Classic texts by philosophers like Socrates and Plato were discussed in Roosevelt Montas’ new book.
Montas, senior lecturer of American studies and English at Columbia University, wrote a book, titled “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.” He discussed it at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 14 at the Memorial Student Center.
“Rescuing Socrates” explores his experiences with liberal education and how it changed his life as a young man born in the Dominican Republic and moving to Queens, New York, at 11 years old.
He explained the book is both “personal and polemical” and said the driving force behind the book is “the way in which liberal education has altered and enriched the trajectory of my life.”
One of his first interactions with classic texts was in his sophomore year of high school, where he found a Harvard Classics series book in a garbage pile outside of his family’s rented apartment. The Harvard book included dialogues recorded by Plato that document the last days of Socrates’ life.
“This first encounter with Socrates was as fortuitous as it was decisive,” Montas said. “There is probably no better introduction to the life of the mind than Socrates’ defense of his philosophical activity in these dialogues.”
Montas said he used these dialogues for over a decade to “introduce low-income high school students to a world that, almost without exception, had been until then inaccessible and inconceivable to them.”
Montas’ formal liberal education started when he was a freshman at Columbia University, an Ivy League school.
“There, I began to make sense of the world and of my place in it through the social and intellectual initiation that is the core curriculum,” he said.
When discussing his 10 years as the director of the Columbia core curriculum, he said, “I did a lot of advocacy, a lot of speaking, about the power and importance of liberal education, and even though I always recognized that the value of liberal education is rooted in a subjective and personal experience, throughout my time as the director of the Columbia core, I avoided making the case for liberal education with reference to my own story.”
Montas expressed his “profound distaste” for the stereotypes of immigrants, saying, “It’s not that these things aren’t true about me, but that I have refused to turn those aspects of my life into an identity.”
“I do not want my case for liberal education to be about my story,” he said.
Jordan Ooten can be contacted at [email protected].
