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> 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,

> 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....

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....