COMMENTARY

Independent Observers

". . . a new and rapidly growing paedagogical movement called 'Reacting to the Past' is reinventing the Trivium for the 21st century."  —Niall W. Slater, Dobbs Professor of Greek and Latin, President, Phi Beta Kappa, in LiberalArtsOnline

"I came to this revisionist enterprise with a degree of skepticism, but attended the third "game" of the semester, the India Game, which is devoted to an extended version of the Simla conference that the British established in 1945 to determine the shape of India's future. . . The first and perhaps most important thing to say is that students are highly engaged all the time--aroused, amused, talkative. In a word, they are happy. In "Reacting to the Past," no student can withdraw from the class, even if she wanted to do so. The structure of the course forces them all to stay active. The students talk to one another outside of class; they meet in groups for strategy meetings, sometimes staying up as late as 4 a.m. to do so. They communicate by e-mail. Leaders emerge who cajole and shame the lazier students into performing.  .  . I think this is a brilliant and well-developed pedagogical experiment which has met with obvious success: The games produce engagement and ardor in the students and also a dangerous but exciting wrenching of belief in which the students learn the power of subjectivity.  I see the course as an excellent alternative to the traditional version of Contemporary Civilization [Columbia College's 'great books' discussion class.]  [Some students] might not be attracted to "Reacting to the Past," but those who are attracted will flourish and likely have the most exciting experience of their undergraduate careers."
—David Denby, author of Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World and staff writer for the New Yorker