Much that there is to learn cannot be learned from books. For example, students should not study religion, but actively seek and cultivate religious experience. Then they will know that all theologies are attempts to make sense out of something simple, direct, and real in human life. They should come to view great art as a valuable celebration of their own potentiality, a higher ordering of experience. Whenever possible, students should rediscover basic physical laws, and come into contact with scientists who, are working on the murky forefront of knowledge, far from the misleading certainties of textbooks.
Genuine experience is rare.
In the long run, though, experience is all there is. Above all, college should seek to cultivate that class of experiences which are integrative, generative, personal and social, individual and cosmic. They are accessible to everyone, as recent humanistic and somatic psychologies have shown. Great Books and great art are only one way to approach peak experiences. The goal is for the student to generate, in the course of his ordinary living, peak experiences and creative responses that are comparable to the best of the past.