The Virtues of a Liberal Education with Roosevelt Montás

Roosevelt Montás is a senior lecturer at Columbia University’s Center for American Studies and director of its Freedom and Citizenship Program, which introduces low-income high school students to the Western political tradition through the study of foundational texts. In his book, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation , Montás argues for the unique value of required general education courses based on the study of great books, including the traditional canon, beginning somewhere close to Homer and extending to the present. His conception of the “great books” differs somewhat from the traditional one in that it isn’t exclusively Western, in that it is concerned with the recovery and foregrounding of voices that have been marginalized, and in that it emphasizes the inclusion of diverse authors as we approach contemporaneity. Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum, one of America’s last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career—he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college.