WHAT THE FRESHMAN CLASS NEEDS TO READ
It is no small part of a liberal education to show students the broad range of meaningful lives they might aspire to lead.
By Niall Ferguson and Jacob Howland
You’re in. You’ve been admitted. And soon your parents will drop you off at your new university. It’s thrilling. It’s daunting. But what will you actually be studying in your freshman year?
All universities claim to provide some kind of intellectual foundation for their students. Sadly, the reality of what freshmen and sophomores are required to study usually belies the admissions-office propaganda.
In our view, liberal education requires that students, like rowers, face backward in order to move forward. If they are to become active and reflective individuals, they must learn to regard the past not merely as the crime scene of bygone ages, but as the record of human possibilities—an always unfinished tapestry of admirable and shameful lives, noble and base deeds. They must develop an ear for the English language and the language of ancestral wisdom as well as the various languages of intellectual inquiry, including mathematics. They need a good grasp of modern statistical methods. But they must also allow themselves to be inwardly formed and cultivated by the classics—what the English critic Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said.”
A classic is an exemplary instance, a work with imperishable cultural vitality. The Hebrew Bible is a classic, as is Homer’s Iliad. They are taproots of the great branching oak of Western civilization. A liberal education must begin at the beginning, where strange, beguiling voices of the distant past speak with authority of what it means to be human.