Dr. Gamble on the Liberal Arts and Going Back to the Source
Written by Emily Runge
“There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books.”
– C.S. Lewis, On the Reading of Old Books
In his essay “On the Reading of Old Books,” C.S. Lewis describes a timid student who would rather pick up a modern analysis of Plato than read Plato’s own words. At Hillsdale College, that fear does not exist. Students are encouraged by the professors to dig through the ancient texts from the very beginning, in core classes like Western Heritage and Constitution 101.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Richard Gamble to talk about the importance of “old books” to Hillsdale’s liberal arts education. Dr. Gamble is an Associate Professor of History at Hillsdale, director of the Honors Program, and editor of The Great Tradition: classic readings on what it means to be an educated human being.
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First things first…how does Hillsdale define a liberal arts education?
A good liberal arts core curriculum has several features. Unity, coherence, and sequence. If you read books about the liberal arts and the liberal arts tradition, they seem to come back to these three attributes.
Unity. Every student who goes through Hillsdale College has a common experience. This is something that is becoming extremely rare in higher education. At Hillsdale, not only do we have the vision and courage to stand against this cultural trend, but we’re even expanding the core curriculum, the main element of this “common experience.” Hillsdale believes that education is more than just a set of interchangeable parts. You can’t just take a course here, add an elective there, take a test there, slap it together, and call it a liberal arts education. There has to be structure and a unity of experience, and that’s the role of the core curriculum.
Coherence. The different pieces of a college education have to fit together. It isn’t just random. We’re committed to the parts of the core that a student needs in order to be liberally-educated: history, literature, philosophy, theology, politics, foreign language, fine arts, lab sciences, and mathematics. There’s coherence between the parts – it’s not just some random, arbitrary collection of courses
Sequence. We dictate the general order in which to take the core curriculum in most cases. This is important. For example, it’s crucial that you take Western Heritage before you take American Heritage, because to fully appreciate and understand American Heritage, you have to know the background. We are building knowledge systematically. We’ve actually thought about what we’re doing with the core, and that is not something many colleges can say.
All of these elements are key to Hillsdale’s liberal arts education. It is unfortunate that this has become so rare, that Hillsdale should look peculiar. Ironically, we are doing something very traditional, something that was once commonplace, and that has now become strange.
Now Hillsdale is pretty well-known as a “conservative” college. So…what does the word “liberal” mean in the context of a liberal arts education?
In the Greek tradition, as seen in Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachaen Ethics, “liberal” means, “that which is not servile.” Also, it means, “that which is distinctive to human beings who are creative, rational creatures endowed with language.” As humans, we are meant to go beyond the realm of mere necessity; a liberal education is meant to free us from that realm. Today, we live in a country where we have enough wealth to give us the freedom of taking time to immerse ourselves in study.
The word liberal also implies breadth of study; a liberally-educated person should be educated in the sense of abundance and generosity. It encompasses all things that relate to the fullness of being human, or as the ancients used to say, the realm of all things human and divine.
Now, it has taken on a very different coloring in America. Society defines “liberal” as the “liberation” from the “narrowness” of family, religion, community. In the Classical or Christian tradition, that is not what the word liberal means. A liberal education was never meant to strip you of your responsibilities to others, to family, and to God.
Why does Hillsdale emphasis the use of primary source documents as part of a liberal arts education?
We emphasize the use of primary documents because we want to educate students to be good readers, thinkers, writers, and speakers. From the very first day of core classes like Western Heritage and Great Books, we have our heads buried in primary documents. We’re acquiring skills by allowing the unfamiliar to become familiar, learning the vocabulary, and learning how to think along with the author. Through this kind of study, we’re very carefully developing analytical reading skills in our students.
We also cultivate qualities of mind and develop habits of honesty and integrity through the use of primary sources. We learn to be true to the document – how not to take words out of context, or “cherry picking” to prove something we already believe. This is crucial to the development of the well-formed mind; something John Henry Newman called the “philosophical habit of mind.”
What place do secondary sources and textbooks have in the classroom then?
Well, every teacher needs reference books and resources. Textbooks, however, become dangerous when a teacher uses them as a substitute for primary documents. They should be an invitation to go to the primary documents and be a companion to the actual documents. When they are a substitute, then we’ve made a big mistake.
So in your anthology, there is an essay by C.S. Lewis called “On the Reading of Old Books.” In that essay, Lewis says that students shy away from old books because they are intimidated. Where do you think this fear comes from?
Sometimes the fear comes from the inherent difficulty of the book. When you first encounter Plato’s Republic, you realize that it’s not a book that’s going to open itself to you. Aristotle is also notoriously difficult to read because of the history of manuscripts and translations. Sometimes, the intimidation comes from difficulty in the way a book is written; other times it’s the ideas that the book wrestles with that are intimidating.
How then do we conquer that fear at Hillsdale?
Part of the answer to that is to give students experiences of success and show them that they really can understand these books. With some curiosity and a little bit of self-confidence, students begin to feel that they can take on Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Politics.
Students will often re-read and understand something their junior or senior year that they thought was impossible during their freshman year. Or they find their own comments in the margin of a book and they’re embarrassed that they wrote that! These experiences are really important because students realize they can now understand more difficult books. It gives them confidence to continue studying.
Lewis describes old books as a “clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.” How would you recommend students go about reading more old books?
I think it is very important that our school cultivates an appetite and a desire to read these old books. We don’t want students to burn out. Once the desire to continue studying has been cultivated, I would recommend that students allow books to lead them onto to the next book. Say you’re reading C.S. Lewis’s autobiography and you discover he read a lot of G.K. Chesterton and George McDonald. What do you do? You pick up Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and discover what Chesterton has been reading. That process will continue throughout your whole life and you will never run out of good books to read.
I would also encourage students to read some books more than once at different points in their lives. Books such as Augustine’s Confessions are good to read when you’re young. It will take on a new meaning when you’re about the age of Augustine when he wrote it. I believe the mark of a good book is that it can be enjoyed by people of different ages and that it means something new at different ages.
Emily Runge is a sophomore at Hillsdale College who is majoring in Politics and minoring in History. She is a George Washington Fellow, a member of Pi Beta Phi women’s fraternity, a member of the Hillsdale College Honors Program, and a volunteer at Will Carleton Academy.