Great Books program focus of visiting lecture

Imagine being taught by Plato, Galileo or Shakespeare themselves. The Great Books program allows students to almost do that.

A lecture about the Great Books program, which is currently offered at universities such as Stanford University, St. John’s University and Mercer University in Macon, was held April 14 in the Arts & Sciences Auditorium.

Senior political science major Caroline Rentz invited Mercer professor Dr. Will Jordan, Mercer graduate Nathan Edmondson and GCSU political science professor Dr. Jerry Herbel to provide the lecture on the program.

Rentz is attempting to create actions to implement the Great Books program in GCSU’s curriculum as a part of achieving the capstone of her leadership certification program. Rentz feels that the Great Books program would be beneficial due to her experience with high school and college courses that have had an emphasis on what are considered “great books.”

Within the program, students read specific great books and engage in discussion while a professor designated for the course operates as a discussion facilitator. The classes operate then as a true seminar where the professors are present as supportive tutors to the participating students.

The program can potentially replace a typical core curriculum schedule. As explained by Jordan, the program operates at Mercer in an eight-class schedule taking place over eight semesters and accounting for 24 hours. At Mercer, roughly 30 miles away from GCSU main campus in Milledgeville, 15 percent of the students in the School of Liberal Arts are participating in the Great Books program.

Jordan, a major supporter of the program feels that the program is appropriate for a liberal arts education.

“Liberal teaching is the deliberate and intentional initiation of a pupil onto an inheritance of human intellectual achievement,” Jordan said.

He explained that this intellectual achievement could happen through learning directly from scholars through their works. This includes reading books such as Homer’s “The Iliad “or Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” and having conversation with classmates as well as a knowledgeable professor in an appropriate field whose main purpose in the class is to facilitate learning through the use of the books.

Edmonson, a graduate of the Great Books program from Mercer and a current fiction writer who has recently published his first book about Greek mythology, offered his experience with the Great Books program as helping to encourage and inspire him as a writer.

“You are just encouraged but compelled to talk and to be a teacher yourself,” Edmonson said.

Although the Great Books program appears to have many benefits, it is unlikely that it will be implemented at GCSU any time soon.

“It would be extremely difficult to start up, but it is a fight worth having.” Herbel said. “There is a way to do it if the collective will is strong enough.”

Both professors agreed that including this program as an option in the curriculum would require more faculty as Jordan explained that “it is a worthwhile project, but very hard to sustain.”

Posted by Mandy Boddy on Apr 23 2010. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry