The Great Tradition

The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be an Educated Human Being edited by Richard M. Gamble

Any teacher, parent, or student intent on cultivating an educational philosophy immune to changing fashions and technologies needs this anthology. Editor Richard Gamble brings together seminal writings on liberal arts education in the hopes of inspiring “modern misfits” to “follow the trail of an older, more noble, and continual conversation about what it means to be an educated human being.” Spanning twenty-four centuries, the texts represent a legacy that begins in pagan Greece and Alexandria and draws wisdom from the Eastern and Western Church, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and agnostics, without trying to offer any ecumenical synthesis. The common ground is respect for liberal learning (“helping the soul love what it ought to love, to know itself and its maker”) and a rejection of the utilitarian ideal that dominates mainstream education. Each writer is introduced with a brief biography and references to encourage further reading. Roughly a third of the 80 excepts are drawn from classical and late antiquity (Plato, Seneca, Philo, Basil the Great); a third from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Aquinas, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Milton); and the final third adds modern voices (Burke, C. S. Lewis, Eliot, Weil, Christopher Dawson).

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