The Great Conversation
What it means to be educated according to Robert Hutchins
Robert Maynard Hutchins was an editor of the Great Books of the Western World, published by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1952. The Great Conversation, written by Hutchins, served as the introduction to the first edition of the multi-volume set of books, in which he described why the works of philosophy, literature, poetry, and so forth were chosen and what sort of education they offer. In this introduction, he put forth his views on education and what it means to be educated by making the case for a liberal education for all using the Great Books.
The Great Books are considered the masterpieces of the West by Hutchins and his fellow editors. They are, as Hutchins describes, “the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western mind.” The editors of the Great Books, Hutchins goes on to state, “attempt to reappraise and re-embody the tradition of the West for our generation” because “the West needs to recapture and re-emphasize and bring to bear upon its present problems the wisdom that lies in the works of its greatest thinkers and in the discussion that they have carried on.”
The editors admit that the Great Books are not the only books worth reading, nor will they solve all of mankind’s problems, but they did believe that “in the passage of time the neglect of these books in the twentieth century will be regarded as an aberration, and not, as it is sometimes called today, a sign of progress. We think that progress, and progress in education in particular, depends on the incorporation of the ideas and images included in this set in the daily lives of all of us, from childhood through old age.”
A Liberal Arts Education for All
“The spirit of Western civilization is the spirit of inquiry,” Hutchins proclaimed.