Padilla’s criticisms raise the perennial question of utility—what is an education for?—and inflect it with the social-justice mission that seems to have permeated virtually all of the nation’s academic, cultural, and artistic institutions. Yet it is Montas who answers most persuasively: The purpose of an education is liberation. And the ideas and traditions that support that liberation are not and can never be crudely racialized as one group’s property, thinned out and flattened beneath the rolling pin of identity. We are not only one thing (Dominican! Brown! ESL!) and ideas are not black or white. They are good or bad, worthy or not worthy, useful or not useful—judgments that can shift and evolve with time, and not always for the worse.
“Many people today, even academics, take the approach to liberal education based on the study of classics to be elitist and exclusivist, with little understanding of the democratizing impulse behind it,” Montas writes. But “we do minority students an unconscionable disservice” when we steer them away from it. “We condescend to them when we assume that only works in which they find their ethnic or cultural identities affirmed can really illuminate their human experience.”
Ideas and identity are not in opposition, and they are not equals. Striving with and against the most durable human thinking to have created and altered the intellectual, cultural, and political landscape beyond our own backyard equips all of us to discover who we are most fully. This is the message brought vividly to life in Montas’s book. It is a simple one. But in times of extreme social tension and tribal polarization such as our own, the act of stating obvious, lasting truths can amount to the most generous form of bravery. (Source)
What is truly remarkable is that reading the Great Books should be controversial in the first place. Such thinking is thinkable only in a society that has lost its vertical dimension and is adrift in a sea being buffeted about by each new academic fad--including ideas about social justice. A thirst for Justice is among the most important things a human being can have, but our thinking about and understanding of Justice deserves more than what too often is thought of as a kindergarten level of fairness between two egotistical children.
See also "Jacobin Magazine on the Great Books"