David Bloom, who bid $580!
David is a regular reader and commenter on the Blog. He comments under a pseudonym. He is a teacher with a passion for books.
Thank you, David.
Every penny will go to support the work of the Network for Public Education.
And you will have a set of 50 volumes, personally selected by Charles Eliot and published in 1910.
Charles Eliot served as president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909. Clearly, he decided to spend his free time assembling the best thought of his day, and now it is yours.
I will pack the set and send to you, along with an inscribed copy of one of my own books.
That was fun.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Congratulations!
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Congratulations! A treasure trove is yours and all for a good cause!
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Hooray!!! Thank you both, Diane and Carol. My dad (who’s been helping me with this) is mailing the check this morning. He probably already did. Diane, your books will be adored, read, protected, cared for, and eventually passed on to a niece who, as a child in North Carolina, is already a bibliophile. I am going to have Diane Ravitch’s Five Foot Shelf! I will read and admire it every day.
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Congratulations! Diane, this was a great idea and yes, a lot of fun.
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TERRIFIC, David and Diane. WOW. Such a treasure.
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My grandfather (who died in 1989 at the age of 93) only went to the eighth grade in school. His “high school” education was reading that particular set of books. He was an extremely intelligent, well read man, despite never having taken a single assessment in the public schools he attended.
Congrats David.
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Ok Diane! What other treasures do you have for us to bid on???
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Not my dog or cat or grandchildren. I’m thinking.
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Books, dogs, cats, and grandchildren: treasures that can never be deleted.
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Peter Cunningham, editor of Education Post, once known as “Arne’s Brain,” once said to me, “We measure what we treasure.” I responded that the things I treasure can’t be measured.
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All that counts cannot be counted.
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Oh no. Not them! 🙂
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Whew!
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Well, outside of a dog, a book is man’s (or woman’s) best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read. Ba da bum bum. Sorry, I couldn’t resist. 🙂
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Heard it before. Still funny.
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Another from Groucho. The best Marx ever.
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Thank you. Didn’t recognize it. Love the Marx Brothers, especially Harpo.
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Interesting to think about how that collection and the University of Chicago Great Books of the Western World series would differ if published today. What titles would be discarded (how many readers of John Woolman are there out there today? What would be replaced by a different work from the same author? What would be added? Would the books contain fewer by Brits, Americans, and white men, and more by everyone else?
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Yes.
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Every effort to identify the “best” reflects its times and the experience of those who do the selection
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It’s also interesting to think about what criteria might be used by different people to determine what works are the “best” or the “greatest.”
So, for example, a collection might contain those works deemed by the editors
to have been most influential in the history of thought
to best typify historical eras, styles, archetypes, schools, genres, or points of view (in which case, the editors are striving for comprehensive illustration)
to comprehensively illustrate differing voices and cultural currents
to be the most original or finely wrought or otherwise best according to aesthetic criteria
to be most significant ethically, socially, or politically
There are other criteria, of course. I love it when editors find works of enormous value that aren’t widely read, that are relatively obscure, in an attempt to bring these to light. I would love to see, sometime, for example, Ohiyesa’s/Charles Eastman’s magnificent The Soul of the Indian (1903) in a high-school literature anthology.
One of the things that I loved about working, for many years, as an editor of literature anthologies for students is that I was able to give currency to works that I personally loved but that a lot of people didn’t know. For example, I included Denise Levertov’s outstanding poem “A Tree Telling of Orpheus” in a high-school literature anthology and was very pleased when the next editions of lots of literature anthologies picked this up. That kind of thing happened often, and I loved having that influence.
The current high-school lit anthologies are pretty awful. A few bits and pieces of classic lit (much less than in the past), without sufficient supporting historical apparatus for students to be able to engage with their uniqueness/strangeness/foreignness; a lot of badly written, ephemeral, contemporary selections thrown in to give the books currency; and Common Core-based study apparatus that seems to have been written hastily by hacks with very little literary, historical, and philosophical training. I advise teachers to avoid the current anthologies, which are flashy but dreadful, in favor of trade books and selections from anthologies published twenty years ago.
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Of course, some of the new selections might have to be more than 140 characters…. Think of all the authors of the 20th century. Still, the classics endure.
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Bob,
Yes, I was thinking the same thing!
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Tell your niece to read the part of the meditations of Marcus Aurelius about us humans being made for cooperation.
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Oh yes!
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This was fun Diane, and David, you got a real treasure. When I was growing up, I had my parents made two major education investments for their kids–the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Harvard Classics and the Great Books. I still have both sets (reprints of course), and cherish the wise politcal philosphers, and while do not recall any of the questions on the Stanford Binet, I recall much of what was learned from the wise major writers. Happy reading David.
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