Only at St John’s College, where Adler’s friend Scott Buchananbecame president, was there instituted what Harry Ashmore calls a‘hundred-proof Great Books curriculum’.

The School of the People’s Institute,

As ScottBuchanan has said, "Popular science has made every manhis own quack; he needs some of the doctor's medicine."

The men who crafted Great Books programs, most prominently John Erskine, Mortimer Adler, and Scott Buchanan, promoted the idea that the reading of classics was a task meant for all students, at all levels, even if the works were translated from their original language. At several colleges, the curricula of undergraduate programs came to be based upon the reading of these Great Books.

certain sub-currents in their thought. One being the proposition that the original (or translated) texts of the most influential Western books are vastly superior material to study for serious minds than are textbooks that merely give pre-digested (often mis-digested) assessments of the ideas contained therein.