Except for the eight years I spent on the Farm, I have been reading books constantly since I was a teenager. Some of it was science fiction and detective stories, i.e., Heinlein, frank herbert, Asimov, Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, but for the most part it was the classics of 19th and 20th century literature and non-fiction. For a boomer I am a relatively hyper-self-educated man.
But I haven’t read Milton or Dante or much of Homer or Aquinas. I don’t speak or read French or Latin or Greek. Compared to an educated man of the 19th century, I am an ignorant plebeian.
Of course I know several computer languages. I know a lot of Beatles lyrics. I’ve read Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and Vonnegut, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, William Styron, Henry James, Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Nabokov, Steinbeck, Arther Koestler, Aldous Huxley, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Jung, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, etc., authors unknown in the 19th century.
At the same time I am woefully ignorant of any music or literature or Philosophy since the 80s.
At this point when everything is available everywhere all the time for anyone who is interested, what does it mean to have a classical liberal education? What should be included/excluded? It’s no wonder that colleges are struggling with this question.
But what I hate is that these choices are being made on the basis of equal representation for everyone except white Western males, rather than on the quality of the material itself. It has become an exercise in “social justice” rather than an attempt to put together a collection of the most profound human works.
If you are living within the bosom of Western civilization, what is wrong with studying the art, music, philosophy, and literature of Western civilization? And then, if you choose, you can also study the same of other civilizations. But basing the choice of what you study on the gender and color of the authors seems to me, to put it kindly, ridiculous, less kindly, insane.