Great Books - by Michael Gose (Paperback)

About the Book

This book explores the benefits of reading "Great Books," and is virtually unique in detailing what a series of Great Books classes has looked like over the past decades.

Book Synopsis

This book explores the benefits of reading "Great Books," and is virtually unique in detailing what a series of Great Books classes has looked like over the past decades.

Review Quotes

Michael Gose was my Great Books professor. He helped me navigate the great conversation. Now he's poured his wisdom from forty years of teaching Great Books into one place. Great Books: Everyone's Inheritance should be given to every novice and veteran teacher of the Great Books so that they may learn or remember how to continue the tradition that was started not merely by Erskin and Adler in the twentieth century but began with Homer, Plato and Aristotle millennia ago.

The Great Books concept, designed by Erskine and Adler and practiced by Gose for more than 37 years, can provide an academic foundation for any student during the last two years of high school or the first two years of college. Gose begins his book with a brief history of the Great Books idea and crafts the other chapters around curriculum, issues and controversies, conflicts and benefits, limitations and potential downsides, and assumptions. He concludes with a plea to place the Great Books in the curriculum. The book has many notable facets: Gose's 75-word preface for the study of Great Books, Gose's embrace of both chronological and a historical approaches to this literature, four possible Great Books lists, and an excellent appendix to determine whether a student is prepared for Great Books study. This book is for both individuals interested in creating a Great Books curriculum or for those who are already ensconced in the practice. Highly recommended. Faculty and professionals.

What's so great about the great books? They bring us into conversations with great thinkers and ideas, teaches reading, analysis, conversation and writing. The program lays a liberal arts foundation for the very best college education. One of the best things we did when I was president of Pepperdine University was to encourage Michael Gose and his colleagues to begin a Great Books program for the first two years of the undergraduate experience. The only thing better would have been to require every student to take it. Following the lead of the great Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago, one of the best things a college president can do is start and support a Great Books program. The model is out there, it only takes excellent teachers, like Michael Gose, and community support to accomplish it.

About the Author

Michael Gose was a student at Mission Bay High School, Occidental College, Pepperdine University, Stanford University, and as such, he had the great good fortune of reading and discussing the classics. After a visit to campus by Mortimer Adler, Gose initiated a Great Books program at Pepperdine University, and has been teaching Great Books, and writing about Socratic pedagogy, for almost forty years.