做过40年哈佛校长的Charles W. Eliot (1834 ~ 1926)认为，每个接受通识教育（liberal education）的人都应该有一个五尺书架（他原来设想是三尺），每天花15分钟用心读那些书。出版商Collier & Son Company 听说后，请他为那个书架配书。他断断续续考察了一年，最后选择了50卷，哈佛大学同意将其冠名为“Harvard Classics”（具体书目见http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics）。

My aim was not to select the best fifty, or best hundred, books in the world, but to give, in twenty-three thousand pages or thereabouts, a picture of the progress of the human race within historical times, so far as that progress can be depicted in books. The purpose of The Harvard Classics is, therefore, one different from that of collections in which the editor's aim has been to select a number of best books; it is nothing less than the purpose to present so ample and characteristic a record of the stream of the world's thought that the observant reader's mind shall be enriched, refined and fertilized.

Within the limits of fifty volumes, containing about twenty-three thousand pages, my task was to provide the means of obtaining such knowledge of ancient and modern literature as seemed essential to the twentieth-century idea of a cultivated man. The best acquisition of a cultivated man is a liberal frame of mind or way of thinking; but there must be added to that possession acquaintance with the prodigious store of recorded discoveries, experiences, and reflections which humanity in its intermittent and irregular progress from barbarism to civilization has acquired and laid up.

最后两句话，正是校长大人所希望的“通识教育”的目标：形成自由开放的思维标架；让用功和爱思想的人熟悉前人的发现和想象。他的经典式的语言，我读得太少，真不知道怎么翻译才好：

Liberal education accomplishes two objects. It produces a liberal frame of mind, and it makes the studious and reflective recipient acquainted with the stream of the world’s thought and feeling, and with the infinitely varied products of the human imagination.

这套大书实际有52卷，第零卷是导读（以上引用的文字都是从那儿抄录的），第50卷是索引，第51卷是关于若干主题的60篇演讲。导读别有风味，它将全部经典照每天15分钟的阅读计划进行了详细的分解，例如1月1日读Franklin's Advice for the New Year (V1: pp79-85)，而今天（6月9日）读Enchanting Songs of David (V44: pp168-179)，也就是《圣经诗篇》（Psalms）里的大卫之歌。