Frustrated with the continuing educational crisis of our time, concerned
parents, teachers, and students sense that true reform requires more
than innovative classroom technology, standardized tests, or skills
training. An older tradition--the Great Tradition--of education in the
West is waiting to be heard.
Since antiquity, the Great Tradition has defined education first and
foremost as the hard work of rightly ordering the human soul, helping it
to love what it ought to love, and helping it to know itself and its
maker. In the classical and Christian tradition, the formation of the
soul in wisdom, virtue, and eloquence took precedence over all else,
including instrumental training aimed at the inculcation of "useful"
knowledge.
Edited by historian Richard Gamble, this anthology reconstructs a
centuries-long conversation about the goals, conditions, and ultimate
value of true education. Spanning more than two millennia, from the
ancient Greeks to contemporary writers, it includes substantial excerpts
from more than sixty seminal writings on education. Represented here are
the wisdom and insight of such figures as Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle,
Seneca, Cicero, Basil, Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, Bonaventure,
Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Erasmus, Edmund Burke, John
Henry Newman, Thomas Arnold, Albert Jay Nock, Dorothy Sayers, C. S.
Lewis, and Eric Voegelin.
In an unbroken chain of giving and receiving, The Great Tradition
embraced the accumulated wisdom of the past and understood education as
the initiation of students into a body of truth. This unique collection
is designed to help parents, students, and teachers reconnect with this
noble legacy, to articulate a coherent defense of the liberal arts
tradition, and to do battle with the modern utilitarians and
vocationalists who dominate educational theory and practice.
