I can sympathize with your concern about spreading too thin but justifying this by saying that Western philosophy is the most relevant thought system in today’s world betrays an ignorance that even most Americans have largely remediated. Any person not living under a rock for the past decade can tell you that the rise to super-power status of countries like China and India is undeniable. Once this democratization of world power takes place, diminishing the tyranny of the so-called NGOs that are stifling their growth, it’s only a matter of time before Africa, South-East-Asia and the rest of the world follows suit.

Couple that with the spending and eating habits of Americans, and the increasing godlessness and disintellectualization of Europe (essentially amounting to a complete rejection of any of the values and beliefs you’ll read about in the above list — so much for relevance) and it’s clear where the balance of future power is headed.

In raising your concern, you make the incorrect assumption that depth of study is only achievable through dividing rational thought based on cultures. The fact of the matter is that when it comes to learning how to think this distinction is imaginary and even harmful. If anything, this reading list raises all sorts of alarm bells regarding the state of liberal arts education today. If you want to make arguments for deep thinking based on a narrow focus, you can continue to take it to absurd limits. Harold Bloom thinks that there is nothing about human nature that one cannot learn from Shakespeare so why not fashion a syllabus based on ruthless dissection of Shakespeare for all four years of college? Compared to that, the above list is but a “basic survey”.

Part of being a good thinker necessarily involves the ability to contrast and view the sum of all human knowledge from a global perspective. Perhaps it was just such a lack of diversification that led your computer science professor to make his unfortunate generalization.

It’s okay to make mistakes, which we make plenty of. But then we don’t acknowledge them or seek to find out from others what went wrong. We just continue to impose our will. Our latest big blunder is trying to impose democracy at the end of gun. How unbelievably stupid. Especially, when trying to impose it on a culture that has absolutely no understanding of it.

We also think it’s unpatriotic to question such actions. This only reinforces our arrogance with stubbornness. Not a great combination.

As you say, every country does bad stuff. And lots of good stuff. It’s important to know both if we want to understand our world. Hence the reason to study Western/American history in depth. Know what brought us here. Know what’s built up perceptions.

You left out all the good things the US has done.

Yes, we have made mistakes and done stupid things, but EVERY country has done that.

In defense of studying Western civilization, America seems to have a very short memory. I periodically hear people asking “Why do they hate us?” In part, it’s because other countries have longer memories. People in the Middle East remember (through passing it down) the crusader slaughters of even Christian Arabs. They remember the forceful reinstallation of the Shah or the US selling weapons to Saddam. Other countries textbooks may bring up the US internment (“concentration”? without the killing, of course) camps during WWII where the Japanese US citizens got sent. Or the virtual extinction (planned and unplanned) of the First Nations/Native Americans.

If Americans knew more of their own history and how their country (and the West) had interacted with the rest of the world, the world might make a lot more sense.

It’s beneficial to have a thorough understanding of one system of thought (and Western philosophy is the most important and relevant in today’s world) before going on to learn all the other interesting systems.

The sad thing, Andy, is that judging from your comment you do have pretty in-depth knowledge of philosophy, and probably Western philosophy. You know Cauchy’s impact on calculus, something pretty rare outside of math majors who took real analysis. You’ve read Dostoevsky in multiple languages. And now you want to rob people of the experience of learning a beautiful philosophical system in great detail… why? You say Dostoevsky is boring… would you feel justified in saying that if you had only read one book by him? Hopefully not. Can you accurately judge the impact that Western literature has had on you?

Honestly, you sound like a computer science professor I had who said “If you’re a bad programmer, you’ll never learn to be a good one” — forgetting the 30 years of experience he had and the slow buildup of technology over that time that gave him detailed knowledge of every aspect of programming (whereas today kids are tossed a Java book, their senior project is a web application, and people wonder why the hell they don’t understand pointers in C).

Yay a bunch of Europeans disagree about God and the world and it forms the basis for how the Western world works. How about switching out some of those books for literature from other cultures and maybe we can understand how other countries and their people view the world?