Great Minds Reach Across Time
To Talk To Teen-Agers
James Bemis, Los Angeles Daily News
September 5, 1999
Can a modern teen-age girl find happiness in
a summer college program where students aren’t allowed
to bring their CDs, boom boxes or televisions?
Can she learn to love a university environment
with a dress code requiring women to wear skirts or dresses
and men shirts with collars to class? One whose etiquette
obligates students to call each other Mister or Miss in the
classroom when addressing each other? Answer: an unequivocal
yes. Or, as my 17-year-old daughter puts it, it was awesome!
My daughter, Marisa, just returned from a great
books seminar for high school students by Thomas Aquinas College
in Santa Paula. Forty-six students lived in the Residencess,
attended classes given by college tutors, and otherwise worked
and had fun on campus just like students at other colleges.
 Like
other college students, that is, with one big difference.
Instead of the watered-down gruel served up by most higher
education institutions, students in TAC’s summer program
study Plato, Sophocles, Euclid, St. Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare,
Thomas Jefferson and C.S. Lewis. Not books about these important
authors or modern interpretations of their works, but the
texts themselves are read and discussed - students meet the
authors face-to-face, so to speak. Here, great minds reach
across the chasms of time to speak directly to these young
people, stimulating educating and delighting in ways only
books can.
Political philosopher Michael Oakeshott said
the primary purpose of education is to initiate the young
into the conversations of their ancestors. Nowadays, though
most universities ignore this basic obligation, treating students
as mere economic units, future contributors to America’s
GNP, coldly viewing young people as bodies with their heads
severed from their hearts.
Not so at TAC, where the student is looked upon
as a whole person in possession of a head and a heart. This
is best exemplified in the civility and dress codes maintained
on campus, recognizing the true nature of young men and women
and their innate love of honor, nobility and charity. It is
only through prolonged contact with the corrupting influence
of modern culture that these finer instincts are trampled
upon and finally lost.
TAC preserves Oakeshott’s idea of a university,
teaching students to listen to and understand their predecessors’
conversations, and later, perhaps, to contribute voices of
their own. From this training, young people learn how to think,
how to determine their own ends and destiny. Education then
becomes an exciting quest for truth and beauty, one that’s
fired great imaginations in the past and fires imaginations
still.
 So
in arriving at TAC, Marisa entered a world of its own; one
with particular rhythms and urgencies. Contemplating the questions
absorbing great minds for centuries, she discovered she held
much in common with these prominent names from the past, finding
herself unafraid to grapple with Plato or challenge Abraham
Lincoln. All the world’s current obsessions shrink back
to their proper -that is, tiny - proportions. For this brief,
illuminating period, she raised her head above the immediate
and found it thrilling.
She met teen-agers from 16 states and British
Columbia - raised in regions a world apart, yet just like
her. She fell into a fast friendship with her roommate, Mary,
from the dairy country of Wisconsin, soon growing to love
the entire class and - to her surprise - the tutors and prefects
too. At the dinner-dance on the final night, there were hugs,
kisses, tears - and "let’s always stay in touch."
After two weeks, it was time to come home, back to the mundane
world of work, parents ‘and old friends. The moment I
saw her, though; I realized this was the same girl, yet different
somehow - more mature, self-confident, wiser in a way that’s
hard to measure. All I know is that whenever she talks about
the program, her eyes, illuminated by the light of 6,000 years
of human wisdom, shine much brighter than they did before.
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