Trespass Freely and Fearlessly

by Guest Blogger
April 17th, 2012

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Curriculum, Education Practice, Teaching | 13 Comments »

by Jessica Lahey

A teacher emailed me a while back with a great question. I’ve been meaning to answer and there’s no better time than today, when I have five other deadlines to avoid.

Dear Jess,

Here’s my question for today: how much can high school age students benefit from a classical curriculum like the one at my kids’ school?   I love that next year my son will read, for example, Plato, as part of the Great Books type humanities program. That stuff is challenging for even the best educated adults. We chose to transfer our kids this year to [name deleted] specifically because of their humanities program. The other option was having them take many AP courses while attending the nearby traditional public high school. I had nothing like the [name deleted] curriculum back in my high school days, and I only read Great Books stuff on my own, many years after I graduated from college.  So I’m excited for my kids to have this opportunity, but only if it benefits them.

Are “Great Books” relevant for today’s students?  My answer is an emphatic “yes,” and I whip out my favorite quote on the subject, by Michael Dirda: “Classics are classics not because they are educational, but because people have found them worth reading, generation after generation, century after century.”

The argument against asking young people to read great books goes something like this discussion from the Diane Rehm Show. Panelists were discussing the novel Ethan Frome, and a caller said he thought students should not read some books until they are forty, with the life experience and perspective to understand the darker, more mature themes.

While I would shy away from teaching Ethan Frome in the darkest weeks of our New Hampshire winter – just for sanity’s sake, mind you – I respectfully disagree. I have heard this argument among teachers, that Romeo and Juliet is appropriate for middle school, while King Lear is not. Romeo and Juliet concerns itself with the heartache of young love, while King Lear stares down the naked torment Lear finds at the end of his useful life. Students may find connections to their own life in the story of Romeo and Juliet’s love tragedy, but the pain of losing a child and the treachery of the vile Edmund are just too mature for younger readers.

Sure, the familiar may be strange in King Lear, but there is much to offer young people in a story such as Lear’s. My students love the treachery of Edmund, the way he plots against the seemingly perfect and legitimate Edgar. Lovely, bookish, kind, Edgar, who can do no wrong in his father’s eyes. And the tensions runs high as Edmund is overtaken by sibling rivalry and plots to steal a place in his father’s heart – or at least his inheritance.

Or what of Cordelia? The youngest child, who cannot heave her heart into her mouth in order to satisfy her father’s outlandish expectations and is eclipsed by her more rapacious older sisters? Or Gloucester, who does not realize until too late that he has hurt someone he loves, and must find a way to make amends.

No, King Lear is not an easy read. It would be much easier for me to reach for The Hunger Games or Inkheart – both commonly assigned in middle school, and books with entertaining plots, to be sure, but they are…lacking. Reader’s questions are too easily answered. “Of all the virtues related to intellectual functioning, the most passive is the virtue of knowing the right answer. Knowing the right answer requires no decisions, carries no risks, and makes no demands,” writes Elanor Duckworth in The Having of Wonderful Ideas.

It is important that we ask students to read great works of literature because, when we hand them Dickens or Shakespeare, we offer students so much more than a good story. We give them the opportunity to step beyond the safe boundary of the known world and journey into the uncharted territory of challenging vocabulary, unpredictable plot, and shifting perspectives. I’m with Virginia Woolf on this one, “Literature is no one’s private ground. Literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.”

In the end, that’s what I hope I do. I teach my students how to find their own way through a complex and challenging world, and these books are the maps I hand my students.

Great books are literary proving grounds, safe places for students to try, fail, and in the end, find unexpected moments of wonder and pride in their own abilities. Students cannot approach these works lightly; they must brave these works armed with their own experiences and ability to reason, because great works of literature require more than simple retrieval and regurgitation of other’s ideas; they demand feats of intellectual bravery, patience, and trust.

Great books contain more than challenging vocabulary and syntax. Great books contain novel ideas, universal themes, vivid sensory experiences and complex literary construction absent from commonplace works of literature. Great books teach great lessons. When students learn to ask more of the books they read, they learn to ask more of themselves.

Jessica Potts Lahey is a teacher of English, Latin, and composition at Crossroads Academy, an independent Core Knowledge K-8 school in Lyme, New Hampshire. Jessica’s blog on middle school education, Coming of Age in the Middle, where this piece also appears, can be found at http://jessicalahey.com.

Great Books Without Apology

by Robert Pondiscio
July 19th, 2010

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Curriculum | 13 Comments »

From his very first words, Bruce Gans makes it clear that this is not going to be a typical interview where a defender of Great Books bends over backwards making outsize claims of relevance, excitement and engagement.  Gans, a Professor of English at Wilbur Wright College in Chicago clearly considers that argument settled.  Asked by EdNews.org’s Michael Shaughnessy about the current status of “great books” Gans opens fire:  “Do me a favor—lose the scare quotes and the small letters.” 

It’s on.  

Gans, who has won national attention teaching English and Literature to urban Black, Hispanic and immigrant students, launches immediately into an entertaining and refreshingly unapologetic defense of Great Books:

It is critical that a core of books be identified as Great Books, not because the list is exhaustive and perfect but because it is a falsification of reality to pretend that there is not nor can be certain books which are vastly more profound and influential and beneficial to mankind than practically all others, because people have a right to know and thereby have the opportunity to be personally exposed to such books and in so doing have a greater chance to know themselves and lead an examined life worth living.

Uncomfortable with the idea of saying good, better, best when it comes to works of literature?  Gans isn’t.   “It is a peculiar perversity of the present time that no one objects to a Hall of Fame for baseball players and rock and roll musicians,”  he notes, “but so many do have a problem with a Hall of Fame for books like the Hebrew Bible and the works of Shakespeare.”  The idea of Great Books is resisted by ”faculty who in most cases have not read them, often cannot read them, feel threatened at the prospect of having to teach them, whose political prejudices make it impossible for them to consider the merits and benefits of the texts objectively,” he says. 

No mere scold, Gans is laugh-out-loud funny on his own children’s reading habits:

My twelve year old twins are both deeply absorbed in a multi volume saga of vampires or wolves or maybe both but which I understand, despite being entirely unable to work up the curiosity to retain the name of these multi million dollar properties, are momentarily of universal interest and have some connection, perhaps merely thematic, to a movie that did quite well concerning a Fabianesque fellow whose role was to I think turn into a vampire and or a wolf. My daughters have his graven image on T-shirts but while he is currently one of the world’s most central human beings his name escapes me. I believe he is from Australia.

(If the term “Fabianesque” doesn’t ring a bell, you’re clearly under 50.  I’ll save you the need to tax your 21st century skills by providing a handy link.)

Asked to suggest a list of ten recommended books for summer reading, Gans naturally lists 86, from Don Quixote and The Great Gatsby to Bonfire of the Vanities and The Godfather.  He also pushes back on the “universal appeal” of contemporary writers like Stephen King and John Grisham.  “Universal appeal is not measured in years but in GENERATIONS,” he says.  

His most stirring response, however, is his defense of Mortimer Adler, founder of the Great Books Foundation.   “Adler’s central contribution was on the one hand to attempt to gather the most central texts ever written, to organize them according to central questions about the human condition, and then to stand there like Rocky Marciano and absorb all the red faced, hate filled prejudiced, sneering, philistine ravings that the second, third and fourth raters, the professorial paluka weight class throw at him.”

It’s enough to make me want to stop what I’m doing, and run out and buy a copy of Bleak House. 

Meanwhile, over at the Answer Sheet, Valerie Strauss offers a completely unrelated, but also entertaining defense of the general level of education of the vampire or wolf played by the Fabianesque figure whose name Gans refuses to learn or repeat.

Do “Great Books” Still Matter?

by Robert Pondiscio
December 11th, 2008

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Core Knowledge, Education Practice | 3 Comments »

Britannica Blog, too often overlooked, continues to impress with its thoughtful writing and conversation on education.  With writers like Dan Willingham and Karin Chenoweth, it’s unabashedly intellectual, broad and wide-ranging, and refuses to cater to the allegedly short attention span of the online reader.  This week, to mark the publication of Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam’s new book, A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, the B.B. sets many minds to work on the question, “Do ‘Great Books’ still matter?”

Robert McHenry, former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica, observes that any discusssion of the very idea of “Great Books” comes down to a single (and singular) question:  What is education for?

Do we educate our young so that they will find gainful and rewarding employment? Do we educate them so that they will be good citizens? Do we educate them so that they will have disciplined and well-stocked minds? Do we educate them mainly to get them out of the house?

Echoing McHenry, the president of St. John’s College, Christopher B. Nelson, reclaims the liberal arts ideal, reminding us that too many of us in education, in our relentless focus on test scores and outcomes, risk losing our way.  Try not to cringe as Nelson describes the chairman of the business department of a small “liberal arts” college saying to one of his sons,

“My job is to make you into the best product that can be sold on the market.  You are raw material and I am the producer and together we must make a product that we can go out and sell.  I want to help you get the best price for your mind and body when you graduate from here, in competition with all the other products from all the other colleges.”

In a certain sense, there is nothing wrong with this approach, Nelson writes.  ”More people should have this.  Almost all of us need to work in order to live.  But life is more than earning a living.  One ought also to be concerned with making a life worth living.  So, the problem with this kind of education is that it is just not enough,” he concludes.

Lastly, for teachers who, inevitably, question the relevance of Great Books to low-income, immigrant, or minority learners, English professor Bruce Gans has a reply.  Observing the “tragic intellectual and cultural handicaps” that have hobbled his students, Gans administers a curriculum based on Mortimer Adler’s famous reading list.

The most serious form this terrible damage takes is that my students as a consequence are unexposed to the ideas, questions, and meditations on the human condition these major figures have contributed and from which millions of the educated have gleaned a deeper and more useful understanding of themselves, of others, and of the long and painful evolution that has brought us to our current stage of civilization and human freedom.

“Insofar as the Great Books are concerned, they will continue to deeply reward those like my students who study and understand them,” Gans writes.   And to those who dismiss them?  ”One calls to mind the Middle Eastern expression: the dogs bark, the caravan passes.”