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training more efficiently than schools. Placing nonacademic demands on schools, such as social adjustment or vocational training, diverts time and resources from the school’s primary purpose of developing students intellectually. Because truth is universal and unchanging, the curriculum should consist of permanent, or perennial, studies that emphasize the recurrent themes of human life. It should contain subjects that cultivate rationality and the moral, aesthetic, and religious values that contribute to ethical behavior and civility. Like idealists, realists, and essentialists, perennialists favor a subject-matter curriculum that includes history, language, mathematics, logic, literature, the humanities, and science. Religious perennialists, such as Jacques Maritain, also include religion and theology in the curriculum. Robert Hutchins, a former president of the University of Chicago, described the ideal education as “one that develops intellectual power” and is not “directed to immediate needs; it is not a specialized education, or a preprofessional education; it is not a utilitarian education. It is an education calculated to develop the mind.”42 Hutchins recommended reading and discussing the great books of Western civilization to bring each generation into an intellectual dialogue with the great minds of the past. Among the great books are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Plato’s Dialogues, Cicero’s Orations, St. Augustine’s Confessions, St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly, More’s Utopia, Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Mill’s On Liberty, Darwin’s Origin of the Species, Marx’s Das Kapital, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. These classic works, with their reoccurring themes, stimulate intellectual discussion and critical thinking. With the classics, Hutchins urged the study of grammar, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, and philosophy. As noted earlier, postmodernists attack Hutchins’s Great Books curriculum as giving Western European canons dominance over other cultures, such as those of Asia and Africa. Maritain, a French philosopher, based his perennialist “integral humanism” on Aristotle’s natural realism and Thomas Aquinas’s theistic realism.43 Maritain wanted religion to be an integral part of the curriculum.44 Rejecting cultural relativism and existentialism, Maritain asserted that education needed to be guided by the ultimate direction that religion provides. His religious emphasis fits the contemporary resurgence of faith-based values in American society. Like Hutchins, Maritain endorsed the great books as indispensable for understanding the development of civilization, culture, and science.45 For Maritain, elementary education should develop correct language usage, cultivate logical thinking, and introduce students to history and science. Secondary and undergraduate college education should focus on the liberal arts and sciences.
Robert M. Hutchins, A Conversation on Education (Santa Barbara, CA: The Fund for the Republic, 1963), p. 1; and Robert M. Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America (New York: Transaction, 1995). For biographies of Hutchins, see Milton Mayer, Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Mary Ann Dzuback, Robert Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). For a highly readable and engaging discussion of Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, and the Great Books curriculum, see Alex Beam, A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (New York: Public Affairs, 2008). 43 Douglas A. Ollivant, Jacques Maritain and the Many Ways of Knowing (Washington, DC: American Maritain Association, 2002). 44 For a reappraisal of Maritain, see Gerald L. Gutek, “Jacques Maritain and John Dewey on Education: A Reconsideration,” Madonna Murphy, “Maritain Explains the Moral Principles of Education to Dewey,” and Wade A. Carpenter, “Jacques Maritain and Some Christian Suggestions for the Education of Teachers,” in Wade A. Carpenter, guest ed., Educational Horizons 83 (Summer 2005), pp. 247–263, 282–301. 45 Jacques Maritain, Education at the Crossroads (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), pp. 70–73. 42
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