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Entry: The Pentagon Needs a Choreographer Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/the_pentagon_needs_a_choreographer#33230 Post contents: The Great Books curriculum predates Strauss and predates our modern educational debates. It's revitalization in the 1940s at Colubmia and at Chicago under Robert Maynard Hutchins had its origins in a rejection of the technocratic and vocational model nascent among universities. It's the kind of education that a Burke or Sir Henry Maine or John Stuart Mill received. It's the kind of education extolled by Russell Kirk, who along with Burke was probably my biggest intellectual influence in college to me. I was unfamiliar with the link you provided, but am aware that a certain kind of reading of the Great Books--which I encountered at Chicago--focuses on their supposed secret or esoteric meaning. I alwayd found this viewpoint a bit too clever. I also got into my share of disputes with Tarcov, Kass, and Cropsey--gentleman all--for their Lincoln worship, which struck me as having a whiff of Jacobinism. That said, I think Leo Strauss is interesting and worth reading, not least for his invitation to re-read the Classics not as mere historical artifacts but as people speaking to us directly to mankind for all time about the important questions of life. I was a Burkean conservative in college, and my views were not too different from what they are now, though some new issues have appeared to say the least. Sent at: 2008 12 02