John Erskine (12 nov 1897 ano – 13 dez 1937 ano)

Descrição:

John Erskine (1896–1954)
Literary scholar
BA 1900
MA 1901
PhD 1903
1904-1909: teaching at Amherst
Faculty at Columbia: 1909-37
LittD 1929 (hon.)

http://c250.columbia.edu/c250_celebrates/remarkable_columbians/john_erskine.html: "Erskine's conception of a General Honors course in classic texts spawned the Colloquium on Important Books and later Humanities A. Though he never taught in a freshman core course, Erskine's influence on general education courses extended beyond the College to affect all of American education....Although he was a gifted teacher, Erskine seems to have lacked a traditional scholarly disposition. His flamboyance, eccentricities, and literary ambitions set him apart from most of his more staid colleagues at the College. Nevertheless, what he lacked in academic formality he made up in humanity and purpose.


Erskine was a student of George Edward Woodberry, who was appointed to a comparative literature chair at Columbia in 1891. Woodberry emphasized "literature was life itself," and championed reading great books (see his book, Great Writers (1912) (for more, see Cross, Oasis of Order)

Cross: In concentrating exclusively on classic texts, the course marked a new approach, but Erskine's real innovation was to "treat the Iliad, the Odyssey, and other masterpieces as though they were recent publications, calling for immediate investigation and discussion."4 Not only did this mean reading works in translation, which was bad enough for many of his colleagues, but also reading them outside of traditional academic disciplines. In Erskine's plan, students would read and discuss each book rather than being introduced to it in lectures and through secondary sources. In fact, although the plan was to teach "classic" texts, General Honors was actually a reaction against the empty classicism of many contemporary liberal education programs." (Oasis of Order, ch. 2).

This was critisized for its superficiality, and defended as a humane first encounter. ERskine had started pitching this in 1917, but the war interrupted the effort.

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