Three books that made me go to graduate school

Libraries change lives, people.

To be honest, I always expected to go to graduate school. I’ve always been the kid who generally succeeded in school environments and appreciated institutional validation. It wasn’t really a question of whether I’d go to graduate school but where.

Today I’d like to reflect on three books which redirected my education and, by extension, my life.

Reforming Education by Mortimer J. Adler (1989)

I should be clear: I read this one in graduate school. The first graduate school, that is. This book redirected me toward my second one.

In 2017, I began attending Drake University to earn my MA and teaching licensure. I was still working for the military full-time, so I took courses in the evening. I knew that my time with the Army was coming to a close, and I wanted to be on the path toward a second career. I was interested in teaching, but I was not sure if it was a good fit for me. I decided to take a couple classes to get a taste of the profession and make a more informed decision.

In one of those first classes, we had to do a book report. There were a range of choices, but I went with this collection of essays by Mortimer Adler. I’ll admit that half the reason I picked it was because I liked saying his name. I also knew that he was from the “perennialist” school, meaning he believed in studying the works which stood the test of time. I didn’t really know what that meant, but I wanted to learn more.

Many things about this book made me uncomfortable.

If there is a thesis running through the essays, it’s that Adler wants educators to notice the way that formal education can be oriented around student subordination instead of liberation. He wants teachers to think very carefully about whether they are imposing an opinion on students and telling them it’s a fact. This is education by domination, a form that celebrates students’ docility above all.

“If we affirm a principle that is supposed to be self-evident, without its being evident to us, or a conclusion that is supposed to be demonstrated, without being able to demonstrate it... we have acquired an opinion, not knowledge; and if we persist in it through a sort of verbal memory, rather than a truly intellectual penetration of truth, we have been indoctrinated, not instructed."

-Mortimer Adler

Adler highlights the way that textbooks will present answers without presenting the process of arriving at those answers. Even if the answers are truthful, you are just giving a student a fish, not teaching them to fish.

He is not the only person to acknowledge this dynamic. It’s at the root of practices like project-based learning and flipped classrooms and Montessori. But his solution was something different.

“The only college in the country… that still persists as a college in which general, liberal, humanistic learning is required for four years is St. John’s College… There are no departments at St. John’s College. There are no professors. Every member of the faculty must teach the whole curriculum. That is the only way you can make it work. That is the ideal.”

Adler believed that the way to avoid indoctrination was by having students read classic texts for themselves without using textbooks or secondary sources. The job of the teacher was not to instruct but to facilitate students’ own process of discovery. Ultimately, the teacher needed to help students see that they didn’t need teachers in order to learn.

And he believed there was one place, just one, where that kind of education was happening: St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.

As someone training to be a teacher, this put me in a bit of a bind. Adler’s arguments were convincing, but I wasn’t sure what to do with them.

I ended up taking a few days off work and visiting St. John’s College later that year to see for myself. I spent a day with St John’s graduate students, studying geometry and poetry and going to a pub to keep the conversation going.

I still wasn’t sure whether they were “right” about education, but I did know I wanted to experience this approach for myself.

I ended up finishing my teaching degree in 2019, about a year after I left the Army. A week after my graduation from Drake University, I was in Maryland to do the summer term at St. John’s College.

I still wasn’t sure why, but I knew I had to go.

Colleges that Change Lives by Loren Pope and Hilary Masell Oswald (2012)

I arrived at St. John’s College in May 2019. After a week, I started wondering what exactly I had gotten myself into.

My first class had five students. We met every day to discuss Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

We sat around a small table. The professor (called a “tutor” at St. John’s) would begin the class by asking a question about the section we’d read. Perhaps he would read a quote out loud. And then he’d sit there and wait.

For long stretches, there would be silence. We came to no conclusions. I kept a notebook with me in class, but there were no notes to take. Spending time writing during the meeting was explicitly discouraged anyway. Instead, you spoke. Mostly you listened. And you embraced silence.

Was this really graduate school? Was this really education?

I ended up visiting the St. John’s library and looking for books about the college itself. I felt totally unmoored, and I wanted to get a sense of what this place was and where it really stood in the world of higher education.

This little book was what I found.

It contains profiles of 40 colleges that it claims will “change lives.” St. John’s is one of them. The authors give profiles of each institution, discussing what makes it unique and getting quotes from students and staff about just how unique the place is.

This told me a little bit about St. John’s. But it told me less than I thought it would about what makes a college unique.

Some profiles described properly atypical institutions, like the Great Books program at St. John’s or the universal undergraduate research program at College of Wooster.

Others were less convincing. In the book, Wheaton’s claim to fame is that it’s a good liberal arts school and it’s a Christian school. Hiram has small class sizes and intensive study courses. Eckerd has a beach.

All of those things might be cool or valuable, but do they really change lives? Allow me briefly to quote myself from my 2019 Goodreads review of the book:

“But a lot of these schools seem to be something other than fundamentally different from many similar liberal arts colleges. If the biggest calling cards are small class sizes, an invested staff, and first-year seminars, there are a lot more than the few dozen schools profiled here doing that. Perhaps this list should be smaller and only include schools that are fundamentally distinct…”

I was looking for Uncommon Colleges. The question I was asking was how to determine “fundamental distinction” in colleges and universities.

I’ve been asking that question ever since.

I believed that St. John’s was unusual in a way that was deeper than aesthetics or emphasis. I believed its curriculum was doing something that called common higher education practices into question. But I also believed it could not be the only institution doing that.

I was sure that this was an interesting question. I wasn’t sure how big a question it was. So, I kept thinking about it. And I went back to Iowa to begin my high school teaching career.

Stoner by John Williams (1965)

I read this in January 2022 with

Wynne Kontos

from The RONA READer. It had been on both of our to-read lists for years, so we decided some mutual motivation was in order.

Since that first summer at St. John’s, I’d kept going back. As if it were summer camp, I spent eight weeks between school years reading books, writing papers, and embracing awkward silences. I made friends and played bocce and spent a lot of time at the Irish pub in the neighborhood.

And I kept thinking about that question. How unique was St. John’s College really? How would I even define “unique”?

While I’d read about more interesting institutions in the interim, I was doing so in isolation. I was driving the Google machine all over the internet, but it only made me realize the scale of my seemingly simple question was more than I could take in.

While I enjoyed my teaching position in many ways, I could also feel its impermanence. I always felt like I wasn’t being stretched enough by it. I felt busy and bored at the same time. I felt like teaching was not allowing me to ask new questions.

And I felt like Mortimer Adler would say my pedagogy was doing more indoctrinating than liberating.

Reading Stoner amidst all this tipped the scales.

It’s about a humble student who goes to a state university to get a degree in agriculture at the behest of his father. Entirely by accident, he falls in love with poetry while at college and changes his major.

He never returns home, opting instead to pursue a graduate degree and become a professor. He is captivated by an idea that he cannot put into words, and he lives his life enamored with that impression.

From there, things get bad. Without dabbling in spoilers, he endures disappointments, humiliations, and dead ends. He is practically forgotten even as he’s still alive.

And yet, he clings to the out-of-print volume of literary criticism he authored, and he smiles. He cherishes his fruitless and invisible pursuit.

What Stoner did for me was confirm that I was not alone. I was enraptured with an idea. I had questions about education in America that I could not answer passively. I had experiences in the classroom that I wanted to put into perspective. I knew I was curious, but I didn’t know how to ask new questions. Not really. Not robustly.

More than anything, I felt, inexplicably, that going back to grad school held something necessary for me. I felt like I had to go because, like Stoner, I couldn’t imagine not going anymore. It was circular, but I wanted to go to grad school in order to go to grad school.

Later that month, I confessed to my wife that I had to pursue a PhD. I disclosed it in a state of agitation, hesitant to admit it even to myself because I couldn’t explain what I planned to do with another degree. But I just knew.

After reading Stoner, I just knew.

A year and a half later, I was moving to Indiana to begin my next degree.

I still don’t know what I’ll get out of going to graduate school (for the third time). Maybe nothing. Maybe this is all a dead end for me.

And if that’s the case, then I hope that, like Stoner, I’ll hold my failures in my hands and smile.

I hope I’ll be grateful that I did the thing I had to do.

-Matt