"…What should first-year students read? We would suggest not only Solzhenitsyn but also François Furet, Leszek Kolakowski, Vasily Grossman, and Czesław Miłosz. Rather than imbibe a just-so story about colonialism and anti-colonialism, freshmen need to understand the true nature of totalitarian empires.
Today's students tend to value social influence more than human excellence. Worse, they pay more heed to antiheroes—people who tear down civilization—than heroes: those who protect, repair, and rebuild it. So, at the outset of their studies, we think undergraduates should encounter not just thinkers and writers but also founders, doers, leaders, and pioneers such as Abraham and Socrates, da Vinci and Mozart, Lincoln and Churchill. They should study the works of great men, to use another unfashionable phrase, but also of great women: Sojourner Truth and Malala Yousafzai, Ada Lovelace and Lise Meitner. It is no small part of a liberal education to show students the broad range of meaningful lives they might aspire to lead.
No matter what they are obliged by their professors to read, most intelligent 18-year-olds will wrestle with what the creators of the Columbia Core called "the insistent problems of the present." But a true educational foundation draws on ancient as well as modern wisdom, enabling students to understand the difference between the timeless and the ephemeral…"
The Atlantic
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