{"id":13409,"date":"2024-08-29T11:59:16","date_gmt":"2024-08-29T18:59:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=13409"},"modified":"2024-09-19T12:02:17","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T19:02:17","slug":"read-the-classics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2024\/08\/29\/read-the-classics\/","title":{"rendered":"Read The Classics!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from The Atlantic<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

WHAT THE FRESHMAN CLASS NEEDS TO READ<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

It is no small part of a liberal education to show students the broad range of meaningful lives they might aspire to lead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0Niall Ferguson<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Jacob Howland<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019re in.\u00a0You\u2019ve been admitted. And soon your parents will drop you off at your new university. It\u2019s thrilling. It\u2019s daunting. But what will you actually be studying in your freshman year?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014an 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\u2014what the English critic Matthew Arnold called \u201cthe best which has been thought and said.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A classic is an exemplary instance, a work with imperishable cultural vitality. The Hebrew Bible is a classic, as is Homer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at The Atlantic<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Atlantic 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\u00a0Niall Ferguson\u00a0and\u00a0Jacob Howland You\u2019re in.\u00a0You\u2019ve been admitted. And soon your parents will drop you off at your new university. It\u2019s thrilling. It\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}