My mother was one of those one million Americans that bought the Great Books (and let me tell you, she had to do without a lot to scrape together the $$$). I wouldn’t have survived my high school years without them; they were my friends. It’s a sad commentary on the postmodern dumbing-down of America (the entire West, for that matter) that no one can talk about the Great Books without putting those infuriating “air quotes” around the word “Great”. The fact is, they are great, and they’ll be great long after “Desperate Housewives” and Eminem (see below) have stopped being the kind of sad, degrading memories that makes you feel just a little bit soiled knowing that you ever devoted a single brain cell to thinking about them. Kant, Hume, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, and even that annoying and consistently wrong Athenian elitist named Plato, whose Great Books volume still has a place of honor on my bookshelf, where I take it down every year or two to write yet another screed attacking yet another aspect of Plato’s wrong-wrong-wronnnnnnggggggg thought. (my personal feeling about Plato is this: if Plato doesn’t infuriate you to the point where you stand up and kick furniture, then you really haven’t understood him …).
http://online.wsj.com/article/…
Molly Rothenberg, a student at St. John’s in Annapolis, Md., told Mr. Beam of comparing notes when she was a sophomore with a fellow graduate of the public high school in Cambridge, Mass. St. John’s sophomores study works by such authors as Aristotle, Tacitus and Shakespeare. Her friend was attending Bates College in Maine. “She told me they were studying Rhetoric,” Ms. Rothenberg said, “and they would be watching episodes of ‘Desperate Housewives’ and listening to Eminem. They were going to analyze it. I just laughed. What could I say?”