Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler promoted a universal curriculum based upon the common and essential nature of all human beings and encompassing humanist and scientific traditions.
Other notable figures in the movement include Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan (who together initiated the Great Books program at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland), Mark Van Doren, Alexander Meiklejohn, and Sir Richard Livingstone, an English classicist with an American following.
Inspired by Adler's lectures, Sister Miriam Joseph wrote a textbook on the scholastic trivium and taught it as the Freshman seminar at Saint Mary's College.
Our political institutions cannot thrive, they may not even survive, if we do not produce a greater number of thinking citizens, from whom some statesmen of the type we had in the 18th century might eventually emerge.
Hutchins writes in the same vein: The business of saying ... that people are not capable of achieving a good education is too strongly reminiscent of the opposition of every extension of democracy.
It is the task of every generation to reassess the tradition in which it lives, to discard what it cannot use, and to bring into context with the distant and intermediate past the most recent contributions to the Great Conversation.
...the West needs to recapture and reemphasize and bring to bear upon its present problems the wisdom that lies in the works of its greatest thinkers and in the name of love[3] Perennialism was proposed in response to what many considered a failing educational system.
Again Hutchins writes: The products of American high schools are illiterate; and a degree from a famous college or university is no guarantee that the graduate is in any better case.
In a highly negative review of the book, Dewey wrote a series of articles in The Social Frontier which began by applauding Hutchins' attack on "the aimlessness of our present educational scheme.
[6] Perennialists believe in reading being supplemented by mutual investigations involving both teacher and student and minimally-directed discussions through the Socratic method in order to develop a historically oriented understanding of concepts.
A skilled teacher keeps discussions on topic, corrects errors in reasoning, and accurately formulates problems within the scope of texts being studied but lets the class reach their own conclusions.
Perennialists argue that many of the historical debates and the development of ideas presented by the great books are relevant to any society at any time, making them suitable for instructional use regardless of their age.