"Rescuing Socrates" by Roosevelt Montas
Roosevelt Montás was a teenage Dominican immigrant in New York when he discovered a stack of books left by a neighbor on the curbside as garbage. One of them was Plato’s dialogues on the last days of Socrates, the record of the thoughts of a philosopher who chose death over falsehood. The dialogues changed him, although at the time he couldn’t explain how, and opened a window onto a world of contrasting ideas and well-reasoned wisdom.
Montás earned a scholarship to Columbia where that window opened wider thanks to the school’s Core Curriculum. Now Director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, Montás
is staving off the efforts by the apparatchiks of academia to throw “great books” programs into the garbage of history.
Rescuing Socrates is a memoir, a history of American higher education and an impassioned argument for the essential value of the humanities in education. Knowledge in a data-driven society is a click away. Knowing how to use knowledge is something else altogether. Great thinkers of the past can show us how.
The portions of Rescuing Socrates devoted to Montás’ impoverished childhood in the Dominican Republic and disadvantaged high school years in Queens are especially moving, but Montás is assured throughout and on solid footing. Rescuing Socrates is a critique of the impoverishment of education by a mixed crew of culprits—the postmodern fashionistas who deny the ideals of truth and virtue alongside a managerial establishment for whom colleges exist to train worker ants for their tasks in the hive of a market society.
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As for those who say that liberal education based on classic texts is elitist, Montás responds not only by expanding the curriculum but by insisting that the goal of education in a democracy should be to lift everyone up, not dumb most of us down. Students should read books that help them to think, not texts that dull their minds.
