What I hadn’t realized when I was in school was that a degree only takes maybe 12 courses

The impossible ideal of a collegiate Classical education – an idea so beloved of so many university professors – has killed the spirit of autodidacticism that allowed many 19th- and 20th-century Americans to achieve the same result

If, for each course, you read only 10 books (Stanford is on the quarter system, so each class was only 12 weeks long), then you get a degree by reading 120 books. Of these, most, if you’re an English major, will be comparatively recent modern novels. Others will be much too long to teach in a single course. That’s how you can graduate from a Russian Literature program (as my ex-boyfriend did) without reading Anna Karenina or War and Peace or from an English Department without reading Moby-Dick. The truth is that if one is to be truly given a Classic education, there is no room for fat in the curriculum. Continue reading →