https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-odyssey-of-roosevelt-montas/
His education in the ‘Great Books’ and in the purpose of the humanities has enabled him to write a valuable and persuasive book.
Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation, by Roosevelt Montás (Princeton University Press, 248 pages, $24.95)
Roosevelt Montás was born very poor in a remote rural village in the Dominican Republic in 1973 and managed to immigrate with family members to the United States in 1985, living in impoverished circumstances and broken homes in New York City. He has now written a poignant and edifying book about how he emerged from such circumstances and ended up getting bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in English and comparative literature from Columbia University and becoming a key instructor and administrator in the famous Columbia undergraduate liberal-arts program generally known as the Core Curriculum, now a century in operation. Rescuing Socrates is a valuable and thoughtful book both sociologically and educationally, making a contribution to the ongoing debate over the past, present, and future of liberal-arts education in the United States.
It is temptingly easy to see Montás’s success story in assimilating to Anglophone, elite Western intellectual culture as in fact the rare exception that proves the general rule that for poor, immigrant, racial- and ethnic-minority students the very structure of Western high culture and institutions is essentially irrelevant, useless, exclusive, humiliating, and destructive. What about the other 95 percent of such students who did not happen to encounter a passionately committed high-school teacher who encouraged a bookish young man’s accidental discovery of a discarded copy of some of Plato’s dialogues?
Yet Montás’s book is sufficiently complex and deep in its treatment of large-scale cultural and curricular issues to warrant wide and careful reading about our current educational condition. Though he has indeed become a vigorous spokesman for “Great Books” education, his own upward path is not unduly idealistic or unrealistic about ethnic, linguistic, and class dynamics: Only on the surface is it a story of “making it.”
Living in socially anarchic urban circumstances, Montás went to a nonselective, multiethnic high school in the New York City borough of Queens, and a dedicated teacher mentored him and suggested he enroll in an intensive summer program, at Columbia University, sponsored by New York State for able lower-income and socially disadvantaged students, HEOP: the Higher Education Opportunity Program. The social and emotional costs of this program were wounding but were ultimately outweighed by the benefits of induction into the middle-class Anglophone educational milieu that enabled him subsequently to get admitted on scholarship to Columbia.
