How often are textbooks used in UofC courses?

JHS
Wed, 30 Jun 2010 09:48:46 +0000

No one at Chicago is going to assign you to read Will Durant’s textbook, unless it’s part of a graduate course on the history of teaching philosophy. That’s not to say that you wouldn’t enjoy it and learn something, but I would be surprised if there were any philosophy class at Chicago that was taught from a textbook (as opposed to reading texts themselves).

My kids have completed 7.5 kid-years at the University of Chicago, mainly studying humanities and social sciences. The only textbooks I have ever purchased were for those nasty pre-med science courses, for the first two years of a language, and for some courses that were essentially statistics courses taught in a social science department. Humanities – even broad Civ survey classes – were mostly taught from original texts only, and some articles. (In one class, my daughter read a textbook as a supplementary thing to help her understand what was going on, but that was a very unique situation, where the class did not meet for the first month, the students were given a huge reading list in alphabetical order, and their first/midterm assignment was to propose a more appropriate, syllabus-like organization of the reading list.)

I imagine introductory econ or psychology courses may use a textbook, too.

If I can suggest some books: Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers is a 1950s history of classical economics that still gets read and discussed today (unlike Durant, really). Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of a Scientific Revolution and Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach are cross-disciplinary works that a wide variety of people care deeply about and refer to a lot, but that don’t tend to be assigned. Somewhat similar touchstone books that do tend to be assigned are Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses), the Walter Benjamin essays collected in Illuminations, and the Claude Levi-Strauss essays in Structural Anthropology. Plus, I think almost everyone who goes to the University of Chicago ends up reading Freakonomics.