The Classics Everyone Should Read Today
To build a better world in the age of AI, students need grounding in indispensable ideas.
In 1970, the poet, educator, and architect June Jordan posed the following question during a middle-school graduation speech in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn: “Where are the central, required courses that will teach us our real heritage of heroes and heroines, rebellion, and loving accomplishment?”
Questions like this are at the forefront of my mind lately. Like Jordan, I’m a writer who teaches students of all ages. As a literature professor at MIT, I’m working to develop Great Books programming—inspired by her dream of what a general curriculum might look like—that centers the history, poetics, and philosophy of science. Toward that end, I spent the past summer talking to physicists, poets, political scientists, materials-science engineers, and high-school teachers in English and robotics about the literary works that shaped their lives. You’ll recognize some of the authors whose names emerged from those conversations. Homer, Hansberry, Virgil, Whitman, Dickinson, and Dewey all made appearances. So did Melville and Morrison, Douglass and Du Bois. The central theme of our list was invention—the dance between the examined life and the art of self-creation. A number of these colleagues and friends are now working with me to build a program that will live at MIT but also be available to the general public: a set of living documents and dynamic conversations, open access, available to all.
What we are trying to do is not just help ground students—the large majority of them scientists and engineers in training—in a humanistic research program, but to identify irreplaceable ideas during a time of accelerated change. In the world beyond campus, each day brings news about the dangers and wonders of artificial intelligence: that it will lead to economic abundance, the end of a range of life-threatening diseases, and the light-speed distribution of human knowledge around the globe. At the same time, reports warn of declining rates of literacy and damage to our working memories, the potential for mass job loss, and possibly much worse. Why many people have stopped reading, or no longer see the beauty or necessity of it, is one matter. But the question of why reading—especially reading that challenges and surprises us—is presently indispensable is another. How might timeless works of art, literary and otherwise, help prepare each of us for this new world?
Every educational reform has to meet its particular moment. And the cultural turn toward artificial intelligence is only part of what makes this project timely: In my view, we need a renewed emphasis not just on the arts and humanities as such, but on making meaningful connections between humanistic thinking and technological development. We need to clarify, often and in public, why the pursuit of scientific knowledge matters in the first place, as well as what we actually want pathbreaking new technologies to offer us. Just as important, we must equip young people with the tools they need to navigate a social and political landscape that is growing more hostile toward the core premises of higher learning and scientific research.
My sense of the transformative power of literature didn’t come from the academy. It is an inheritance, largely from my great-grandmother. She was born 30 years after the abolition of slavery, lived into the 1980s, and ultimately shaped my mother’s approach to education. The beauty of reading, she told her, of what you learn and preserve in your mind, is that it can never be stolen. It is yours the way little else in this life is yours. A reader is never entirely alone; the text opens a portal between friends and strangers, the dead and the living. Amid a nationwide crisis in education—and a parallel crisis of transcendent meaning and social belonging—my sense is that this is a crucial time to return to works that help us practice patience, astonishment, and deep attention to the details of the world around us. This work, if it is effective, will not only beautify our days. It will also make us more courageous, imaginative, and free.
There has never been broad agreement on exactly what constitutes a core curriculum. Its history in the United States is marked by a series of debates that continue into the present. The “Yale Report of 1828” reflects this reality: After describing the foundation of a “thorough education” for college students, the document identifies the “two great points to be gained in intellectual culture” as “the discipline and the furniture of the mind.” For its authors, the imagination of a young person was akin to a physical space that demanded a particular kind of structure, and adornment.
This report is conscious, from its first pages, of the new possibilities offered by science education; one early passage describes visiting Yale alumni who “express their surprise” at the fact that, since they’ve graduated from an institution once primarily devoted to religious education, “whole sciences have, for the first time, been introduced.” Anticipating the criticisms their version of the core curriculum may face, the authors pose a rhetorical question: “But why, it may be asked, should a student waste his time upon studies that have no immediate connection with his future profession?” Their answer, like the query itself, seems prescient today: “Every thing throws light upon everything.” Little more than a century later, another Great Books curriculum, at St. John’s College, likewise incorporated the sciences into its sprawling vision: Its four-year reading list included “classic works in philosophy, literature, political science, psychology, history, religion, economics, math, chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, music, language, and more.”
Columbia University has had a core curriculum since 1919. Wanting to know why it continues to resonate with students today, I called a colleague, Roosevelt Montás. A Columbia alumnus, he directed its Center for the Core Curriculum for a decade. Last year, Montás became an endowed professor at Bard College, which has a first-year Great Books seminar; as part of his new position, he travels across the country speaking with other institutions about their visions of what a Great Books program should look like. Montás has an expansive sense of the promise and power of a core curriculum, incorporating widely accepted classics—by Milton, Shelley, et al.—into a larger, universal syllabus, a gathering of ancient and contemporary authors who enhance our understanding of what it means to be human across time and space.
When we spoke, Montás interwove the story of his life into this larger vision: Arriving in New York from the Dominican Republic at 12 years old; learning English alongside other first-generation students in Queens; choosing Columbia because it was “the most selective school that I could get to on the subway.” Once there, Montás was immediately struck by the creative resources that the Columbia Core offered him. The program is grounded primarily in foundational texts from around the world that are studied across two years. The first year focuses on epic poetry, fiction, religious literature, and drama: from the Epic of Gilgamesh to The Aeneid, and on through the King James Bible, Dante and Shakespeare, Austen and Woolf. The second year explores philosophy and politics, beginning with Plato and concluding with the works of Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, and others. While pursuing his Ph.D. at Columbia, Montás went on to teach these classes to a new generation of students who, like him, sought not just historical knowledge, or higher meaning, but common ground.
The set of programs we are working to establish at MIT—ones that bridge the sciences and the humanities and reach beyond campus—has its precedents. In 1917, an MIT literature professor named Frank Aydelotte worked as a writing consultant at AT&T, leading seminars for its younger employees to help improve their writing and communication skills. That same year, he published a book titled English and Engineering: a primer for educators interested in sharing the wonders of literature with STEM-focused students. Almost 60 years later, MIT established the Mario Umana Harbor School for Science and Technology, a high school where working-class kids from East Boston met astronauts, programmed computers, and learned to fly airplanes (the syllabus for this particular course began with a bit of Greek mythology—the story of Daedalus, Icarus, and their experiments in aviation science).
More recently, I have found inspiration in Concourse, an interdisciplinary learning community at the institute where students can take a unique set of classes, and share meals and communal space for a year. Based on the vision of two engineering professors, Concourse was meant, as its name suggests, to be a place where the sciences and humanities overlapped. The founding group of faculty held its first seminar, “From Earth to Moon: Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy,” in 1970 and welcomed its first cohort of 35 students the next year. More than half a century later, Concourse hosts almost twice that number. Anne McCants, a history professor who recently led Concourse, told me that the original program aimed to provide “a more complete education,” one in which students would study celestial mechanics in the morning and “read Galileo in the afternoon.” It was not, she clarifies, built around “a Great Books curriculum,” but rather “a curriculum that cares about books that are great.” Not a program built around a rigid canon, then, but one dedicated to an ever-evolving collection of illuminating works.
On the reading list we are now building—our curriculum that cares about books that are great—you’ll find Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, Tracy K. Smith’s poetry collection Life on Mars, and “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence,” written by a group of mathematicians and engineers that included John McCarthy, the man who coined the term artificial intelligence in the 1950s. Our work brings to mind the philosopher Richard Rorty’s essay “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature,” in which he wrote: “We should cheerfully admit that canons are temporary, and touchstones replaceable. But this should not lead us to discard the idea of greatness.”
Rorty’s essay serves as the conclusion to his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country. The collection’s title comes from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which closes with a call to “change the history of the world.” In a moment when stories proliferate about the end of literacy, and the end of higher education as a reasonable aim of everyday people, the chance to work with students from around the world, who bring their own visions of the good and the beautiful into the classroom, gives me hope. It reminds me that the future is open, and that the materials we need to shape it are all around us; they call from the past in verse and image, painting and film, sculpture and song. This process of passing cherished knowledge from generation to generation is the keystone of our shared enterprise: the protection and preservation of what makes us human, and what brings worth and wonder to our lives. We—and this is a capacious “we,” meant to include millions of us—are stewards of this precious continuity.
These timeless containers of human wisdom and experience are for everyone, no matter your background or professional aspirations. They belong to us all: to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ralph Waldo Ellison alike. And not unlike Ellison—who interpolates the words of Herman Melville in the first pages of his 1952 classic, Invisible Man—I am interested in an approach to reading and teaching in which canonization does serves not as a hermetic seal, shielding a work from contact, but rather as an occasion for new interpretations, riffs, and reimaginings. This is the project we now take up together: using all the instruments we have available to us as readers and writers, engineers and artisans, scientists and poets, to find our way into these texts. And to build another world from what we find there.