What Life Asks of Us

A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. "The aim of a liberal education" the report declared, "is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves."
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The report implied an entire way of living. Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.

This approach is deeply consistent with the individualism of modern culture, with its emphasis on personal inquiry, personal self-discovery and personal happiness. But there is another, older way of living, and it was discussed in a neglected book that came out last summer called "On Thinking Institutionally" by the political scientist Hugh Heclo.

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A Reading List That Shaped a President

A Reading List That Shaped a President

Some of President-elect Barack Obama’s favored reading matter as mentioned in this article:

• The Bible
• "Parting the Waters," Taylor Branch
• "Self-Reliance," Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Gandhi’s autobiography
• "Team of Rivals," Doris Kearns Goodwin
• "The Golden Notebook," Doris Lessing
• Lincoln’s collected writings
• "Moby-Dick," Herman Melville
• "Song of Solomon," Toni Morrison
• Works of Reinhold Niebuhr
• "Gilead," Marilynne Robinson
• Shakespeare’s tragedies

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