Word: greatness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Theatre Guild on the Air (Sun. 8:30 p.m., NBC). The Great Adventure, starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne...
...with the facts? Robert Hutchins got his chance to make the challenge just two years later. At 30 he became the "boy wonder" president of the University of Chicago. Not long after, he invited Adler to come out and be a .professor. "I'm the president of a great university," Hutchins announced to Adler at lunch. "But I haven't thought about education." "Me either," said Mortimer. "I'm a philosopher." The only thoughts he had about education, he went on to say, had come from Columbia's John Erskine, who had taught a general course...
What should be the content of education? Hutchins' answer was simple: there is a kind of knowledge that transcends time & place; there are absolute values such as Truth and Justice, and they can be found by modern man, especially by studying what the great minds of the past had to say about the constant problems of mankind. The purpose of education, he held, is to train minds to be free, not chaotic, and free "because they can understand the order of goods and can achieve them in that order...
...spite of the deploring, however, the Chicago Plan worked. Though free to stay away, students flocked to classes where no attendance records were kept and no grades given. Gradually, the Great Books were worked into the courses, until this year they are 75% of the reading for the B.A. It was not all that Hutchins could have wanted, but it was close-an education not of books about books, but one which places ideas over facts, firsthand knowledge over secondhand interpretations, theory over practice...
Beyond these matters, Hutchins' chief interests are his old ones. He is helping to sponsor a project, with Mortimer Adler at its head, to compile a giant index of the Great Books-a learned cross-file of all the great ideas the great minds have ever voiced. Meanwhile, as a result of brisk promotion by the university-organized Great Books Foundation, adult education classes in the Great Books are becoming a nationwide middlebrow vogue. Hutchins himself teaches one class of prominent Chicagoans (known as "The Fat Men's Course"). There are 50,000 other people hashing the books...