John Adam’s once said that “There are two types of education. One
should teach us how to make a living, And the other how to live.” As
a society we have embraced the first type of education. The expansion
of the educational system that occurred with the advent of free and
compulsory education coupled with the American Dream of prosperity had
a lot to do with this. However, during most of civilization’s
existence the second type of education was dominant in academic
institutions. The core curriculum were the great books of Western
civilization. The goal of this type of education was humanistic: to
develop an individual’s potential, to develop minds capable
questioning the structure of the world we live, and to create change
and to lead. Our current educational system is not geared towards
creating leaders because it was designed, during the industrial boom,
to prepare individuals for factory jobs. But we live in times of great
economic change where manufacturing will employ a decreasingly small
portion of our population. Much of our way of life in North America
has been defined by our economics prowess. In fact the middle class
has defined itself for the past century by being the global leader in
prosperity. Now this is changing. The rest of the world is catching up
and for us to move forward we must re-examine the the way we live and
the world we live in or risk becoming identity-less . This is the very
legacy of the great books of Western civilization or what Robert
Maynard Hutchins called The Great Conversation. This was a process
whereby new authors, who had read the classics published before their
time, responded to those ideas by publishing books of their own and
thus perpetuating the conversation through out history. Scientific
knowledge has been a great boon to mankind but it has not and will not
be able to solve all of society’s problems. These problems are part of
the enduring human condition and much knowledge about that is
contained in the classics. Achilles’ self-centered heroism may seem
childish to our modern sensibilities but we have still not conquered
death and our desire to create something that can live on endures to
this day.