’s not like Hitler or the slavers were well read in their Greek philosophy. Traditionally — and I hope going into the future — the classical works of western civ have been a source of enduring liberalism. They show the value and meaning of freedom — and nuanced, complex, non-black/white thought. But of course I’m biased because I’m deeply immersed in the classics—and I draw from it regularly. I find it troubling that people feel comfortable portraying classical civ as Nazi fodder…

wk_end 4y ago
Which "slavers" are you referring to? Almost all of the American Founding Fathers owned slaves, and they were of course very familiar with the tradition of liberal thought. I can't speak for Hitler's knowledge of the Greeks specifically, but he was democratically elected by the nation of Germany, which - like I mentioned - was considered to be one of the most "civilized" in Europe (and thus the world). It's easy enough to draw a line from Hegel or Nietzsche - both on this list - to Nazism, after all. It's even easier to draw a line from Heidegger to Nazism, and he's also on this list.
- thow4533566 4y ago
  Hitler was only sort of democratically elected. He lost the direct vote for president by a landslide against Hindenburg. Later, his party became the largest in parliament though without a majority (37%). He was only made chancellor after another election were his party lost ground (33%), through a backroom deal. Hitler's highest formal education was finishing secondary school.
  - neaden 4y ago
    That is just how elections work in a parliamentary system though, it's not unusual to have a ruling party without a majority of the vote.
    - thow4533566 4y ago

skottk 4y ago

The greatest weakness of the school is that the list of works was compiled in 1922 and has changed only incrementally since. It's also a great _strength_ of the school, but you could enter the world in 1988 from SJC knowing absolutely nothing about it. I'm sure that that's still true now.

thwayunion 4y ago
And, for all the talk of timelessness, the list was already quite reactionary in 1922. Vaguely Amish, in some sense, tbh. I do really like the pedagogical approach. I just wish that approach to learning and teaching could move on from a very particular cultural moment in pre-war Britain/America. All those crusty Oxbridge guys who had Strong Feelings about reading tons of Euclid were reacting to their own cultural moments and have now been dead for half a century :)

drstewart 4y ago

wk_end 4y ago
I certainly wouldn't imply that it is! I think the read that you and some others are getting out of my post is that "the Western tradition is bad", which wasn't the intention - I repeatedly praised the works, after all! And to be fair there's lots of outspoken, stupid voices in the so-called culture wars that do say things like that, so I see why you might've made the assumption. The point I was trying to make is that - contra to many prevailing modernist attitudes at the time - is that the Western tradition alone won't lead us to utopia, shield us from atrocities, make us enlightened and peaceful, bring us to The Blissful End of History. This is not to say that the Western tradition is bad; it's to say that it's still a work-in-progress, a thing to be interrogated and questioned, something we can look outside of; not a calcified list of hundreds-of-years-old Great Works which, upon reading, will automatically confer greatness.

a_techwriter_00 4y ago

You're right, that view is "a little" dramatic. The Holocaust proposition was maybe more defensible 20 years ago when we could still look at Third World with rose-colored glasses. Nowadays, I think if someone argues along the lines of "3,000 years of Western culture culminated in the Holocaust," they should also consider that the same logic leads to "5,000 years of Chinese culture culminated in the ongoing genocides in Xinjiang and Tibet" or "1,400 years of Muslim culture culminated in 9/11" or any number of other such propositions that I think most thinking people can see are problematic. Those things happen in spite of, not because of, the broader cultural/intellectual canons.

yamtaddle 4y ago
The notion that there exist, to any meaningful degree, philosophies or cultures that will not produce atrocities on a pretty regular schedule, is something a decent education ought to rid one of. Nazi Germany is what made it clear European civilization could incubate monsters? Absurd. Europe's entire history is one of atrocities. Hitler just applied what everyone else had been doing to Africa, to Europe—where and to whom it happened was the shock, not the dehumanization and mass murder and wanton destruction and boundless greed itself. Look elsewhere and you'll find the same—the powerless, and the abusers. Even the friggin' Buddhists were loan-sharks and remorseless murderers, from time to time, and educated plenty of brutal heads of state. That's not enough to indict a vast millennia-long philosophical, cultural, and intellectual tradition—it's the fucking human condition. People've stacked high the skulls of The Other since before civilization. One might hope civilization counters that—and there's strong evidence it does—but we've been at this civilization thing for like 10,000+ years and haven't figure out how to get rid of it yet. That's not Western Civ's fault, it's just... us. Humans.
- wk_end 4y ago
  > The notion that there exist, to any meaningful degree, philosophies or cultures that will not produce atrocities on a pretty regular schedule, is something a decent education ought to rid one of. This is precisely what I'm saying, though. It was a predominant mood in the pre-war time that European society was enlightened and modern and superior to all others, and that this was a consequence of a Great History of Ideas starting from The Bible and Plato, finally coming to fruition in the then-present. It's absurd to believe these things about European civilization - or any known civilization! - but that's what people did. I think it's clear by all the times I praised this "wonderful list of brilliant works", calling it "a great way to become cultured and a great way to spend four years", that I'm not trying to "indict" the Western tradition. There's a vast gulf between arguing that "deeply fetishizing [it] is problematic" and condemning it outright.

yamtaddle 4y ago

> There seems to be a decent selection of works reckoning with American slavery, which is good, but if I recall and AFAICT not much about European colonialism, the Holocaust, CIA-backed coups in South America, the horrors of Stalinism, rising Asian powers, the postmodern condition, any post-sexual revolution gender politics...a robust knowledge of the Greeks is all well and good, but I don't know if that's enough to be a well-rounded citizen of the world, these days. Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, most college grads (let alone non-grads) from traditional programs that weren't poli-sci or philosophy would receive a better "citizen of the world" education from reading and understanding the first couple books of The Republic than they evidently picked up in 17 or more damn years of formal schooling. They could literally exceed all that education in a lazy Sunday afternoon, because despite all those years they somehow failed to appreciate what the questions even are and that those questions aren't as easy to dismiss as many pop-understandings and pop-philosophies suggest, so they end up with these embarrassingly-bad ideas about it (and are often weirdly confident that they know it all!). They're in exactly the same position as the targets of Socrates' "what is justice, actually?" question at the very damn beginning of the book, thinking they have a simple answer for the question and that their answer's more-or-less adequate. That's how far all that education got them. No-where, in other words.

leephillips 4y ago
I was about to say something along the lines you did. The idea behind a curriculum like this is that, after studying the Greeks, you will be far better equipped to grapple with something like “post-sexual revolution gender politics” than a graduate of a more mainstream school who majored in gender studies or something. The problems never change, only the labels we attach to them. The thing is to know how to think and how to talk.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Right, it's about foundational concepts and frameworks. Sure you can jump to Rawls (not that the folks who've been arrested so far back that a skim of a few pages of Plato would be enlightening are likely to have done that, either) but you'll miss a bunch and won't wrestle with him as well, if you do. You can always read him, and de Beauvoir, and et c., et c., later—and you'll be so much better equipped to read them if you've got a half-decent foundation in the basics, in the very language and idiom, of intellectual Western (at least) writing—of how to read, how to really read—first. There's nothing stopping you from digging deep into modern social justice or anti-colonialism or whatever after you graduate—and I'd wager St. John's grads are more likely to do exactly that, and to do so more profitably, than most. Anyway, it's not as if either of those began in the 20th century....