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Great Books of the Western World
In 1952, Encyclopedia Britannica published a fifty-four-volume set titled Great Books of the WesternWorld. The Great Books were intended by Dr. Mortimer Adler and Dr. Robert Hutchins to establish a standard curriculum for American schools, but the public response to the first edition was tepid. Sales of the volume set rendered the multimillion-dollar project a financial failure. Nevertheless, a second edition was published in 1990 with few alterations. Many critics deplored it for failing to reflect the changing cultural landscape of the twentieth century.
Hutchins and Adler conceived the project as a means of delimiting and promoting a distinctly Western literary canon. There were 443 works representing seventy-six authors in the first edition, and selection criteria were based on the work's relevance to 102 Great Ideas. Both the selection criteria and the notion of a list of Great Ideas met with immediate controversy. For one thing, a number of celebrated French authors are conspicuously absent: Molière, Racine, Balzac, and Flaubert. No works are represented for several important continental authors, including Friedrich Nietzsche, S0ren Kierkegaard, John Calvin, and Martin Luther. Among the missing works of English authors are Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, any poems by John Donne, and John Webster's Duchess of Malfi. Four volumes are devoted to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas without either a rationale or an introduction to their highly specialized use of philosophical terms. The same is true of the six volumes apportioned to scientific works. The lack of explanatory material has given occasion for critics to dismiss the project for lacking relevance to any but the privileged.
The following authors do appear in Great Books of the Western World:
First Edition
- Homer
- Aeschylus
- Sophocles
- Euripides
- Aristophanes
- Herodotus
- Thucydides
- Plato
- Aristotle
- Hippocrates
- Galen
- Euclid
- Archimedes
- Apollonius of Perga
- Nicomachus of Gerasa
- Lucretius
- Epictetus
- Marcus Aurelius
- Virgil
- Plutarch
- Tacitus
- Ptolemy
- Copernicus
- Kepler
- Plotinus
- Augustine
- Thomas Aquinas
- Dante Alighieri
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Nicolò Machiavelli
- Thomas Hobbes
- François Rabelais
- Michel de Montaigne
- William Shakespeare
- William Gilbert
- Galileo Galilei
- William Harvey
- Miguel de Cervantes
- Francis Bacon
- René Descartes
- Baruch Spinoza
- John Milton
- Blaise Pascal
- saac Newton
- Christiaan Huygens
- John Locke
- George Berkeley
- David Hume
- Jonathan Swift
- Laurence Sterne
- Henry Fielding
- Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Adam Smith
- Edward Gibbon
- mmanuel Kant
- Alexander Hamilton
- James Madison
- John Jay
- John Stuart Mill
- James Boswell
- Antoine Lavoisier
- Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier
- Michael Faraday
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
- Herman Melville
- Charles Darwin
- Karl Marx
- Friedrich Engels
- Leo Tolstoy
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- William James
- Sigmund Freud
Added to the Second Edition
- John Calvin
- Erasmus
- Molière
- Jean Racine
- Voltaire
- Denis Diderot
- S⊘ren Kierkegaard
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Alexis De Tocqueville
- Honoré De Balzac
- Jane Austen
- George Eliot
- Charles Dickens
- Mark Twain
- Henrik bsen
Added to the Original Volumes
- Apollonius of Perga
- Laurence Sterne
- Henry Fielding
- Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier
Removed from the Original Volumes
- 20th-century Philosophy and Religion:
- William James
- Henri Bergson
- John Dewey
- Alfred North Whitehead
- Bertrand Russell
- Martin Heidegger
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Karl Barth
- 20th-century Natural Science:
- Henri Poincaré
- Max Planck
- Alfred North Whitehead
- Albert Einstein
- Arthur Eddington
- Niels Bohr
- Albert Einstein
- G. H. Hardy
- Werner Heisenberg
- Erwin Schrödinger
- Theodosius Dobzhansky
- C. H. Waddington
- 20th-century Social Science (I):
- Thorstein Veblen
- R.H. Tawney
- John Maynard Keynes
- 20th-century Social Science (II):
- James George Frazer
- Max Weber
- Johan Huizinga
- Claude Lévi-Strauss
- 20th-century Imaginative Literature (I):
- Henry James
- George Bernard Shaw
- Joseph Conrad
- Anton Chekhov
- Luigi Pirandello
- Marcel Proust
- Willa Cather
- Thomas Mann
- James Joyce
- 20th-century Imaginative Literature (II):
- Virginia Woolf
- Franz Kafka
- D. H. Lawrence
- T. S. Eliot
- Eugene O'Neill
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- William Faulkner
- Bertolt Brecht
- Ernest Hemingway
- George Orwell
- Samuel Beckett
New Volumes on 20th-century Material
Among the most interesting innovations involving the Great Books was the creation of a multivolume Synopticon written by Adler in which articles on subjects as diverse as “Love,” “Politics,” and “War” were linked to appropriate sections where these topics were discussed in the Great Books.
Perhaps a testament to the enduring attractiveness of the project for some, Great Books programs at St. John's College, the University of Chicago, and Biola University continue with steady enrollment numbers.
...
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- American Sign Language
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- Eugenics
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- Phrenology
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- Social Frontier, The
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- Charter Schools
- Child Abuse: Issues for Teachers
- Child Labor
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- Coeducation
- Commercialization of Schools
- Compulsory Educational Attendance Laws
- Corporal Punishment
- Culturally Responsive Teaching
- Culture-Fair Testing
- Desegregation
- Disabilities and the Politics of Schooling
- Disabilities, Physical Accommodations for People With
- Dress Codes
- Dropouts
- Education Commission of the States
- Educational Policy and the American Presidency
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- English-Only Movement
- Equal Access Act
- Ethics Codes for Teachers
- Federal and State Educational Jurisdiction
- Foreign Language Instruction
- Fundraising in Schools
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- Gifted Education, Policy Issues
- Global Child Advocacy
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- Immigrant Education: Contemporary Issues
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- Least Restrictive Environment
- Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Students and Teachers: Rights of
- Lunch Programs
- Mainstreaming
- Mental Retardation and Education
- Mexican Americans and Access to Equal Educational Opportunities
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- National Defense Education Act
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- Sputnik
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- Archives and Library Collections on Education
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- Boy Scouts of America
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- Charter Schools
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- Plagiarism
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- “Scientific” Racism
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- Community of Practice
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- Complexity Theory
- Constructivism
- Context in Education
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- Critical Literacy
- Critical Mathematics
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- Critical Race Theory
- Critical Theory
- Critical Thinking
- Cultural Capital
- Cultural Studies
- Culture Epoch Theory
- Curriculum Theory
- Dalton Plan
- Deskilling
- Disability Studies
- Discursive Practices
- Education, Aims of
- Educational Transfer
- Educationese
- Feminist Theory in Education
- Gary (Indiana) Model
- Hampton Model
- Hawthorne Effect
- Head Start
- Hegemony
- Holistic Education
- Ideology and Schooling
- Intelligence, Theories of
- Local Knowledge
- Marxism
- Mixed Methods Research
- Models and Methods of Teaching
- Multiculturalism, Philosophical Implications
- New Harmony
- Observation Research
- Paideia
- Performance Theory
- Philosophy of Education
- Place-Based Education
- Postcolonialism
- Postmodernism
- Praxis
- Project Method
- Pygmalion Effect
- Qualitative Research
- Reconceptualist Models of Education
- Reggio Emilia Approach
- Reproduction, Educational
- Semiotics
- Small Schools Movement
- Social Action, Democratic Classrooms for
- Social Capital
- Social Construction of Disability
- Vulnerability
- Waldorf Education
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