Recall the dictum of Rousseau: “It matters little to me…

Recall the dictum of Rousseau: “It matters little to me whether my pupil is intended for the army, the church, or law. Before his parents chose a calling for him, nature called him to be a man…. When he leaves me, he will be neither a magistrate, a soldier, nor a priest; he will be a man.”

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Other Robert Hutchins Quotes

So Bertrand Russell once said to me that the pupil in school should study whatever he liked. I asked whether this was not a crime against the pupil….Should he be allowed to grow up without knowing Shakespeare?…Lord Russell replied that he would require a boy to read one play of Shakespeare; if he did not like it, he should not be compelled to read any more. - View Quote Details on So Bertrand Russell once said to me that the pupil…
In the course of history… new books have been written that have won their place in the list. Books once thought entitled to belong to it have been superseded; and this process of change will continue as long as men can think and write. It is the task of every generation to reassess the tradition in which it lives, to discard what it cannot use, and to bring into context with the distant and intermediate past the most recent contributions to the Great Conversation…. the West needs to recapture and reemphasize and bring to bear upon its present problems the wisdom that lies in the works of its greatest thinkers and in the discussion that they have carried on. - View Quote Details on In the course of history… new books have been written…
If many great books seem unreadable and unintelligible… it may be because we have not for a long time learned to read by reading them. Great books teach people not only how to read them, but how to read all other books. - View Quote Details on If many great books seem unreadable and unintelligible… it may…
The business of saying, in advance of a serious effort, that people are not capable of achieving a good education is too strongly reminiscent of the opposition of every extension of democracy. This opposition has always rested on the allegation that the people were incapable of exercising the power they demanded. Always the historic statement has been verified: you cannot expect the slave to show the virtues of the free man unless you first set him free. When the slave has been set free, he has, in the passage of time, become indistinguishable from those who have always been free. - View Quote Details on The business of saying, in advance of a serious effort,…
The rise of experimental science has not made the Great Conversation irrelevant…. Science itself is part of the Great Conversation. - View Quote Details on The rise of experimental science has not made the Great…
Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was much doubt in anybody’s mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western tradition. - View Quote Details on Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that…
If only the specialist is to be allowed access to these books, on the ground that it is impossible to understand them without “scholarship,”… then we shall be compelled to shut out the majority of mankind from some of the finest creations of the human mind. This is aristocracy with a vengeance. - View Quote Details on If only the specialist is to be allowed access to…
Because of experimental science we know a very large number of things about the natural world of which our predecessors were ignorant. In the great books we can observe the birth of science, applaud the development of the experimental technique, and celebrate the triumphs it has won. But we can also note the limitations of the method and mourn the errors that its misapplication has caused. We can distinguish the outlines of those great persistent problems that the method… may never solve and find the clues to their solutions offered by other methods and other disciplines. - View Quote Details on Because of experimental science we know a very large number…
Only an unashamed dogmatist would dare to assert that the issue has finally been resolved now, in favor of the view that, outside logic or mathematics, the method of modern science is the only method to employ in seeking knowledge. The dogmatist who made this assertion would have to be more than ashamed. He would have to blind himself to the fact that his own assertion was not established by the experimental method, nor made as an indisputable conclusion of mathematical reasoning or of purely logical analysis. - View Quote Details on Only an unashamed dogmatist would dare to assert that the…
…criticisms that I have mentioned come to the same thing: that liberal education is too good for the people. - View Quote Details on …criticisms that I have mentioned come to the same thing:…