Assign These Books to Your College-Bound Child Before You Pay Tuition, Room, Board, and Textbook Fees
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) is the nation's premier conservative intellectual think tank that deals exclusively with college students.
It was founded in 1953. It was then called the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI). It was founded by a libertarian Jewish atheist, Frank Chodorov; a recent Yale graduate and Roman Catholic author (God and Man at Yale), William F. Buckley; and a second Roman Catholic, Vic Millione. It reflected the division on the Right between natural law traditionalism and libertarian economists who reject natural law theory in favor of utilitarianism. The division existed in 1953. It still exists.
I won a Weaver Fellowship from ISI in 1969. These fellowships are for graduate students. The money helped.
ISI recently sent out a list of ten books that college students should read before graduating from college.
I think students should read three of the ten before going to college. Note: when I say "going to college," I mean staying home and taking CLEP exams for $2,000 for a year, thereby quizzing out of the first two years of college, and then staying home to earn a bachelor's degree by distance learning from an accredited university for an additional $10,000 to $12,000. A student can easily pay for this by working part-time. I have done a video interview on this. It's here. You will therefore not have to pay a dime for your child's college.
But if your child asks you to put up the money for four or (more likely these days) five years away from home at your after-tax expense ("It's party time!"), you should require some reading, plus a five-page, double-spaced book review of each book.
There are no free lunches in life. Your child should pay the toll in order to get across the educational bridge.
The ISI list can be much improved. It has two books by Russell Kirk. I have never been a fan of Kirk. Robert Nisbet invited me to have lunch with him and Kirk in the spring of 1960, when I was a freshman at the University of California, Riverside, where Nisbet was academic dean. I then read Kirk's book, The Conservative Mind (1953). It was a cogent summary of American conservative intellectual thought, but (deliberately) with almost no mention of the politically inconvenient (for conservatives in 1953) issue of slavery. I think this was his best book. It is not on the recommended list.
Three of the books on ISI's list really are crucial: Rodney Stark's How the West Was Won, Nisbet's The Quest for Community, and Wilhelm Röpke's A Humane Economy. I recommend anything written by these three scholars. Röpke's Economics of the Free Society is even better than A Humane Economy as an introduction to economic theory. A student should read both.
I recommend these books as required reading . . . beginning with you.
John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education (2000). Gatto won the award as the Teacher of the Year in New York City three times, and was once named Teacher of the Year for the state. Then he quit public school teaching in disgust. He became an advocate of home schooling. His book explains why the tax-funded K-12 schools are as bad as they are. They were designed this way.
F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944). This book was basic to the revival of classical liberalism after World War II. Chapter 10 is a classic: "Why the Worst Get on Top."
Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (1944). This short book shows why tax-funded administration and profit-seeking management are fundamentally different. This is why it is impossible to make the state more efficient through business methods. Download it for free here.
Rousas John Rushdoony, Freud (1965). This is the best 60-page introduction to Freud that I know of. Freud's intellectual con job is still taken seriously. This book is a cure for that intellectual defect.
Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, The Churching of America, 1778-2005 (2005). This is by far the best book on American Protestant church history. It shows how every attempt by churches to use the power of civil government to subsidize a denomination led to the decline of the denomination. It shows how liberals attempted to do this in the 20th century. It has backfired on a massive scale.
These next two books are indispensable for understanding the history of the West since the French Revolution. The first ends where the second begins.
James Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (1981). He traces the rise of 19th-century revolutions to two ignored sources: secret societies and journalism. It is a detailed book. It is not light reading.
Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (2001). Those were 75 years of tyranny. The French Revolution (1789) ended on December 25, 1991, when Gorbachev announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction (1983). This is a thoughtful book on statist secular humanism vs. Christianity in America. This is a war for the hearts and minds of men. It continues.
Finally, this book. It is not for the faint of heart.
Gary North, Conspiracy in Philadelphia: The Origins of the United States Constitution (2013). Download it for free here.