Page:Catalogue of St. John's College 1945.pdf/4

18 must be introduced, and even subtler distinctions involving the use of symbols in imagination as well as reasoning must be made. Memory, manual dexterity, calculation and measurement must be cultivated as arts, if we are to make minds free.

The child is potentially a free man, and this means that he has the capacities which these arts require. The realization of these capacities comes about by their exercise under controlled conditions in which ordinary learning by trial and error becomes discipline under the guidance of teachers. By children then we mean men who are capable of liberal learning.

Although we have no new fads in teaching methods, but rather use all available methods and devices, still we have a special interpretation of the teacher's function. This can best be stated by saying that the real original and ultimate teachers at St. John's are the authors who are now teaching at St. John's, subject to continual revision and criticism, will be found on page 40. These are the real teachers, but we also have a secondary faculty of tutors and fellows who act as auxiliary intermediaries between the books and the students.

These books were chosen over a period of nearly twenty years by auxiliary teachers in various places, notably Columbia University, the University of Chicago, the University of Virginia, and St. John's College. The list was under criticism and testing by teaching and learning experience during that period, and the process has continued under conditions set by the single all-required curriculum which all students at St. John's take.

This experience of co-operative teaching with the authors of the great books has led us to a new understanding of the classics and classical education. The pre-elective liberal arts colleges understood and defined the classics in terms of the symbolic mediums of transmission and communication; they taught Greek, Latin, and mathematics as an extension of primary education in reading, writing, and arithmetic. We are also emphasizing language and mathematics for reasons that will appear on later pages. On the other hand we are reading the classics in English. As we do that, certain criteria emerge and provide a new understanding of the original motives in classical liberal arts education. The criteria divide themselves into two kinds, those that are exemplified in single books and make them great, and those that appear in the effects that one book has on another and on the reader and teacher.

The first criterion is that a classic must be a master of the liberal arts. Its author must be a master of the liberal arts of his time, and his work must exemplify the direction of those arts of thought and imagination to their proper ends, the understanding and exposition of the truth as he sees it.

The second criterion follows from the first, namely that a classical book must be a work of fine art. It must have that clarity and beauty on its surface which provides an immediate intelligibility and leads the mind of the reader to its interior depths of illumination and understanding. This is of first importance in teaching, and its principle is almost universally violated in the textbooks that have developed in the ordinary elective system. The great books were written for the ordinary intelligent public, and they therefore have the seductive charm of works in the fine arts. They are intrinsically interesting and impose their disciplines with pleasure.

The third criterion concerns the internal structure of a classic. A great book has many possible interpretations. This does not mean that it is simply ambiguous and thus leads to confusion. On the contrary it is possible to discover in a great work such as Dante's Divine Comedy or Newton's Principia several distinct, complete, and independent meanings, each allowing the others to stand by its side and each supporting and complementing the others. It is the business of a liberal artist to construct such works and also to analyze and understand them.

The fourth criterion demands that a great book shall raise the persistent and humanly unanswerable questions about the great themes in human experience. On the one hand this means that a great book shall be honest about the limits of its powers of exposition, admitting the paradoxes and mysteries that surround the practice of the liberal arts. On the other hand it means that a liberal artist should not allow a false modesty or scepticism to excuse him from pushing reason and imagination to ultimate questions. The entertainment and exploration of ultimate questions concerning number and measurement, form