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Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation
A Dominican-born academic tells the story of how the Great Books transformed his life―and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds
What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates , Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities.
Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum, one of America’s last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career―he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college.
Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes how four authors―Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi―had a profound impact on Montás’s life. In doing so, the book drives home what it’s like to experience a liberal education―and why it can still remake lives.
What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates , Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities.
Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum, one of America’s last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career―he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college.
Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes how four authors―Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi―had a profound impact on Montás’s life. In doing so, the book drives home what it’s like to experience a liberal education―and why it can still remake lives.
248 pages, Paperback
First published November 2, 2021
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January 16, 2024
Rescuing Socrates- Roosevelt Montás makes a deeply moving appeal for liberal education, that is, for the great ancient and modern classics within the Western tradition to be part of a college curriculum. The author draws on his own experience as a lad who came from the Dominican Republic to New York City and eventually earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at Columbia University.
Roosevelt Montás has been an instructor in Columbia's Core Curriculum (Great Books Program) and describes how the Great Books changed his own life and can transform the lives of students, particularly students from lower income families and historically marginalized communities.
The author capsulizes his approach for the book as follows:“Rather than offer a battery of arguments, I try to bring the reader closer to the experience of liberal education through encounters with some of the human questions that lie at its heart.” And four authors serve as focus: Augustine, Plato, Freud and Gandhi.
For a more direct flavor of this provocative work published by Princeton University Press, I'll couple my comments with Roosevelt Montás' actual words -
“As a college freshman, my own religious experiences gave me an advantage, an entry point, into Augustine that others did not have. The power of his mind, the beauty of his language, and the depth of insight that pervades his writing captivated me.”
Roosevelt shares his background as a Christian in an austere Pentecostal religion from the Dominican Republic and how his faith shifted thanks to a warmhearted, charismatic leader who presented a vision of faith compatible with reason. So when he first encountered Augustine, he has a fund of direct experience that he could relate to the great thinker's philosophy.
“According to Socrates, the philosophical life is inseparable from this activity of self-scrutiny and involves open-ended and in-depth conversations with others. And this isn't just an activity for professional philosophers but the most important endeavor in any human life.”
One critical component in approaching a subject such as philosophy: inspiration. Roosevelt relates his own enthusiasm in discovering and reading the dialogues of Plato, especially the trial, imprisonment and death of Socrates (Apology, Crito, and Phaedo). As he comes to appreciate year after year after year, one of the wonderful things about teaching these Socratic dialogues is witnessing students undergo a kind of inner awakening. Reading this section of Roosevelt's book is a treat – anyone who imagines philosophy as a dry, turgid plodding through a tangle of logic will be pleasantly surprised and might even be inspired to launch their own exploration of Plato.
“In Freud's understanding, the mind is driven, and the conscious “I” is not the driver....According to Freud, unconscious material breaks through into the open on a regular basis, but always disguised and unrecognizable to the conscious mind for what it really is.”
In addition to his having carefully read many works by Sigmund Freud, Roosevelt has had his own personal experience in psychoanalysis. This first-hand acquaintance enriches the author's observations on various aspects of Freud's writings, such things as hysteria and dreams.
“Personally, Gandhi reawakened a deep sense of spirituality for me. Around the time I started reading him, I took up the practice of meditation and a meandering, unmethodical, but sustained exploration of Buddhism.”
In this section on Gandhi, the author underscores his view on the Columbia Core Curriculum regarding an important point: in today's global world, the Western tradition is essential but not sufficient - a student is well to have an acquaintance with authors and works from other traditions.
Time to tackle a tough subject head on. As Roosevelt says, “Liberal education has always been a hard sell.” Zeroing in on the US, here's the way things stand:
Money – College education nowadays costs a small fortune. Many students put themselves in serious debt, $30,000, $60,000, $100,000 or more for a college degree. Upon graduation, time to pay off those loans. Fortunate are those students with a degree in such things as engineering or accounting where they stand a chance to gain employment earning a decent salary. Reading the classics will undoubtedly contribute to broadening one's horizons and empower an individual to better contribute as a citizen but it doesn't easily translate into a paycheck.
Education for the Wealthy – Studying Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne and Tolstoy can be seen as elitist, what was once termed a “gentleman's education.” However, as Roosevelt explains, “One of the dangers facing American higher education – and American civic culture in general – is a return to a time when liberal education was the exclusive province of a social elite."
Fox Nation – It's 2021 and a huge percentage of the US population is aligned with the right wing. A liberal education in philosophy, literature and the arts is seen as the enemy. People in Fox Nation don't read books – they watch Fox. Can you imagine Joe Buck talking about Seneca or James Joyce?
Sports – I'm all for playing sports as a recreation but sports, especially professional sports, in the US has become an unhealthy obsession. If an entire population, including college students, can think of nothing but sports, what room is left for philosophic inquiry?
Internet as a Resource – To conclude on an optimistic note: Today, for those wishing to engage with the Great Books, many courses, lectures, podcasts and websites are available either free-of-charge or for a nominal fee: Coursera, The Great Courses, Peter Adamson's Philosophy Without Any Gaps, the list goes on. If someone wants to pursue a liberal education in our internet age, access to outstanding teachers, scholars and fellow students is only clicks away.
I'll let Roosevelt Montás have the last word. “The corona virus pandemic has exposed the depth of social inequality in America and may give our generation the necessary spur to address it. Making liberal education available and accessible to all students is the most important contribution that higher education can make to this effort.”
Roosevelt Montás, Philosopher, Academic Administrator and Teacher currently at Columbia University
January 19, 2022
Roosevelt Montas sets out to make the claim here that colleges should offer a liberal education, liberal in the sense that it explores what we might, in shorthand, call “truth” rather than push toward a vocational application.
As for that, I’m all in.
But Montas comes at this from a particular orientation. He was the director of Columbia University’s Core Curriculum, meaning that he helped oversee the Great Books program. As a Columbia grad myself (Masters in English, 1989 – six years before Montas himself started there) I have a feel for what it is he’s defending, and I have my reservations.
Montas’s method here is to explain what he sees of value in four of the thinkers from the core – St. Augustine, Socrates, Freud, and Gandhi – and to weave his academic insights into a memoir about how he, an immigrant from a Dominican family without a tradition of higher education, came to feel a part of the full-blown Western tradition.
With apologies, I don’t find Montas much of a memoirist. I teach memoir, and I value it above all for the dimension that Montas prizes in the thinkers he examines: memoir is about probing after the truth of the self, about being willing to push through the comforting stories we tell about ourselves into what I like to call “the dark side.” Montaigne called it asking oneself, “What do I already know” and, implicitly, he meant “that I am not fully admitting to myself.”
In his memoir sections, Montas puts his experience in the service of his argument. There’s a finished quality to what he’s been through, whether it’s being brought to the U.S. as a bewildered child, embracing an evangelical call, or divorcing his wife of 11 years, that suggests he’s not prepared to share the work of his insights about himself. I don’t mean that he hasn’t earned those insights; I’m sure he has. I just mean that he did the work before he started this book, and he leans on it. That, to me, is less memoir, less the process of self-discovery, than it is reporting. Some may find it compelling, but I find it distracting.
So, the focus for me here is the argument that he’s making. And, as I say, I accept his fundamental notion that we should push toward a values-based education. There’s a lot to that, though, and I don’t go at all as far as he does.
As much as Montas makes a strong case for teaching these four thinkers from their own words – again, something I fully endorse – he also sets out to critique what he sees as its antithesis. That is, he makes the case he does because he sees contemporary college/university education as governed by a postmodern ethos of relative truths.
For much of this book, I was frustrated by the fact that he seems to be justifying these classical texts (though I’m not sure – and I say this admiringly – how “classical” Freud and Gandhi are) on the grounds that they have value for helping student readers come to a sense of self-knowledge. All that’s great, but it doesn’t justify why it has to be these particular texts.
Toward the end of this, in his brief “Nuts and Bolts” epilogue, he begins to answer that concern. As he tells us in an almost aside, the Western focus of the Core matters because “the Core is a genealogy of the present.” I have to yawn a little because that sounds an awful lot like the argument of Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind. (And Bloom, of course, was echoing Leo Strauss whom Montas quotes admiringly in the same section.) As far as I’m concerned, Bloom lost that argument convincingly. Yes, the thinkers he cites were consequential, but they stood in conversation with other less august, less Western thinkers. If you want to understand the contemporary American mind, you’d better have some sense of, say, Louis Armstrong and the ambitious re-thinking of rhythm. If you don’t want it to be Armstrong, fine – look for (or listen to) others who have picked up on that challenge and created a soundtrack that is distinctly American, and generally African-American.
Montas isn’t quite as assertive about Western primacy as Bloom – in fact, in those closing pages he surprises me with the claim that there’s now a “Global Core” that seeks to introduce students to those other voices – but he’s ultimately playing the same game more softly. We are supposed to prize these texts, which do a magnificent job of helping students toward self-knowledge, over others which also do so because, well, these are the roots of Western thought. They matter because they have mattered…and incidentally because they remain great learning and teaching experiences. I like the idea that the Core should be under perpetual revision; I just wish that insight were hard-wired into the larger claim here – but that would mean a more expansive argument and less of an orthodox call for teaching texts because, implicitly, they’re the texts that were taught to us.
But the real concern I have with Montas’s argument is that he creates what I see as a false dichotomy. For him, these texts represent truth as against what he calls postmodernism – a mode of thought ushered in by Nietzsche, “Satan’s most acute theologian.” He reads postmodernism as claiming that there can be no fundamental truth, that everything is subjective.
That is, of course, a more than reasonable way to read it. In its application in the contemporary academy, though, it isn’t the way it’s universally received. Gayatria Spivak must have seen it as such – and he notes her as a mentor who helped him get into grad school even if she couldn’t get the $30k tuition waived – but most of us who have been ‘tainted’ by postmodernism do not.
Instead, and I think I speak for a general consensus of academics of my own age, postmodernism in small doses is a healthy reminder that we depend upon undependable language (and other signifiers) for certainty. That’s a little like designing buildings on the premise that the world is flat. From space, of course, the world is spherical; for the expanse of even the largest buildings, though, we experience it as flat. I had my share of deconstruction and high-church postmodernism in my own time at Columbia – and I rejected it before I could articulate why – but I think Montas does a real disservice to his argument and to this cause by rejecting it as simply Satanic.
Postmodernism can remind us that no truth can crowd out all others. Instead, in the very spirit of self-knowledge that Socrates proposed and that Montas celebrates, it invites us to look to the self to hear a voice we recognize as truthful.
I have felt that way, more or less, for the last three decades, but I have found congenial language for it in my experience teaching at a Jesuit school. To paraphrase Ignatius of Loyola, the truths of Discernment (of the self) will resonate with the truths of revelation. As a Jew, I don’t accept the full truth of the revelations that he took for axiom, but I do admire – and teach in the tradition of – his method. We tell students that they will find truth through self-exploration but that that’s only half the work. The larger work is to find how those truths harmonize with the truths that the wider world offers.
Montas asserts that an education founded on the squishy bedrock (my own poor paraphrasing metaphor) of relativism can never offer the guidance of one that’s founded on capital-t Truth.
I argue otherwise. Asserting something as True always comes with a price. It casts a necessary shadow of doubt, one that too many students learn to fear and look away from. Many of the best students I know, certainly most of the bravest, recognize that assertion as a challenge. Tell them something is irrefutably true, and they will hear it as a challenge to doubt. As educators, I hope we can embrace that impulse; I hope, in fact, we can recognize that it’s part of what Socrates himself challenged us to do. It’s an effort to find the truth – and then it’s further effort to find ever-fresh ways to articulate it in an ever-changing world.
So, I’m with Montas as far as he goes in asserting that we should expose students to – as he quotes Matthew Arnold – some of the best that has ever been thought. I’m not with him in thinking that so much a preponderance of that thought comes as part of a clear genealogy of ideas carried over from the classical era. Teach the Socratic dialogues, please do, but teach Toni Morrison as well. Be open to discovering that some of the people writing today (or at least in the last couple of decades) can articulate truths that get to students in fresh and newly imagined ways.
I believe in a liberal education as fully as Montas does. As well as he occasionally makes his case, I think he trips into occasional illiberal notions, closing his mind to some of the voices that make his case for self-knowledge in a vernacular that will work (especially in concert with the classics of the core) all the better for many of the students he wants to reach.
As for that, I’m all in.
But Montas comes at this from a particular orientation. He was the director of Columbia University’s Core Curriculum, meaning that he helped oversee the Great Books program. As a Columbia grad myself (Masters in English, 1989 – six years before Montas himself started there) I have a feel for what it is he’s defending, and I have my reservations.
Montas’s method here is to explain what he sees of value in four of the thinkers from the core – St. Augustine, Socrates, Freud, and Gandhi – and to weave his academic insights into a memoir about how he, an immigrant from a Dominican family without a tradition of higher education, came to feel a part of the full-blown Western tradition.
With apologies, I don’t find Montas much of a memoirist. I teach memoir, and I value it above all for the dimension that Montas prizes in the thinkers he examines: memoir is about probing after the truth of the self, about being willing to push through the comforting stories we tell about ourselves into what I like to call “the dark side.” Montaigne called it asking oneself, “What do I already know” and, implicitly, he meant “that I am not fully admitting to myself.”
In his memoir sections, Montas puts his experience in the service of his argument. There’s a finished quality to what he’s been through, whether it’s being brought to the U.S. as a bewildered child, embracing an evangelical call, or divorcing his wife of 11 years, that suggests he’s not prepared to share the work of his insights about himself. I don’t mean that he hasn’t earned those insights; I’m sure he has. I just mean that he did the work before he started this book, and he leans on it. That, to me, is less memoir, less the process of self-discovery, than it is reporting. Some may find it compelling, but I find it distracting.
So, the focus for me here is the argument that he’s making. And, as I say, I accept his fundamental notion that we should push toward a values-based education. There’s a lot to that, though, and I don’t go at all as far as he does.
As much as Montas makes a strong case for teaching these four thinkers from their own words – again, something I fully endorse – he also sets out to critique what he sees as its antithesis. That is, he makes the case he does because he sees contemporary college/university education as governed by a postmodern ethos of relative truths.
For much of this book, I was frustrated by the fact that he seems to be justifying these classical texts (though I’m not sure – and I say this admiringly – how “classical” Freud and Gandhi are) on the grounds that they have value for helping student readers come to a sense of self-knowledge. All that’s great, but it doesn’t justify why it has to be these particular texts.
Toward the end of this, in his brief “Nuts and Bolts” epilogue, he begins to answer that concern. As he tells us in an almost aside, the Western focus of the Core matters because “the Core is a genealogy of the present.” I have to yawn a little because that sounds an awful lot like the argument of Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind. (And Bloom, of course, was echoing Leo Strauss whom Montas quotes admiringly in the same section.) As far as I’m concerned, Bloom lost that argument convincingly. Yes, the thinkers he cites were consequential, but they stood in conversation with other less august, less Western thinkers. If you want to understand the contemporary American mind, you’d better have some sense of, say, Louis Armstrong and the ambitious re-thinking of rhythm. If you don’t want it to be Armstrong, fine – look for (or listen to) others who have picked up on that challenge and created a soundtrack that is distinctly American, and generally African-American.
Montas isn’t quite as assertive about Western primacy as Bloom – in fact, in those closing pages he surprises me with the claim that there’s now a “Global Core” that seeks to introduce students to those other voices – but he’s ultimately playing the same game more softly. We are supposed to prize these texts, which do a magnificent job of helping students toward self-knowledge, over others which also do so because, well, these are the roots of Western thought. They matter because they have mattered…and incidentally because they remain great learning and teaching experiences. I like the idea that the Core should be under perpetual revision; I just wish that insight were hard-wired into the larger claim here – but that would mean a more expansive argument and less of an orthodox call for teaching texts because, implicitly, they’re the texts that were taught to us.
But the real concern I have with Montas’s argument is that he creates what I see as a false dichotomy. For him, these texts represent truth as against what he calls postmodernism – a mode of thought ushered in by Nietzsche, “Satan’s most acute theologian.” He reads postmodernism as claiming that there can be no fundamental truth, that everything is subjective.
That is, of course, a more than reasonable way to read it. In its application in the contemporary academy, though, it isn’t the way it’s universally received. Gayatria Spivak must have seen it as such – and he notes her as a mentor who helped him get into grad school even if she couldn’t get the $30k tuition waived – but most of us who have been ‘tainted’ by postmodernism do not.
Instead, and I think I speak for a general consensus of academics of my own age, postmodernism in small doses is a healthy reminder that we depend upon undependable language (and other signifiers) for certainty. That’s a little like designing buildings on the premise that the world is flat. From space, of course, the world is spherical; for the expanse of even the largest buildings, though, we experience it as flat. I had my share of deconstruction and high-church postmodernism in my own time at Columbia – and I rejected it before I could articulate why – but I think Montas does a real disservice to his argument and to this cause by rejecting it as simply Satanic.
Postmodernism can remind us that no truth can crowd out all others. Instead, in the very spirit of self-knowledge that Socrates proposed and that Montas celebrates, it invites us to look to the self to hear a voice we recognize as truthful.
I have felt that way, more or less, for the last three decades, but I have found congenial language for it in my experience teaching at a Jesuit school. To paraphrase Ignatius of Loyola, the truths of Discernment (of the self) will resonate with the truths of revelation. As a Jew, I don’t accept the full truth of the revelations that he took for axiom, but I do admire – and teach in the tradition of – his method. We tell students that they will find truth through self-exploration but that that’s only half the work. The larger work is to find how those truths harmonize with the truths that the wider world offers.
Montas asserts that an education founded on the squishy bedrock (my own poor paraphrasing metaphor) of relativism can never offer the guidance of one that’s founded on capital-t Truth.
I argue otherwise. Asserting something as True always comes with a price. It casts a necessary shadow of doubt, one that too many students learn to fear and look away from. Many of the best students I know, certainly most of the bravest, recognize that assertion as a challenge. Tell them something is irrefutably true, and they will hear it as a challenge to doubt. As educators, I hope we can embrace that impulse; I hope, in fact, we can recognize that it’s part of what Socrates himself challenged us to do. It’s an effort to find the truth – and then it’s further effort to find ever-fresh ways to articulate it in an ever-changing world.
So, I’m with Montas as far as he goes in asserting that we should expose students to – as he quotes Matthew Arnold – some of the best that has ever been thought. I’m not with him in thinking that so much a preponderance of that thought comes as part of a clear genealogy of ideas carried over from the classical era. Teach the Socratic dialogues, please do, but teach Toni Morrison as well. Be open to discovering that some of the people writing today (or at least in the last couple of decades) can articulate truths that get to students in fresh and newly imagined ways.
I believe in a liberal education as fully as Montas does. As well as he occasionally makes his case, I think he trips into occasional illiberal notions, closing his mind to some of the voices that make his case for self-knowledge in a vernacular that will work (especially in concert with the classics of the core) all the better for many of the students he wants to reach.
Read
December 12, 2021Every summer, Professor Montas takes in a class of low income, disadvantaged high school students and introduces them to a selection of the Great Books. The transformation these students undergo in the classroom is remarkable: in between discussing the foundations of Western philosophy and political economy, these students gain the confidence to know that they are citizens in a world where they have agency.
Montas offers his own life as a similar, seemingly improbable journey from the Dominican Republic to chairing Columbia's infamous Core Curriculum. In an academic atmosphere where it has become unfashionable to believe in any absolute notion of Truth or Virtue worth striving for, Montas mounts a passionate, nuanced defense of the liberal education and the epistemology that justifies any Great Books curriculum.
In Montas' view, liberal education is about learning how to make a life, not just how to make a living. Only against a socioeconomic backdrop of precarity and imperiled liberal democratic order has the latter question taken precedence over the former's spiritual pursuit. Instead, Montas argues that a liberal education should be a prerequisite to rather than a utilitarian alternative to a practical education, available to all.
Rescuing Socrates articulates an earnest argument against many of the common criticisms of courses like the Core Curriculum, highlighting the universality that often-criticized Eurocentric texts can offer to an immigrant youth who did not speak a word English arriving from the DR, and their value in understanding the power structures of a world undeniably shaped by Western thought.
From the beginning, the liberal arts have been a matter of freedom. In the polis of Athens, education aimed to prepare the free men of Athenian society to participate as citizens and grapple with the issues of society. Today, the importance of an accessible education that orients one toward citizenship and virtue remains ever so relevant.
Montas offers his own life as a similar, seemingly improbable journey from the Dominican Republic to chairing Columbia's infamous Core Curriculum. In an academic atmosphere where it has become unfashionable to believe in any absolute notion of Truth or Virtue worth striving for, Montas mounts a passionate, nuanced defense of the liberal education and the epistemology that justifies any Great Books curriculum.
In Montas' view, liberal education is about learning how to make a life, not just how to make a living. Only against a socioeconomic backdrop of precarity and imperiled liberal democratic order has the latter question taken precedence over the former's spiritual pursuit. Instead, Montas argues that a liberal education should be a prerequisite to rather than a utilitarian alternative to a practical education, available to all.
Rescuing Socrates articulates an earnest argument against many of the common criticisms of courses like the Core Curriculum, highlighting the universality that often-criticized Eurocentric texts can offer to an immigrant youth who did not speak a word English arriving from the DR, and their value in understanding the power structures of a world undeniably shaped by Western thought.
From the beginning, the liberal arts have been a matter of freedom. In the polis of Athens, education aimed to prepare the free men of Athenian society to participate as citizens and grapple with the issues of society. Today, the importance of an accessible education that orients one toward citizenship and virtue remains ever so relevant.
March 22, 2022
Review coming at Front Porch Republic...
March 5, 2022
This book is like a 3.5 for the discussion and a 5 for the argument in favor of a liberal arts core. Montas is a teacher in and director of Columbia's core curriculum, which looks at key texts in (mostly) Western civilization's philosophy, literature, and art. He was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to the US at about 12; he and his family were very poor throughout, but he found great meaning in the study of the humanities in high school and eventually at Colombia as an undergrad. He is likable, balanced, passionate, and brilliant, although his narration of the audiobook was a bit lacking in verve and expression.
Montas makes a few very important arguments in this book. The first is that the core liberal arts/humanities curriculum is not a luxury or a purely intellectual exercise but a crucial foundation for citizenship and personhood. Core texts like Plato, St. Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi (the 4 texts profiled in this book), as well as many others, are the cornerstone of the education of the citizen of a free society. They challenge the young citizen to ask essential question about life, morality, meaning, and politics: How do we know things? What is the nature of the mind? What is a good life, and how different is a good life for different people? What are we to do with our freedom? What are our responsibilities to ourselves and to each other? Montas argues that it's a shame that we often see these questions as superfluous for students who may have more limited options in life and just want to get a technical/professional degree. Cultivating a society of humane, critical thinking, and reflective people is crucial for keeping democracy healthy, and a core curriculum helps connect students to this ongoing conversation about how to do all these things throughout history.
Montas also puts forth a complex argument about the "dead white males" critique of Western civ texts and core courses. Yes, he acknowledges, the majority of the texts in these courses are white men because within Western civilization (also a shaky and porous term, he admits) white men have dominated the production of knowledge. However, that doesn't mean they have nothing interesting to say; moreover, they disagree with each other in fundamental ways, and their arguments and disagreements can be incredibly illuminating for thinking about today's problems of morality, politics, and identity. Montas also argues that it's condescending to say that these texts are irrelevant to or even oppressive of women and minorities. Of course, they can and should all be critiqued for excluding, dismissing, and often castigating these groups. However, Montas brilliantly notes that people of color and women, just as much as men, have to think about the essential questions raised by these texts, and they can find them just as fascinating and rewarding as men do. His point is that these marginalized people are people; they have to think about who they are, where they are going, how to live a good life, how to contribute meaningfully to society, and so on, all the questions that a core curriculum challenges students to tackle. To say otherwise is to maintain this set of questions as a privilege for the already privileged. Just think about how important the study of Western (and some Eastern) philosophy was to people like Douglass or MLK or even Obama; King, for example, constructed his political philosophy upon reading the ancient classics, the Bible, Marx, Niebuhr, the Transcendentalists, Gandhi, and others. His thought and action were a product of and advancement of a liberal arts education. You can also reverse this argument; great black thinkers like Douglass and DuBois might speak more directly to the experiences of young people of color today, but they can be incredibly illuminating for white men and women, as I found when I taught these thinkers extensively to mostly white and Asian-American high schoolers.
Still, Montas shouldn't be taken as some totally old school defender of a tired old canon. In this book, he adds Gandhi in order to explore fundamental challenges to the Western tradition of thought with someone coming from a vastly different perspective. Moreover, Montas and his peers constantly revise the curriculum, and as the course enters recent centuries, it becomes much more diverse, as it should. Also, COlumbia has world civilizations courses that introduce students to other traditions just as the core curricula introduces them to the Western tradition. The big points here are 1. It benefits students to have a core that they all engage with and that forms a common bond of learning 2. That it's okay that this core is mostly Western, because most of them will inhabit a Western society shaped by these texts. 3. You can, of course, be critical of these texts as long as you take the time to understand them on their own terms. 4. You don't have to stick with the same old texts; Montas and his peers are clearly adding new voices all the time.
Finally, Montas has a brilliant refutation of post-modernist arguments against the core. The heart of postmodernism is the Nietzschean claim that all claims to truth or morality are really just claims to power and status; that all knowledge is essentially weaponry in a struggle for the will to power. Obviously you can never disconnect knowledge and power. However, after a flirtation with this now-dominant perspective in academia as a graduate student, Montas eventually drifted away from it as reductionist, trendy, and meaningless. He sees the deconstructionist impulse as one of the core reasons why the humanities are in disarray and decline; the entire project is just to show how biases and efforts to establish hierarchy are riven through core texts, thus rendering all the essential questions raised above as just a gloss on or cover for the exercise of power. This delegitimizes crucial questions that human beings must ask about themselves and others; it is also quite boring and eventually easy. It means not taking the texts in their own contexts and on their own terms before you start criticizing them, and it reinforces the anti-intellectual, condescending position that people in the past have nothing to teach us today, especially if they come from a different race/gender/glass, etc.
Instead, Montas challenges us to approach key texts from a different angle by asking: in what way are the right? It's mad easy to just look at Freud, without having read a speck of him, and just say "sexist, imperialist, etc." But in what ways was Freud right? In what ways did he challenge people to think about themselves differently or ask new questions about the human mind and condition? How about his social psychology, critiques of religion and warfare, or his metaphors for mental activities, which we all still use today? When we take this approach to the past, we start by digging out the golden nuggets of insight that have made these people relevant across the ages; then, once we understand them, we can turn to various forms of critique. This strikes me as a much healthier and humbler way to approach the past and, sadly, one that is out of fashion it today's academia. Montas laments that many faculties probably couldn't even agree on a core today largely for political and ideological reasons. When you think about that, the absurdity hits home; scientists (even social scientists) can usually come up with a list of core things a young student must understand to join the field. The humanities is so infiltrated by post-modernist ideas that it literally can't even stand up for itself to proclaim its own value. Montas' book is a clarion call against that set of problems.
I will say that the memoir aspect of this book is good but a little underdeveloped, given how interesting his life has been. So this is really a book for teachers and academics, as well as those who feel like something has gone haywire in the teaching of humanities. It wasn't perfect, but I strongly recommendit.
Montas makes a few very important arguments in this book. The first is that the core liberal arts/humanities curriculum is not a luxury or a purely intellectual exercise but a crucial foundation for citizenship and personhood. Core texts like Plato, St. Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi (the 4 texts profiled in this book), as well as many others, are the cornerstone of the education of the citizen of a free society. They challenge the young citizen to ask essential question about life, morality, meaning, and politics: How do we know things? What is the nature of the mind? What is a good life, and how different is a good life for different people? What are we to do with our freedom? What are our responsibilities to ourselves and to each other? Montas argues that it's a shame that we often see these questions as superfluous for students who may have more limited options in life and just want to get a technical/professional degree. Cultivating a society of humane, critical thinking, and reflective people is crucial for keeping democracy healthy, and a core curriculum helps connect students to this ongoing conversation about how to do all these things throughout history.
Montas also puts forth a complex argument about the "dead white males" critique of Western civ texts and core courses. Yes, he acknowledges, the majority of the texts in these courses are white men because within Western civilization (also a shaky and porous term, he admits) white men have dominated the production of knowledge. However, that doesn't mean they have nothing interesting to say; moreover, they disagree with each other in fundamental ways, and their arguments and disagreements can be incredibly illuminating for thinking about today's problems of morality, politics, and identity. Montas also argues that it's condescending to say that these texts are irrelevant to or even oppressive of women and minorities. Of course, they can and should all be critiqued for excluding, dismissing, and often castigating these groups. However, Montas brilliantly notes that people of color and women, just as much as men, have to think about the essential questions raised by these texts, and they can find them just as fascinating and rewarding as men do. His point is that these marginalized people are people; they have to think about who they are, where they are going, how to live a good life, how to contribute meaningfully to society, and so on, all the questions that a core curriculum challenges students to tackle. To say otherwise is to maintain this set of questions as a privilege for the already privileged. Just think about how important the study of Western (and some Eastern) philosophy was to people like Douglass or MLK or even Obama; King, for example, constructed his political philosophy upon reading the ancient classics, the Bible, Marx, Niebuhr, the Transcendentalists, Gandhi, and others. His thought and action were a product of and advancement of a liberal arts education. You can also reverse this argument; great black thinkers like Douglass and DuBois might speak more directly to the experiences of young people of color today, but they can be incredibly illuminating for white men and women, as I found when I taught these thinkers extensively to mostly white and Asian-American high schoolers.
Still, Montas shouldn't be taken as some totally old school defender of a tired old canon. In this book, he adds Gandhi in order to explore fundamental challenges to the Western tradition of thought with someone coming from a vastly different perspective. Moreover, Montas and his peers constantly revise the curriculum, and as the course enters recent centuries, it becomes much more diverse, as it should. Also, COlumbia has world civilizations courses that introduce students to other traditions just as the core curricula introduces them to the Western tradition. The big points here are 1. It benefits students to have a core that they all engage with and that forms a common bond of learning 2. That it's okay that this core is mostly Western, because most of them will inhabit a Western society shaped by these texts. 3. You can, of course, be critical of these texts as long as you take the time to understand them on their own terms. 4. You don't have to stick with the same old texts; Montas and his peers are clearly adding new voices all the time.
Finally, Montas has a brilliant refutation of post-modernist arguments against the core. The heart of postmodernism is the Nietzschean claim that all claims to truth or morality are really just claims to power and status; that all knowledge is essentially weaponry in a struggle for the will to power. Obviously you can never disconnect knowledge and power. However, after a flirtation with this now-dominant perspective in academia as a graduate student, Montas eventually drifted away from it as reductionist, trendy, and meaningless. He sees the deconstructionist impulse as one of the core reasons why the humanities are in disarray and decline; the entire project is just to show how biases and efforts to establish hierarchy are riven through core texts, thus rendering all the essential questions raised above as just a gloss on or cover for the exercise of power. This delegitimizes crucial questions that human beings must ask about themselves and others; it is also quite boring and eventually easy. It means not taking the texts in their own contexts and on their own terms before you start criticizing them, and it reinforces the anti-intellectual, condescending position that people in the past have nothing to teach us today, especially if they come from a different race/gender/glass, etc.
Instead, Montas challenges us to approach key texts from a different angle by asking: in what way are the right? It's mad easy to just look at Freud, without having read a speck of him, and just say "sexist, imperialist, etc." But in what ways was Freud right? In what ways did he challenge people to think about themselves differently or ask new questions about the human mind and condition? How about his social psychology, critiques of religion and warfare, or his metaphors for mental activities, which we all still use today? When we take this approach to the past, we start by digging out the golden nuggets of insight that have made these people relevant across the ages; then, once we understand them, we can turn to various forms of critique. This strikes me as a much healthier and humbler way to approach the past and, sadly, one that is out of fashion it today's academia. Montas laments that many faculties probably couldn't even agree on a core today largely for political and ideological reasons. When you think about that, the absurdity hits home; scientists (even social scientists) can usually come up with a list of core things a young student must understand to join the field. The humanities is so infiltrated by post-modernist ideas that it literally can't even stand up for itself to proclaim its own value. Montas' book is a clarion call against that set of problems.
I will say that the memoir aspect of this book is good but a little underdeveloped, given how interesting his life has been. So this is really a book for teachers and academics, as well as those who feel like something has gone haywire in the teaching of humanities. It wasn't perfect, but I strongly recommendit.
December 22, 2021
Rescuing Socrates by Roosevelt Montás is a book I'm glad I squeezed in because it gave me a lot to think about. Through these pages, Montás walks us through the transformative insights that writers and thinkers like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Sigmund Freud, and Mahatma Gandhi had on his life.
Montás is a senior lecturer at Columbia University, where he also spent a decade as Director of the Center for the Core Curriculum. He was also a first generation immigrant from the Dominican Republic and a participant of Columbia's Higher Education Opportunity Program which assists underserved, low-income students with financial support and academic enrichment programs to prepare them for college.
The term "liberal arts" today is sometimes derided as an elitist luxury and waste of time that doesn't translate into practical career applications or liveable wages. But the idea of liberal education has its roots in ancient Greek tradition as the education needed to participate in life as a free person (man) — as Socrates asked, "What whole way of life would make living most worthwhile for each of us?"
Montás makes the argument that while the books that are taught in general studies courses should reflect the diversity of the students themselves, we must also be careful not to be too narrow in the criteria we use to determine that reflectiveness. We shouldn't make students read exclusively dead white guys, but the things these dead white guys had to say are so deeply ingrained in the fabric of our society that it would be a disservice to not teach them to students just because they don't look like them.
In four sections dedicated respectively to St. Augustine, Plato, Freud, and Gandhi, Montás gives beautifully insightful overviews to these writers' most important contributions to literature while interspersing his analysis of the classics with personal anecdotes about how these works were foundational in his own growth and development.
Montás is a senior lecturer at Columbia University, where he also spent a decade as Director of the Center for the Core Curriculum. He was also a first generation immigrant from the Dominican Republic and a participant of Columbia's Higher Education Opportunity Program which assists underserved, low-income students with financial support and academic enrichment programs to prepare them for college.
The term "liberal arts" today is sometimes derided as an elitist luxury and waste of time that doesn't translate into practical career applications or liveable wages. But the idea of liberal education has its roots in ancient Greek tradition as the education needed to participate in life as a free person (man) — as Socrates asked, "What whole way of life would make living most worthwhile for each of us?"
Montás makes the argument that while the books that are taught in general studies courses should reflect the diversity of the students themselves, we must also be careful not to be too narrow in the criteria we use to determine that reflectiveness. We shouldn't make students read exclusively dead white guys, but the things these dead white guys had to say are so deeply ingrained in the fabric of our society that it would be a disservice to not teach them to students just because they don't look like them.
In four sections dedicated respectively to St. Augustine, Plato, Freud, and Gandhi, Montás gives beautifully insightful overviews to these writers' most important contributions to literature while interspersing his analysis of the classics with personal anecdotes about how these works were foundational in his own growth and development.
June 1, 2023
Lovely memoir with philosophy of a liberal arts education and its value for all. Beautiful and inspiring. Added books to my TBR list.
November 10, 2023
Surprising no one, I enjoyed this book. How convincing it would be to others, I cannot say, but as someone who's drank the Great Books/ Liberal Arts Kool-Aid, I am all in. But reaffirmed how the liberal arts and reading the classics can be a liberating and even revolutionary act. The introduction and conclusion (to a lesser extent) were the best parts of the book. I appreciated how it was organized, though at times the weaving between memoir, educational manifesto, and summaries of books was clunky. It gave me tons of follow up books/ articles to read, which was wonderful. Overall, a more successful version of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life.
October 14, 2024
More memoir than I expected. Montas discusses his early experiences emigrating to the U.S., and his later studies at Columbia involving the "Great Books" program. He centers the discussion around Socrates, Freud, and Ghandi.
Not a bad book, but if I had to recommend a book about studies of ancient western classics, or a "Great Books" program, I would first point to Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom.
Not a bad book, but if I had to recommend a book about studies of ancient western classics, or a "Great Books" program, I would first point to Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom.
July 22, 2022
I just listened to the audiobook in less than a week - partially because it's a short book and partially because it was that good. It's rare I give a book 5 stars but this was one of the best articulations of the value of a liberal arts education that I've encountered. Poignant, personal, and carefully not esoteric, it's the kind of book you could fruitfully give to your grandma - or your nagging uncle who keeps asking what "you're going to do" with an English degree. His introduction of several paradigmatic great thinkers/writers (Plato/Socrates, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi), woven with his personal encounters with their writings and the influence they had on him, left me itching to read or re-read each.
May 27, 2023
I’m so thankful I read this book!! It gave me a lot to think about regarding the purpose of the liberal arts and certainly raised my standard for education.
Walking away, I don’t agree with Montas about the centrality of self discovery in the liberal arts; he rejected God, while I embrace him; if I had to guess, we’d part ways on politics, too. We probably disagree on more particulars than we agree on. But still, I hold a deep respect for Montas because of the balanced, honest, and humble way he approached the topic, the eagerness he has to serve his reader, and the fruitful “conversation” I had with him through the pages of this book. It felt like learning from a friend, not debating an opponent.
If you find yourself trying to define the liberal arts, questioning or defending their usefulness in education, or looking for guidance as you read the classics—I recommend this book. Read it with discretion and pleasure.
For the general public, it’s probably too niche to recommend successfully. But, if you can interest yourself in it, you’ll benefit from it!!
Walking away, I don’t agree with Montas about the centrality of self discovery in the liberal arts; he rejected God, while I embrace him; if I had to guess, we’d part ways on politics, too. We probably disagree on more particulars than we agree on. But still, I hold a deep respect for Montas because of the balanced, honest, and humble way he approached the topic, the eagerness he has to serve his reader, and the fruitful “conversation” I had with him through the pages of this book. It felt like learning from a friend, not debating an opponent.
If you find yourself trying to define the liberal arts, questioning or defending their usefulness in education, or looking for guidance as you read the classics—I recommend this book. Read it with discretion and pleasure.
For the general public, it’s probably too niche to recommend successfully. But, if you can interest yourself in it, you’ll benefit from it!!
June 20, 2022
In this book, which I most looked forward to, there are some interesting vignettes and arguments for Liberal Education. But it is ultimately unsatisfying.
The four most prominent figures he chose are interesting and there are some nuances, but Freud and Gandhi are not all-time great thinkers, worth including in a canon.
I appreciate the point that we should go beyond the notion of a 'western canon' and agree with Roosevelt on this, but for different reasons. As a Christian, who believes in the universal Orthodox faith, that sounds good to me. There are seeds of the Word the world over. As Roosevelt mentions in the book, by way of Gandhi, modern 'western culture' is at odds with the Judeo Christian heritage of many 'western' nations. Professor Wayne Cristaudo also notes how Ancient Greek philosophy also falls short of the Jewish and Christian scriptures at times, by lending itself to 'ideaism'. We have restricted the power of the Gospel by forcing syntheses where that is insufficient. There is an overlap often times, but it is not neat and symmetrical. No more than the left and right hemispheres of the brain are symmetrical. As noted in great detail by Dr Iain McGilchrist. On the positive side, I also love the great Chinese sage, John CH Wu and think we need to come to see how Christ fulfils traditional Chinese philosophies, etc.
I do sure wish Montás had applied much greater skepticism to Freud and Gandhi in this book. He did a good job on Saint Augustine, who I think is a much more important historical figure for reasons he suggests. Whilst very flawed, he also reaches heights that the others don't. He also did well on introducing Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and co.
He seems to call into question his brief and emotive evangelical 'faith' but not his faith in psychoanalysis and the questionable dietary and sexual practices of Gandhi. Moreover, the constant references to the self are not sufficiently radical in an expressive individualist culture. There are some nuances again, such as when he critiques the materialism of Descartes, etc. However, I think the extent of the problem is so vast that he should have spent more time on this. More time on the need for real communities and the corrosive nature of liberalism as a political philosophy, even anthropology. Which is worlds apart from the use of liberal in liberal education.
His reflections on his own journey could have been so much more, but his navel gazing at his topsy-turvy self bored me and came across as self-absorbed. He also uses intellectual shibboleths that I friend ludicrous: 'People of colour' and other ridiculous terms that American intellectuals have forced upon the world by a bizarre neo-colonialism.
To be candid about the choice of quartet: Carl Jung and Sri Aurobindo Ghose would be much better figures to include in a universal Liberal Education. Focusing on those two rather than Sigmund and Mahatma would have made for a much more captivating book IMHO.
Whilst I found the book frustrating and it was not to my tastes for the reasons mentioned and more, there were some redeeming qualities and I learned a bit more about the inner workings of colleges. Plus how hard it is to argue for a Liberal Education in a materialist, utilitarian culture. And it is great to see a guy come from a small corner of the Dominican Republic and 'make it' in a sense that is not crudely materialist. That's all good and I hope his story resonates in ways that will benefit others who apply a constant hermeneutic of suspicion on Liberal Education. On that note, I appreciated his deconstruction of the deconstructionists. For more on Liberal Education, I would recommend Drs Josef Pieper, Mortimer Adler, and Robert M. Woods.
The four most prominent figures he chose are interesting and there are some nuances, but Freud and Gandhi are not all-time great thinkers, worth including in a canon.
I appreciate the point that we should go beyond the notion of a 'western canon' and agree with Roosevelt on this, but for different reasons. As a Christian, who believes in the universal Orthodox faith, that sounds good to me. There are seeds of the Word the world over. As Roosevelt mentions in the book, by way of Gandhi, modern 'western culture' is at odds with the Judeo Christian heritage of many 'western' nations. Professor Wayne Cristaudo also notes how Ancient Greek philosophy also falls short of the Jewish and Christian scriptures at times, by lending itself to 'ideaism'. We have restricted the power of the Gospel by forcing syntheses where that is insufficient. There is an overlap often times, but it is not neat and symmetrical. No more than the left and right hemispheres of the brain are symmetrical. As noted in great detail by Dr Iain McGilchrist. On the positive side, I also love the great Chinese sage, John CH Wu and think we need to come to see how Christ fulfils traditional Chinese philosophies, etc.
I do sure wish Montás had applied much greater skepticism to Freud and Gandhi in this book. He did a good job on Saint Augustine, who I think is a much more important historical figure for reasons he suggests. Whilst very flawed, he also reaches heights that the others don't. He also did well on introducing Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and co.
He seems to call into question his brief and emotive evangelical 'faith' but not his faith in psychoanalysis and the questionable dietary and sexual practices of Gandhi. Moreover, the constant references to the self are not sufficiently radical in an expressive individualist culture. There are some nuances again, such as when he critiques the materialism of Descartes, etc. However, I think the extent of the problem is so vast that he should have spent more time on this. More time on the need for real communities and the corrosive nature of liberalism as a political philosophy, even anthropology. Which is worlds apart from the use of liberal in liberal education.
His reflections on his own journey could have been so much more, but his navel gazing at his topsy-turvy self bored me and came across as self-absorbed. He also uses intellectual shibboleths that I friend ludicrous: 'People of colour' and other ridiculous terms that American intellectuals have forced upon the world by a bizarre neo-colonialism.
To be candid about the choice of quartet: Carl Jung and Sri Aurobindo Ghose would be much better figures to include in a universal Liberal Education. Focusing on those two rather than Sigmund and Mahatma would have made for a much more captivating book IMHO.
Whilst I found the book frustrating and it was not to my tastes for the reasons mentioned and more, there were some redeeming qualities and I learned a bit more about the inner workings of colleges. Plus how hard it is to argue for a Liberal Education in a materialist, utilitarian culture. And it is great to see a guy come from a small corner of the Dominican Republic and 'make it' in a sense that is not crudely materialist. That's all good and I hope his story resonates in ways that will benefit others who apply a constant hermeneutic of suspicion on Liberal Education. On that note, I appreciated his deconstruction of the deconstructionists. For more on Liberal Education, I would recommend Drs Josef Pieper, Mortimer Adler, and Robert M. Woods.
January 2, 2022
A definite 5 star review. One of the most important and thrilling books I’ve read in many years. Ultimately, this book and its author Roosevelt Montas, leaves me with hope. And if we need, as a people and society anything in this season of despair, confusion and conflict, is hope. Hope for our nation, for your youth and the future that they, our children and grandchildren will inhabit. Professor Montas has done us a great service in the writing of his book and his work as an educator and thinker. Gracias Señor
December 21, 2022
A great book about great books and it comes at the right time. A must read!
Roosevelt is brilliant at combining his memories of growing up in Dominican Republic and New York with an account of his education in the classics. The book is also a road map for how to bring the Humanities and the classics to the center of undergraduate education.
Roosevelt is brilliant at combining his memories of growing up in Dominican Republic and New York with an account of his education in the classics. The book is also a road map for how to bring the Humanities and the classics to the center of undergraduate education.
August 4, 2024
Best part of this book is his apologetic for a liberal education (it educates the whole person in existential and universal questions, trains ethics, and provides a foundation for all disciplinary study since the disciplines arise from these foundations of Western thought). But the parts where he actually summarizes four major texts (Augustine, Socrates, Freud, and Gandhi) seemed entirely inessential, especially as he emphasizes that it is discussion of the ideas in these texts that makes them come alive. Reading his notes about them was pretty stiff going.
April 12, 2023
This book got me to reflect on my assumptions about the great books approach to general education in higher education. I recently asked some of my undergraduates why we go to college, the only answer was to get a better job/make more money. This was at a “liberal arts” institution. Clearly we have lost our way. The problem of checking boxes as education runs deep in US schooling and perhaps we have no hope of returning. Yet, this book makes a compelling case for trying.
August 9, 2022
Five stars but full disclosure I’m a product of the book’s subject matter, (Columbia’s core curriculum.)
Therefore consider this a biased review….
Therefore consider this a biased review….
March 14, 2022
I met Professor Montás in 2004 at the 250th Anniversary of the founding of Columbia College, our common alma mater. Talks were being offered during the day by various distinguished alumni, and I chose his talk, which I enjoyed very much. Recently, he posted an item about how great books can have lessons for 21st century citizens worried about living with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.; he recommended reading Boccaccio's "The Decameron," which I recalled from Lit-Humanities in the Core Curriculum! The irreverent, sometimes ribald, but thoughtful and touching tales of ordinary people living with the plague in Florence were medicine for us being constantly battered by statistics, isolation and shutdowns. Roosevelt Montás was right on the money.
This book deserves a wide readership, because it is really both an illuminating and highly personal autobiographical story of a family's immigration to the United States, and the reflections of their successful son Roosevelt who earned his Ph.D. in English at Columbia College, later becoming the academic custodian for the Core Curriculum amid questions about its relevance and changes that would ultimately undermine its contribution to real education.
The discussion about what constitutes an education and how it is delivered resonated with my own experience at Columbia and later as a graduate student and MBA graduate finance teacher. For Montás, reading Augustine's Confessions in Lit-Hum with his teacher/mentor opened his eyes in so many ways and that teacher became a life-long mentor because of their common experience of presenting, discussing and reading Augustine together. One of his mentors said that if the Core were not well taught, then it has not been delivered to its students.
My own experience reading Hobbes and Locke in Contemporary Civilization and Thucydides in Lit Hum turned me upside down, not just because of the material but by the teachers and their own personal engagement in their lives which we could share through reading the literature.
Columbia College, the institution founded in 1754 was in danger of being abolished at one time! The University, President Nicholas Murray Butler felt should be a global research-driven institution and things like reading philosophy and literature should be relegated into a General College. Thakfully, he didn't carry the day.
The question remains: is an undergraduate degree about exposing students a broad range of specialized domains, like finance, psychology, or biology, for example? Then, they might enter a specialized trade like medicine, law or business and make a lot of money. Is that it? If education is like reading a Chinese menu, then there are thousands of restaurants around. What makes an institution unique and its offering different? At Columbia, the idea of the Core is that the student and their education are at the center of the endeavor.
I enjoyed reading this book, and I recommend it highly for both of the 'books' which are contained therein.
This book deserves a wide readership, because it is really both an illuminating and highly personal autobiographical story of a family's immigration to the United States, and the reflections of their successful son Roosevelt who earned his Ph.D. in English at Columbia College, later becoming the academic custodian for the Core Curriculum amid questions about its relevance and changes that would ultimately undermine its contribution to real education.
The discussion about what constitutes an education and how it is delivered resonated with my own experience at Columbia and later as a graduate student and MBA graduate finance teacher. For Montás, reading Augustine's Confessions in Lit-Hum with his teacher/mentor opened his eyes in so many ways and that teacher became a life-long mentor because of their common experience of presenting, discussing and reading Augustine together. One of his mentors said that if the Core were not well taught, then it has not been delivered to its students.
My own experience reading Hobbes and Locke in Contemporary Civilization and Thucydides in Lit Hum turned me upside down, not just because of the material but by the teachers and their own personal engagement in their lives which we could share through reading the literature.
Columbia College, the institution founded in 1754 was in danger of being abolished at one time! The University, President Nicholas Murray Butler felt should be a global research-driven institution and things like reading philosophy and literature should be relegated into a General College. Thakfully, he didn't carry the day.
The question remains: is an undergraduate degree about exposing students a broad range of specialized domains, like finance, psychology, or biology, for example? Then, they might enter a specialized trade like medicine, law or business and make a lot of money. Is that it? If education is like reading a Chinese menu, then there are thousands of restaurants around. What makes an institution unique and its offering different? At Columbia, the idea of the Core is that the student and their education are at the center of the endeavor.
I enjoyed reading this book, and I recommend it highly for both of the 'books' which are contained therein.
August 24, 2022
I really appreciated this defense of great books programs. I selected this for our parent reading group (classical school) and I think there are some really great arguments here for why the great books programs are so beneficial for everyone, not just elite students.
November 16, 2022
Would have appreciated more info and less about his life…
January 7, 2022
in defense of liberal education
A very well developed, albeit repetitive, defense of the need of a liberal education loosely based on the "Western canon". Should be read by anyone interested on educating for living well, rather than for acquiring wealth.
A very well developed, albeit repetitive, defense of the need of a liberal education loosely based on the "Western canon". Should be read by anyone interested on educating for living well, rather than for acquiring wealth.
January 4, 2022
A provocative argument that great literature should be an essential feature of American education, especially for students from historically marginalized communities. Montas knows whereof he writes. “I had come to the United States from a mountain town in the Dominican Republic a few days before my 12th birthday, not speaking English…after 2 years of bilingual education in the local public school and four years at the local public high school, I found myself beginning an unimaginably strange life as a freshman at Columbia.” Montas not only succeeded at Columbia University, but he thrived in its core curriculum of classics and went on to direct the program for ten years. He argues that liberal arts education – such as Plato, Augustine, Aristotle – give students a type of “triangulation” that make possible a “way of centering and locating himself” in the world. It is a very well-made argument, as Montas takes several of the great ancient philosophers, explains how they were taught at Columbia, and how they related directly to his own situation in the late 20th century.
For example, he reads and discusses St. Augustine’s Confessions as Montas himself is newly-converted to Christianity, finding himself on a parallel path with the saint from the 5th century. “In Augustine, I had seen the possibility of reconciling my deepest hunger for truth with my growing perception of its stubborn elusiveness.” He has similar connections to Socrates, Freud, and Gandhi. “Socrates captivated me. His method of conversation and inquiry suggested a way of life I wanted to live.” Freud “took firm hold of my mind: ‘The reasons we give ourselves for doing things that we do are never the real reasons.’” I especially like the Montas argument that a liberal arts education gives students the very political tools they need to act in the larger world. He bemoans the emphasis on training students simply for careers at the expense of teaching them to value thinking and reflecting. But it is not either/or. He sees such an education as “democratizing” and “for students like me, who desperately needed an introduction to the tools of public discourse and action.” He faces squarely the criticisms that such curricula have focused on Western traditions; he advocates revision, diversity, inclusion, and questioning. But he says it makes no sense to deny students the benefits given to earlier generations of seeing how we got here from there. There is a lot to contemplate in this book, about how we learn, how we teach, how we transfer knowledge and power across all students, and how we empower the next generation. It relates well to my service on the Utah Board of Higher Education and I look forward to re-reading it a couple of times to grasp all the dimensions of Montas’ arguments.
For example, he reads and discusses St. Augustine’s Confessions as Montas himself is newly-converted to Christianity, finding himself on a parallel path with the saint from the 5th century. “In Augustine, I had seen the possibility of reconciling my deepest hunger for truth with my growing perception of its stubborn elusiveness.” He has similar connections to Socrates, Freud, and Gandhi. “Socrates captivated me. His method of conversation and inquiry suggested a way of life I wanted to live.” Freud “took firm hold of my mind: ‘The reasons we give ourselves for doing things that we do are never the real reasons.’” I especially like the Montas argument that a liberal arts education gives students the very political tools they need to act in the larger world. He bemoans the emphasis on training students simply for careers at the expense of teaching them to value thinking and reflecting. But it is not either/or. He sees such an education as “democratizing” and “for students like me, who desperately needed an introduction to the tools of public discourse and action.” He faces squarely the criticisms that such curricula have focused on Western traditions; he advocates revision, diversity, inclusion, and questioning. But he says it makes no sense to deny students the benefits given to earlier generations of seeing how we got here from there. There is a lot to contemplate in this book, about how we learn, how we teach, how we transfer knowledge and power across all students, and how we empower the next generation. It relates well to my service on the Utah Board of Higher Education and I look forward to re-reading it a couple of times to grasp all the dimensions of Montas’ arguments.
December 9, 2021
I liked this recent book and author’s covering various interesting subjects from his personal journey as an immigrant to becoming a professor, about liberal education, to philosophy and a few key thinkers to academic life. I liked that Columbia U has incorporated more thinkers like Gandhi to their curriculum beyond usual western philosophy. I think they have room to add more from other cultures as well. His proposal to add liberal arts topics for every undergrad curriculum is nice vs you need to go to a Liberal Arts and Humanities program to learn these topics. As an engineer I would not have minded that back at school.
February 5, 2022
A book you could read in a day or two. But if you do that, then you may be like me and want to go back and read it more slowly. Why did I read it? To see a naturalized citizen from a Hispanic background (if I can use that term) appreciate and defend a liberal education based on “important books” from the West along with small class sizes and heavy discussion. His understanding of Freud and Gandhi are the sections I am going to have to back and reread. It has been many years since I have read Freud and I cannot say I have read anything of length from Gandhi. Perhaps on my second read I will give it the book more stars.
April 5, 2022
Really enjoyed this book; lots of memoir with great books, some takes on the canon—the what and why we ought teach of liberal education. Really learned a good bit abt Freud and Gandhi here; would def take the courses described in this book
January 14, 2023
Equal parts memoir, literary criticism, philosophical treatise, and argument in favor of liberal arts as a foundation for every college degree, this is an interesting, solid read. It would pair well with Denby’s Great Books. The author reads the audiobook quite capably.
August 10, 2022
As the subtitle indicates, this is a two-track book. It is a philosophical autobiography, of sorts, and it’s a defense of “great books” in college curricula. These twin themes are presented in a loose back and forth fashion.
The four authors are St. Augustine, Plato (Socrates), Freud and Gandhi. (1) There is for Montas an underlying religious theme for three of them, with Freud being the outlier. Montas includes Freud for his exploration of the unconscious (the author did psychoanalysis).
The author’s attachment to Socrates reflects the common way Plato’s philosophy is presented - what is good, just and beautiful are said to be the defining philosophical questions. But when viewed within the context of Plato’s full body of work, there are problems. They rest on a worldview that is metaphysical and religious. (2) They are about a divine, eternal, objective other-world that regards the this-world of materiality as secondary and illusory. Plato-Socrates’ philosophical quest was to sell this and to bully or shame all skeptics and doubters with alternative perspectives. (3) In other words, he is not the type of guy to hang around with.
It is entirely appropriate for Montas to have his philosophical worldview, but I’d say it’s concerning that he presents it as Truth. This is seen for example, in the author’s reaction to Nietzsche, “Satan’s most acute theologian” who “unleashed he intellectual current that today we associate with Postmodernism and Deconstruction and which questions the very category of truth.” (4) Contrast this with Montas’s characterization of Plato that the “realm of forms is what is, in fact, real.” The operative term is “in fact.” Is Montas’s stating what Plato said, or is it what Montas asserts? Given the overall tone of the book, I’d say this is Montas all the way.
The problem with such a characterization is that it comes across as an assertion that Montas’ viewpoint is the correct one: There is an objective, eternal, autonomous realm of Platonic Truth. While Montas goes into all the criticisms of the great books project – the Western bias, the selection criteria, etc., he draws his line by criticizing modern academia and its dismantling of value-based judgement. In the end, Montas persists with his Socratic quest and that’s a very large problem. An academic professor’s role is to relay both points of view – for example, here, Plato’s and Nietzshe’s -accurately, to encourage openness about how these are to be interpreted and discussed, and to leave out pronouncements about which one is the correct point of view. This is not church and there is room in philosophy for these non-Platonic worldviews and ethics. Otherwise, this comes across as indoctrination from the Master.
(1) Mantas references authors and a selection of their works, not books per se. For example, of the 20 plus Platonic dialogues, Montas talks about three.
(2) “Plato is, above all, a metaphysician, and almost everything he argues comes back in one way or another to some aspect of the Theory of Forms.” Note the author’s capitalization.
(3) See, for example, my Goodreads review of Protagoras and Meno: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
(4) “Nietzsche saw no possibility of truths that exist independent of particular human interests – that is truths that exist as objective entities graspable by pure intellect. He rejected the notion of ‘objectivity’ to begin with, along with the idea of a ‘pure intellect’ that can look at the world from a neutral vantage point abstracted from its own positionality and interests.”
The four authors are St. Augustine, Plato (Socrates), Freud and Gandhi. (1) There is for Montas an underlying religious theme for three of them, with Freud being the outlier. Montas includes Freud for his exploration of the unconscious (the author did psychoanalysis).
The author’s attachment to Socrates reflects the common way Plato’s philosophy is presented - what is good, just and beautiful are said to be the defining philosophical questions. But when viewed within the context of Plato’s full body of work, there are problems. They rest on a worldview that is metaphysical and religious. (2) They are about a divine, eternal, objective other-world that regards the this-world of materiality as secondary and illusory. Plato-Socrates’ philosophical quest was to sell this and to bully or shame all skeptics and doubters with alternative perspectives. (3) In other words, he is not the type of guy to hang around with.
It is entirely appropriate for Montas to have his philosophical worldview, but I’d say it’s concerning that he presents it as Truth. This is seen for example, in the author’s reaction to Nietzsche, “Satan’s most acute theologian” who “unleashed he intellectual current that today we associate with Postmodernism and Deconstruction and which questions the very category of truth.” (4) Contrast this with Montas’s characterization of Plato that the “realm of forms is what is, in fact, real.” The operative term is “in fact.” Is Montas’s stating what Plato said, or is it what Montas asserts? Given the overall tone of the book, I’d say this is Montas all the way.
The problem with such a characterization is that it comes across as an assertion that Montas’ viewpoint is the correct one: There is an objective, eternal, autonomous realm of Platonic Truth. While Montas goes into all the criticisms of the great books project – the Western bias, the selection criteria, etc., he draws his line by criticizing modern academia and its dismantling of value-based judgement. In the end, Montas persists with his Socratic quest and that’s a very large problem. An academic professor’s role is to relay both points of view – for example, here, Plato’s and Nietzshe’s -accurately, to encourage openness about how these are to be interpreted and discussed, and to leave out pronouncements about which one is the correct point of view. This is not church and there is room in philosophy for these non-Platonic worldviews and ethics. Otherwise, this comes across as indoctrination from the Master.
(1) Mantas references authors and a selection of their works, not books per se. For example, of the 20 plus Platonic dialogues, Montas talks about three.
(2) “Plato is, above all, a metaphysician, and almost everything he argues comes back in one way or another to some aspect of the Theory of Forms.” Note the author’s capitalization.
(3) See, for example, my Goodreads review of Protagoras and Meno: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
(4) “Nietzsche saw no possibility of truths that exist independent of particular human interests – that is truths that exist as objective entities graspable by pure intellect. He rejected the notion of ‘objectivity’ to begin with, along with the idea of a ‘pure intellect’ that can look at the world from a neutral vantage point abstracted from its own positionality and interests.”
April 4, 2024
Rescuing Socrates is a passionate argument for all students to have a “liberal education” through the study of great books, especially in their first 2 years of college. As someone actively reading classics in his middle age, this quite appeals to me. The author Roosevelt Montás is an immigrant to the United States and a person of color, first entering University with barely two pennies to scrape together. He now works as a Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. Montás argues that ancient and revered texts have great value for people of all backgrounds:
He goes on to write:
Rescuing Socrates provides the story of Montás’s life, and how he was enriched by reading great books. He pays particular attention to four authors who have influenced him: Socrates (circa 470 BCE to 399 BCE), Saint Augustine of Hippo (AD 354 - AD 430), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), and Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948). I found Montás’s thoughts on Gandhi particularly interesting - the great Indian leader had some of the best arguments against Western culture I have come across. I will need to read his books. Rescuing Socrates is an interesting and inspirational book.
**
Citation:
Montás, R. (2021). Rescuing Socrates: How the great books changed my life and why they matter for a new generation. Princeton University Press. https://www.audible.com/pd/Rescuing-S...
Title: Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation
Author(s): Roosevelt Montás
Year: 2021
Genre: Nonfiction - Memoir, education, & philosophy
Page count: 238 pages
Date(s) read: 3/27/24 - 4/3/24
Book #73 in 2024
**
“Liberal education looks to the meaning of a human life beyond the requirements of subsistence—instead of asking how to make a living, liberal education asks what living is for. ‘These studies,’ says Aristotle, ‘are undertaken for their own sake, whereas those relating to work are necessary and for the sake of things other than themselves.’ Liberal education concerns the human yearning to go beyond questions of survival to questions of existence.”
He goes on to write:
“When making the case for liberal education to low-income students and families, I often point out that there is a long tradition of steering working-class students toward an education in servitude, an education in obedience and docility, an education in not asking questions. The idea that liberal education is only for the already privileged, for the pampered elite, is a way of carrying on this odious tradition. It is a way of putting liberal education out of the reach of the people who would most benefit from it—precisely the people who have historically been denied the tools of political agency. I ask them to take a look at who sends their children to liberal arts colleges and at what liberal arts college graduates go on to do with their ‘useless’ education.”
Rescuing Socrates provides the story of Montás’s life, and how he was enriched by reading great books. He pays particular attention to four authors who have influenced him: Socrates (circa 470 BCE to 399 BCE), Saint Augustine of Hippo (AD 354 - AD 430), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), and Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948). I found Montás’s thoughts on Gandhi particularly interesting - the great Indian leader had some of the best arguments against Western culture I have come across. I will need to read his books. Rescuing Socrates is an interesting and inspirational book.
**
Citation:
Montás, R. (2021). Rescuing Socrates: How the great books changed my life and why they matter for a new generation. Princeton University Press. https://www.audible.com/pd/Rescuing-S...
Title: Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation
Author(s): Roosevelt Montás
Year: 2021
Genre: Nonfiction - Memoir, education, & philosophy
Page count: 238 pages
Date(s) read: 3/27/24 - 4/3/24
Book #73 in 2024
**
June 23, 2022
It all started with the neighbor’s trash.
Roosevelt and brother joined their mother in New York city. Roosevelt was 11 when he left the small village in the Dominican Republic. He came to New York with almost no English language skills. Next to the crowded apartment where he and his family lived, there were English speaking residents who one day took out a bunch of books for the trash collector. Roosevelt was attracted to them. Some of them were beautifully made with gold on the edges of the pages. He only had room for two volumes. He took two volumes of the Harvard Classics because he recognized the names on the spine: Plato and Shakespeare.
When he began to read Plato, his English was not yet good enough to understand all the words so he asked one of his high school teachers for help understanding the words. This led to a mentoring relationship which developed into a lifelong friendship. Mr. Phillippides recommended Roosevelt participate in a summer program with Columbia University designed for kids just like him. Roosevelt was hooked. He applied to Columbia and then his systematic encounter with the Great Books began in earnest. Columbia had and continues to have a mandatory two-year sequence of Great book reading for all incoming students. Roosevelt graduated from Columbia and then returned for Ph.D. work. He was hired as a lecturer and served as director of the Center for the Core Curriculum.
This book is a delightful and engaging memoir that also explores four writers that impacted Roosevelt’s thinking and life: Augustine, Socrates, Sigmund Freud, and Ghandi. Embedded in his story is Roosevelt’s clear conviction that the Great Books are essential reading and reflection points for helping us answer the ultimate question: What makes life worth living?
I must say, I found Roosevelt’s line of thinking and argument refreshing. Classic books, books that continue to have something important to say to generations of people, are worthy of our time and attention. In fact, reading and thinking about them, lead us to think critically about our lives. What makes us truly happy, satisfied, joy-filled? What is the kind of work that we want to engage in? In a culture that has bought whole heartedly into the industrial model of life where life is about comfort, wealth, longevity, and ease, these books commend us to deeper questions.
As Director of the Core Curriculum, Roosevelt had to defend the Core Curriculum on a regular basis. These are not easy books to read and digest. The questions are not easy to answer. Why do this? And, Roosevelt notes that his brown skin and background lend him credibility when he responds to those questions.
Roosevelt has helped other colleges, universities, and cultures develop core curriculums.
America is full of rags to riches, transformative stories. Roosevelt’s story is an American story. But his wealth is not monetary. His wealth is the intellectual life and his role as a teacher to transform students. In his review of this book for Front Porch Republic, Eric Adler informs us that his wife had Roosevelt as a teacher in undergraduate studies, and she was thoroughly impressed with his enthusiasm and teaching abilities. Roosevelt writes not only as an administrator, but also as a teacher concerned for the future of American education.
Rescuing Socrates is for those of us who want an example of how we can interact with the Great Books and who want to learn what Liberal Education can truly give us.
Roosevelt and brother joined their mother in New York city. Roosevelt was 11 when he left the small village in the Dominican Republic. He came to New York with almost no English language skills. Next to the crowded apartment where he and his family lived, there were English speaking residents who one day took out a bunch of books for the trash collector. Roosevelt was attracted to them. Some of them were beautifully made with gold on the edges of the pages. He only had room for two volumes. He took two volumes of the Harvard Classics because he recognized the names on the spine: Plato and Shakespeare.
When he began to read Plato, his English was not yet good enough to understand all the words so he asked one of his high school teachers for help understanding the words. This led to a mentoring relationship which developed into a lifelong friendship. Mr. Phillippides recommended Roosevelt participate in a summer program with Columbia University designed for kids just like him. Roosevelt was hooked. He applied to Columbia and then his systematic encounter with the Great Books began in earnest. Columbia had and continues to have a mandatory two-year sequence of Great book reading for all incoming students. Roosevelt graduated from Columbia and then returned for Ph.D. work. He was hired as a lecturer and served as director of the Center for the Core Curriculum.
This book is a delightful and engaging memoir that also explores four writers that impacted Roosevelt’s thinking and life: Augustine, Socrates, Sigmund Freud, and Ghandi. Embedded in his story is Roosevelt’s clear conviction that the Great Books are essential reading and reflection points for helping us answer the ultimate question: What makes life worth living?
I must say, I found Roosevelt’s line of thinking and argument refreshing. Classic books, books that continue to have something important to say to generations of people, are worthy of our time and attention. In fact, reading and thinking about them, lead us to think critically about our lives. What makes us truly happy, satisfied, joy-filled? What is the kind of work that we want to engage in? In a culture that has bought whole heartedly into the industrial model of life where life is about comfort, wealth, longevity, and ease, these books commend us to deeper questions.
As Director of the Core Curriculum, Roosevelt had to defend the Core Curriculum on a regular basis. These are not easy books to read and digest. The questions are not easy to answer. Why do this? And, Roosevelt notes that his brown skin and background lend him credibility when he responds to those questions.
Roosevelt has helped other colleges, universities, and cultures develop core curriculums.
America is full of rags to riches, transformative stories. Roosevelt’s story is an American story. But his wealth is not monetary. His wealth is the intellectual life and his role as a teacher to transform students. In his review of this book for Front Porch Republic, Eric Adler informs us that his wife had Roosevelt as a teacher in undergraduate studies, and she was thoroughly impressed with his enthusiasm and teaching abilities. Roosevelt writes not only as an administrator, but also as a teacher concerned for the future of American education.
Rescuing Socrates is for those of us who want an example of how we can interact with the Great Books and who want to learn what Liberal Education can truly give us.
February 12, 2023
I am a big believer in the idea of a liberal arts education. Yes, I am an old white man, and, yes, I went to Harvard. My liberal arts education has served me well, but I really think that it isn't just an old white guy elitest concept. It's a concept that can be broadened to be of value for everyone. It is the best way that I know for colleges to produce educated people and for us to train the kind or people that we need for a democratic society with a fair measure of equality of opportunity. So far Mr. Montas and I are on the same page but most of the details of the liberal arts education that I got and the benefits that I got from it are different from what Mr. Montas describes here. In some ways that's part of the beauty of the concept - a liberal education is a multipurpose tool that doesn't work the same way for everyone.
I would never have gone to Mr. Montas' school, Columbia, because when I was going to college, I didn't want to be forced to take the same classes as everyone else. I wanted my freedom! I have read all four of the authors who Mr. Montas dicusses here - Plato, St. Augustine, Freud and Gandhi, but Plato was the only one I read in college, and I only came to appreciate him when I read his works more extensively many years later. My college classes were focused on Russia - language, literature, history and government. I also took classes in math, computer science, anthropology, economics, Chinese and Japanese history and ancient Greek literature. Apart from the ancient Greek literature class, my college classes had little crossover with things taught in the Columbia program, but still it had much the same effect because my classes covered a broad range of subject matter and had a strong in depth focus on one area. My classes repeatedly confronted me with the great questions of philosophy from different angles, and, probably most important, none of it had any practical application whatsoever. I learned how to learn, I developed a broad cultural and intellectual perspective, and I learned to love learning and reading. I came to appreciate and understand theories of art, history, society and government. It put me on a course of lifelong learning. All of this has proved far more valuable and rewarding for me than any narrow vocational pathway could ever have been. And I did it by hardly reading any of the classic old white man books. This pathway is open to anybody. Just pick what interests you and study it in depth, study enough things on the side to give you some breadth and don't worry about job training. If you learn how to learn, that's all of the job training you will ever need.
I would never have gone to Mr. Montas' school, Columbia, because when I was going to college, I didn't want to be forced to take the same classes as everyone else. I wanted my freedom! I have read all four of the authors who Mr. Montas dicusses here - Plato, St. Augustine, Freud and Gandhi, but Plato was the only one I read in college, and I only came to appreciate him when I read his works more extensively many years later. My college classes were focused on Russia - language, literature, history and government. I also took classes in math, computer science, anthropology, economics, Chinese and Japanese history and ancient Greek literature. Apart from the ancient Greek literature class, my college classes had little crossover with things taught in the Columbia program, but still it had much the same effect because my classes covered a broad range of subject matter and had a strong in depth focus on one area. My classes repeatedly confronted me with the great questions of philosophy from different angles, and, probably most important, none of it had any practical application whatsoever. I learned how to learn, I developed a broad cultural and intellectual perspective, and I learned to love learning and reading. I came to appreciate and understand theories of art, history, society and government. It put me on a course of lifelong learning. All of this has proved far more valuable and rewarding for me than any narrow vocational pathway could ever have been. And I did it by hardly reading any of the classic old white man books. This pathway is open to anybody. Just pick what interests you and study it in depth, study enough things on the side to give you some breadth and don't worry about job training. If you learn how to learn, that's all of the job training you will ever need.
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