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    A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning
    A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning
    A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning
    Ebook62 pages48 minutes

    A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning

    By James V. Schall

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    About this ebook

    A Georgetown professor’s look at the subjects one needs to study for a truly well-rounded education.
     
    A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning is an inviting conversation with a learned scholar about the content of an authentic liberal arts education. It surveys ideas and books central to the tradition of humanistic education that has fundamentally shaped our country and our civilization. This accessible volume argues for an order and integration of knowledge so that meaning might be restored to the haphazard approach to study currently dominating higher education. Freshly conveying the excitement of learning from the acknowledged masters of intellectual life, this guide is also an excellent blueprint for building one’s own library of books that matter.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJul 29, 2014
    ISBN9781497645066
    A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning
    Author

    James V. Schall

    James V. Schall, S.J., was a Professor of Political Philosophy from 1977 to 2012 at Georgetown University, where he received his Ph.D. in Political Th eory in 1960. Three times he was granted the Award for Faculty Excellence by the senior class at Georgetown’s College of Arts and Sciences. He wrote hundreds of essays and columns and more than thirty books, including On Islam, The Order of Things, and Another Sort of Learning from Ignatius Press.

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    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      At last an explanation of why I have felt so out of step with things. I highly recommend that anyone with an intellectual curiosity reads this essay. Wonderful.
    • 4/5
      His advice affirms that my study plan has been working, and he has book recommendations I’ve surprisingly not heard of regarding study habits etc.

    Book preview

    A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning - James V. Schall

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    THE PRESTON A. WELLS JR. GUIDES TO THE MAJOR DISCIPLINES

    GENERAL EDITOR

    JEFFREY O. NELSON

    EDITOR

    JEREMY BEER

    PHILOSOPHY Ralph M. McInerny

    LITERATURE R. V. Young

    LIBERAL LEARNING James V. Schall, S.J.

    THE STUDY OF HISTORY John Lukacs

    THE CORE CURRICULUM Mark C. Henrie

    U.S. HISTORY Wilfred M. McClay

    ECONOMICS Paul Heyne

    POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Harvey C. Mansfield

    PSYCHOLOGY Daniel N. Robinson

    CLASSICS Bruce S. Thornton

    AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT George W. Carey

    RELIGIOUS STUDIES D. G. Hart

    A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning

    JAMES V. SCHALL, S.J.

    WILMINGTON, DELAWARE

    CONTENTS

    Introductory Note

    From Whence Did These Observations Come?

    Do You Have This Problem?

    Where Do I Begin?

    On Teachers and Teaching

    Where Do I Find Time for All This Liberal Learning?

    APPENDIX:

    Schall’s Unlikely List of Books to Keep Sane By

    INTRODUCTORY NOTE

    THE IMPORTANT THINGS, Aristotle told us, are to be known for their own sakes, not for some useful or pleasurable purpose, however useful or pleasurable they might also be. Scholars tell us that the ages have saved for us Plato’s literary works and Aristotle’s more pedestrian class-notes or lectures. The first sing; the second demand our careful, repeated attention. The fact that we have both sorts of heritage contains a lesson for us. We oftentimes need to be called out of ourselves by something that is simply charming or delightful. At other times, we recognize that if we are to grasp the essence of something, it will take our undivided attention over a long period of time, perhaps a lifetime.

    Where might we go, what might we do to find the truth, to find what makes sense, what incites us to use that mind we all have been given to pursue by it our human task, to know what is, to know what we ought to do? No age has an easy time of it, trying to figure things out. Our age has difficulty asking these questions, not merely because we have so much knowledge available to us or because, compared with other ages, there are so many of us, but also because we are an age of doubt, an age that does not seem to want to know what it can know.

    The human mind must also choose to use itself properly to achieve its primary purpose which is to find the truth of things. When a human being is functioning normally, when he is being what he is given by nature to be, he is using his mind. And yet, the mind can talk itself out of using itself. Many great thinkers suspect this choice is what has happened to us. We have talked ourselves out of knowing what we can know, and in particular, what we are.

    Is there anything we might do about this? What we need to do is to find some guide, some book, some friend, some professor perhaps, some lecture, some journal or essay, that will alert us to the fact that what we are mostly given is skewed. This discovery will not be easy. We do not like to rethink things. We do not like to challenge commitments to schools

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