Great Books and Diversity in Education
In the fall of 1961, Martin Luther King, Jr. taught his only college class, which he gave the unremarkable name of “Social Philosophy I.” Today, we would recognize the course as a “great books” seminar in Western political philosophy. The reading list ran from Plato’s Republic through Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, followed by works from Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, and ending with “the Utilitarians,” Bentham and Mill. That King called the course “Social Philosophy I” suggests he had a sequel in mind, perhaps one that included readings that spoke more directly to the struggle for civil rights that he and his students at Morehouse were engaged in. What modern thinkers might have appeared on the list? Gandhi, almost certainly, and perhaps Marx and Nietzsche, as well as Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois.
King never did go back to Morehouse for his sequel. Yet his decision to teach the classics of Western political thought as a way to engage urgent contemporary issues is instructive. Like any professor today who wants to introduce students to the sources of our political and cultural order, King found himself confined to a set of figures far from representative of the ethnographic diversity of the United States.
His authors were all male and, with the exception of Augustine, Europeans whom we might anachronistically categorize as “white.” In this narrow sense, the group was not diverse. But in other ways, it was remarkably diverse – with theologians like Augustine and Aquinas and secular humanists like Machiavelli and Mill; with Aristotle arguing that women were incapable of exercising political authority and Plato insisting on their fitness to rule his perfect city; with Rousseau arguing for radical democracy and Hobbes defending absolutist government. King’s list also contains vast chronological diversity, covering a span of twenty-four centuries. Only through the distorting lens of contemporary identity politics can one think of these authors as a monolithic choir.
When it comes to the classroom, most teachers recognize the value of diversity. In the 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court affirmed this value, striking down racial quotas in university admissions. But it also permitted race to be considered as one among many factors in favor of a candidate on the rationale that racial diversity in the classroom represented a “compelling state interest.” The Supreme Court, in its current term, is poised to rule on the continued permissibility of such race-conscious admissions in higher education and seems likely to end it. Yet the underlying point made in Bakke – about the value of a diverse student body in our colleges and universities – is beyond dispute.
But the value we place on diversity in the classroom can easily bump up against the problem Martin Luther King, Jr. faced in constructing his pre-19th-century reading list. Until the relatively recent past, the literary and philosophical canon lacked the kinds of diversity we have come to value and to expect in our classrooms. The mismatch often motivates the idea that a liberal education based on the study of canonical texts is inadequate or inappropriate for a diverse student body. This line of thinking is generally well-meaning, and often informed by a progressive impulse to rectify past exclusion. Yet, consciously and unconsciously, it can also reproduce what George W. Bush once called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Indeed, we should regard with suspicion, regardless of its origins, any suggestion that while Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton are good for the humanistic education of white students, they are somehow unsuitable for non-whites.
There is no sound basis for translating the value of diversity in the classroom into the idea that students, in their general education, should be exposed exclusively or even primarily to authors who reflect their own cultural identities. There’s no question that an unbiased construction of a post-World War II canon would be amply representative of our contemporary diversity. But to demand of the premodern textual tradition that it reflect present-day diversity is in fact to cut students off from crucial aspects of a meaningful education. It is especially pernicious in the case of students from historically marginalized communities because it deprives them of conceptual tools and historical knowledge crucial for effective participation in our broader political culture.
It is true that students should see themselves in the curriculum, but it’s not true that the only way they can see themselves is through their ethnic or racial identity. Some of the most intense moments of recognition in my own education have come from texts that didn’t reflect my cultural background. I also have observed this in my college students, and most dramatically in the low-income high school students I teach every summer.
We do students, especially disadvantaged students, a disservice when we discourage them from the traditional liberal arts curriculum. As King understood, introducing students to important works from our literary and philosophical past serves a key democratizing function: it sharpens their understanding of how the world has come to be what it is and gives them the tools necessary for effective participation in it. A humanistic education that takes the past seriously is indispensable to the project of inclusion and diversity to which we are committed.
