LifeLong Learning

:Cross post:

There is an article in this month's Reader's Digest about a book list a teacher created for students who might not have the opportunity to go on to college. It was thought to be the equivalent of two years of college learning.

I'm surprised that there aren't more non-fiction books on the list but perhaps it's because textbooks, etc. are updated every few years or so? I found it interesting to see what was on the list and wondered what would you add or edit?

How long ago was this list created? It looks like a list created in the 1960s?
Not only is there very little non-fiction, but there is also very little on this list that was not written by white American men.

Surely they are doing more diverse reading than this in college these days?

For non-fiction, I would add The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste. There are many other works of nonfiction, particularly narrative nonfiction, that would bring different perspectives to a liberal arts education.

>1 genesisdiem:

I'm surprised that there aren't more non-fiction books on the list but perhaps it's because textbooks, etc. are updated every few years or so?

But the non-fiction books on the list aren't textbooks.

It's a pretty dated and narrow literary canon, and not much else. I can't imagine a time when that list would be supposed to pass for undergraduate levels of cultural comprehension. It's more like an overblown secondary (i.e. high school) curriculum.

What a dated, tiresome Canon Of Literature list. I mean, it's Reader's Digest, so I don't know that I would have expected better, but that's almost a parody of itself.

The article with the list admits that it was given to the person offering the list during their junior year in the late 1960s, by a teacher who had probably been building it for a decade prior to that.