Great Books

When John Locke quotes an author at length, it’s worth reading twice. In Locke’s

book Some Thoughts Concerning Education (perhaps the most forgotten classic on education), he quotes an unnamed author on the critical importance of great books. I read this quote every so often at a group I meet with every other week. We discuss the classics at a local pub, and use this quote as our “reason” for gathering. Since the thoughts contained within this quote are so important for the practice of education, I will quote it at length:

The study, says he, of the original text can never be sufficiently recommended. ‘Tis the shortest, surest, and most agreeable way to all sorts of learning. Draw from the spring-head, and take not things at second hand. Let the writings of the great masters be never laid aside, dwell upon them, settle them in your mind, and cite them upon occasion; make it your business throughly to understand them in their full extent and all their circumstances: acquaint yourself fully with the principles of original authors; bring them to a consistency, and then do you yourself make your deductions.

In this state were the first commentators, and do not rest till you bring yourself to the same. Content not yourself with borrowed lights, nor guide yourself by their view but where your own fails you and leaves you in the dark. Their explications are not your’s, and will give you the slip. On the contrary, your own observations are the product of your own mind, where they will abide and be ready at hand upon all occasions in converse, consultation, and dispute.

Lose not the pleasure it is to see that you are not stopp’d in your reading duty by difficulties that are invincible; where the commentators and scholiasts themselves are at a stand and have nothing to say. Those copious expositors of other places, who with a vain and pompous overflow of learning poured out on passages plain and easy in themselves, are very free of their words and pains, where there is no need. Convince yourself fully by this ordering your studies, that ‘tis nothing but men’s laziness which hath encouraged pedantry to cram rather than enrich libraries, and to bury good authors under heaps of notes and commentaries, and you will perceive that sloth herein hath acted against itself and its own interest by multiplying reading and enquiries, and encreasing the pains it endeavoured to avoid.”