Top Lessons and Thoughts From The Great Conversation

Below are the highlights from the post I just published. To read the full post with book highlights from the book go here.

Summary

• Old voices can help us live better lives now, they did not have the distraction we have today, and properly thought about the use of our time and brains.
• Intellectual people can't be lied to by loud politicians. Smart people have their own opinion.
• The liberally educated man has a mind that can operate well in all fields. He may be a specialist in one field. But he can understand anything important that is said in any field and can see and use the light that it sheds upon his own.
• By the end of the first quarter of this century great books and the liberal arts had been destroyed by their teachers. The books had become the private domain of scholars. The word "classics" came to be limited to those works which were written in Greek and Latin. In reality, these books are the public domain and are available to everyone and can be consumed by any one person.
• Community is the future (of humanity). To improve we need better messages, better people, not better methods of distribution.
• Facts have to be supplemented by thinking.
• Great books teach people not only how to read them, but also how to read all other books.
• No one said that these books are easy. But they will get easier as you go through them.
• Many people now expect to be done with learning ones they are out of college. However, the most important things that human beings ought to understand cannot be comprehended in youth. Youth is for building habits and discipline that will allow one to pursue further education in the adulthood. Childhood and youth are no time to get an education. They are the time to get ready to get an education. The great issues, now issues of life and death for civilization, call for mature minds. Childhood is a stage of life reserved for being a child nothing more.
• The principle of an aristocracy was honor, and the principle of a tyranny was fear, the principle of a democracy was education.
• The understanding of the west will help with understanding of the east.
• Every man's mind ought to keep working all his life long; Liberal education ought to end only with life itself.

My Thoughts

This book is an intro book to the Great Books of the Western World series (GBotWW, or just 'series' from now on), where Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler try to convince the readers on why it is crucial to read these books. They refer to this series as liberal education and they believe each one of us is capable and should pursue it.

This book has been written in 1952, and with that in mind it is incredible how many topics they cover are relevant today. Not only are they relevant, but also predict the future in a very precise manner.

I don't think it makes too much sense to read this book in a vacuum, but only if you are planning to read the series. You surely be convinced that spending the time to read this challenging books is worth your time and effort.

Apart from convincing you to approach the series they will do a great job of telling you how to approach it (there are multiple approaches). The approach I have decided to follow is a 10 Year Reading Plan, which slowly gets you into the minds of the Greatest People in our history. Conveniently, they have sorted these works by the level of difficulty, and so as you follow along you will get more and more accustomed to authors and topics. And by the end of this series you will be able to tackle any works that your heart and brain desire.

By reading these books you can take part in the Great Conversation between those authors. While reading you will find them referring to each other and being influenced by each other. Their thoughts and opinions are built on top of their predecessors. Standing on the shoulders of giants.