By Kirk Kramer
Great article about the foundation at Clear Creek, but I'm excerpting the part that discusses the work of Dr. John Senior and others at the University of Kansas:
In 1970, at the height--or more accurately, the nadir--of the student upheavals which were at the heart of the social revolution which shook the West as profoundly as the Communist Revolution of 1917 shook Russia, with the same destructive consequences for the human happiness of individuals and the common good of society, three professors, Frank Nelick, Dennis Quinn, and John Senior, received a grant from the American government to begin "an experiment in tradition" at Kansas University. They established a course of studies in the liberal arts, first known simply and elegantly as Pearson College, a name later changed to the more bureaucratic-sounding Integrated Humanities Program. This program, for first- and second-year undergraduates and undergraduettes, was a four-semester sequence of classes in which the students read the Great Books of Western civilization. Many studied Latin, taught orally. For the purposes of this article, it will be enough to give Pearson College's motto and say a word about it.
Nascantur in admiratione. Let them be born in wonder. Aristotle in the Metaphysics says that philosophy begins in wonder. By 'wonder' he does not mean the vice of curiosity, by which, for example, men are tempted to read newspapers and watch the evening news on television. He is speaking of the thing we experience when we look up at the starry sky or enter Chartres Cathedral or behold a "tall ship" with all her sails catching the wind, cutting through the sea. It is the wonder that the cowboy knew who sang, in words that became part of the state song of Kansas:
How often at night/When the heavens are bright/With the light of the glittering stars/Have I stood there amazed/And asked as I gazed/If their glory exceeds that of ours.
Home, home on the range. . . .
This passion of wonder that Aristotle wrote about, and that every man, no matter how debased, has the capacity for, is the reason that men create poetry, understanding that word in the broadest sense: not only poems, but also stories, plays, dance, music, ultimately everything man makes or does that is not merely useful, but for his delight. In Pearson College, Mr. Senior (he earned a Ph.D. at Columbia, but eschews the pretentious title Doctor, in a gesture reminiscent of C.S. Lewis' saying that the only people who get doctorates are Americans and women) and his colleagues taught, and asked their students to read, poetically--to study Plato and Chaucer and Shakespeare in order to know and to understand and ultimately to love the world better. The professors did not seek to cram facts into their students' skulls in the fashion of Thomas Gradgrind. Still less did they wish to "deconstruct" or debunk the texts read in their classes. They wished their students to read the Odyssey and the Aeneid and the Song of Roland in the spirit St Benedict enjoined in the opening lines of the Holy Rule: "Hearken, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart."
The heart. The great books of our civilization (by which the present writer does not mean Hegel or Marx or Sylvia Plath) are not addressed only or chiefly to the mind. They speak to men's hearts. "Were not our hearts burning within us as he spoke to us on the way?" Not our feelings, not our intellects--our hearts. Just as women are prone to emotionalism, men (viri) are prone to rationalism, and one is as disordered as the other. Great teachers teaching the great books in the poetic mode to docile (the word is not an obscenity) students--this dymanic will move hearts and give a true integration to the human person with all its faculties. If grace is allowed to work, as it was at K.U. thanks to the example of three Catholic professors who simply lived their Faith, the results can be remarkable. In Pearson College, the results were extraordinary. Hundreds of students sought instruction in the Catholic Faith (freely, it should hardly be necessary to add).
Stuff on Dr. John Senior:
Our Schoolmaster Remembered
Magister Johannes
His books: The Death of Christian Culture and The Restoration of Christian Culture are out of print, and difficult to find.
