Today in the library I assisted a young teacher (who seemed quite bright and pleasant), working on a Master's–a Master's–degree at a local university. For one of his classes he had to compile a bibliography of fiction and non-fiction sources for high school students on the causes and pursuit of war. After I showed him where to browse for non-fiction titles and introduced him to our periodical databases, we started on fiction. The Red Badge of Courage? Unfamiliar to him. All Quiet on the Western Front and Catch-22 likewise. What about the Iliad? He'd never heard of it, but it sounded interesting. Homer who? I swear this is true. It happened today.
This experience, perhaps more than any other similar ones in recent years, brought home to me how the bottom is falling out of our culture. Let us not go gentle into that good night.
We’re working on it here, Steve!
Suggest that his students watch “Saving Private Ryan” and “Platoon”.
Reading is out. DVD’s are in.
;-)
I’d recommend the series Band of Brothers before either of those two, but it’s a bit longer.
It really is staggering that you can get through school without ever hearing about those books, though I suppose I’m not surprised. If he went through a teacher’s school, he probably never had to study literature at all.
That’s nearly incredible – except I believe you. I was saved from a similar fate in college by getting into the freshman honors sequence where we studied The Odyssey, Aristophanes and Euripedes, Dante’s Vita Nuova, then Ibsen and Chekhov among others.
I remember a few years back, about the time of Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind”, there was also a book about cultural literacy by Hirsch, I think. Both books, frankly, scared me.
Kamilla
I was at a book sale at a library a couple of years ago, finding nothing I liked, when a young lady who worked there asked what I was looking for. After I tried in vain to describe what you might call classic literature, she asked me what I did for a living, and, one thing leading to another, I mentioned that I had translated Dante.
“Who’s that?” she asked. I told her that Dante was perhaps the greatest poet who ever lived, and that he had written something called The Divine Comedy, about a pilgrimage to hell, purgatory, and heaven. “Sorry,” she said, “I don’t mean to slight your favorite author, but I’ve never heard of him.”
She was going on to one of Canada’s most prestigious colleges …
Hi Kamilla,
Yes, E.D. Hirsch is a major proponent of teaching Western culture to all U.S. secondary and college students, and he’s written quite extensively on the subject. He also founded a non-profit venture based out of Charlottesville, VA wherein they teach schools how to use the “Core Curriculum” program he’s developed.
He also was one of my professors at UVA when I was doing my Master’s in Gifted Education there. He’s one of the great ones!
>I’d recommend the series Band of Brothers before either of those two, but it’s a bit longer.
Recommend “We Were Soldiers.” Excellent and the movie can serve as an entree to the superb book by Gen Moore.
If anyone’s interested in a good listing of “Great Books,” I recommend going to the Thomas Aquinas College website and looking up their curriculum.
Beth: And by “a good listing of ‘Great Books’,” you mean “books that people have in their personal library but haven’t actually read.”
Just to chime in on the general theme, several years ago I was teaching a class where the subject of Charles Dickens came up. Out of 24 students (in a sophmore college class) no a single one had even heard of Dickens, much less one of his books. Finally one student had a glimmer of recognition – when I mentioned “A Christmas Carol” he commented “Oh yeah, wasn’t that a Muppet Movie?”.
But let’s remember that it is by no means the students’ fault. I’m an undergraduate at Binghamton University, where they have just eliminated Shakespeare as a requirement for the English majors. They also capped the ONE Shakespeare class at 75 while Media Studies (which is the study of television) has been bumped from 400 to 450.
This means that you can now graduate with a degree in English without having read one single word of the greatest English speaking author. Further, it’s hard to know how to get a decent education when the interest of one’s professors is almost solely limited to literary analysis based around ‘breeding strategies’ (this is the term that I have been taught to use about gender relations) and racism.
I think that Esolen’s previous post, ‘What do you want, an engraved dismissal?’ has some relevance here.
I am principal of a relatively small (900) independent Catholic K-12 school. We introduce serious Shakespeare at grade 8, and in high school require a full year of British literature at grade twelve. We graduate 35 to 50 students a year. We are a small army in the war on American academic ignorance, but we will not retire from the field!
That is a sad comment on today’s educational system. I went to a private high school where I was privileged enough to study The Aeneid and several Latin poets in Latin. And I actually even studied Dante as well as Shakespeare and the Bible in high school. In college, I continued on with studying great literature and authors–and I studied Ovid and Tacitus in Latin.
I have a law degree and work at a university. I am shocked at how people have so little knowledge of good literature here. I can’t imagine living a life where I didn’t read great works. The quality of my life would be seriously diminished without reading what I do.
The largest problem with having this knowledge is that few in today’s world have read great literature, and I believe I am a true anomaly.
Let us not go gentle into that good night.
Agreed as to our not going gently. But, it does not look like a very good night to me.
Rather, it appears to be a night with no moon or stars, filled with things howling in madness, things that crackle as they move and slobber as they speak, and endless featureless walls and corners and cul-de-sacs.
…it does not look like a very good night to me.
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.”
>>I was at a book sale at a library a couple of years ago, finding nothing I liked, when a young lady who worked there asked what I was looking for. After I tried in vain to describe what you might call classic literature, she asked me what I did for a living, and, one thing leading to another, I mentioned that I had translated Dante.
“Who’s that?” she asked. I told her that Dante was perhaps the greatest poet who ever lived, and that he had written something called The Divine Comedy, about a pilgrimage to hell, purgatory, and heaven. “Sorry,” she said, “I don’t mean to slight your favorite author, but I’ve never heard of him.”
She was going on to one of Canada’s most prestigious colleges …<< Tony Esolen: Very similar to one of your recent stories on InsideCatholic.com -- "Where the Battle May Yet Be Fought," except that was a middle-aged woman in Canada, which read: "I went once to speak to our local director -- a very kind middle-aged woman. The people from Steubenville were coming to our diocese (again, a small sign of hope in troubled Canada), and my daughter wanted to sign up for the gathering. The director had heard of EWTN, but not Franciscan University. That might not be so bad, but then we talked a little about what I did for a living. As I said, she was kind. I said that I had translated Dante. Said she, "I've never heard of him." Wishing to jog her memory and give her a way out, I said that he wrote a poem called The Divine Comedy, about traveling to hell and purgatory and heaven. "Sorry," she smiled. "I've never heard of that, either." " I wonder that you didn't include today's story in that piece.
Yet another reason my wife and I are really thinking through our 14 month old daughter’s education with much vigor and a deep sense of urgency! How I wish the church would take the virtue of learning seriously again.
Hi Matt,
Yes, I had that story too … The middle-aged Director of Religious Education for five Catholic parishes, who had never heard of Dante …
Here at Providence College, all students are required to take a 20-credit course (yes, that’s 20) taught by teams of professors, covering history, literature, theology, philosophy, and art (and music, ad libitum), from ancient Mesopotamia to the miserable present. So our students cannot escape from sophomore year without at least having been required to read the Odyssey or the Iliad, at least one or two Platonic dialogues, selections from Aristotle, the Aeneid, Augustine’s Confessions, Aristophanes, at least one Greek tragedy and usually three, Dante (at least the whole Inferno, and sometimes the whole Comedy), at least one play by Shakespeare, the whole (usually) of Paradise Lost, several of the Canterbury Tales, and a good many of the following to boot, including Gilgamesh, Hesiod, the pre-Socratics, Lucretius, Ovid, Genesis, Job, the gospel of John, one or two of the letters of Saint Paul, Cicero, Justin Martyr, Boethius’ Consolation, selections from Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Bernard of Clairvaux, Pico della Mirandola, Luther, Calvin, the Council of Trent, Spenser, Donne, Herbert, Hobbes, Locke. That’s freshman year.
Now for the kicker: the program is vehemently opposed by about half of the faculty, especially those in the social sciences. One long-time political science professor admitted a few years ago that he had never read either the Iliad or the Odyssey. Let’s see now … the foundational texts for the people who invented political science, both of them deeply political works, unknown to a man who teaches political science. What would be comparable? Someone’s teaching drama without having read Shakespeare. Someone’s teaching American history without having read Tocqueville. Someone’s teaching about the Renaissance without having looked at the works of Michelangelo.
Last spring I was part of a semester-long faculty seminar on the topic of freedom. My assignment for the others was that they should read Paradise Lost. Of the seven other professors in the semester, two or three had read selections of the poem before, and the rest hadn’t read it at all. They included an art historian, a philosopher, a theologian (who had read selections), a political scientist (who had read selections), a professor of Spanish, a professor of health policy (who eagerly reads everything new to him), and a biologist. I give them credit — they read the work. And the theologian and political scientist got together an Honors course on freedom, and required, among other readings, the whole of Paradise Lost.
I think that at most colleges I’d have enjoyed nothing near that success.
“good many of the following to boot, including Gilgamesh, Hesiod, the pre-Socratics, Lucretius, Ovid, Genesis, Job, the gospel of John, one or two of the letters of Saint Pual, Cicero, Justin Martyr, Boethius’ Consolation, selections from Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Bernard of Clairvaux, Pico della Mirandola, Luther, Calvin, the Council of Trent, Spenser, Donne, Herbert, Hobbes, Locke.”
Never heard of ’em. Sounds like a bunch of dead white guys. Speaking of “boot”, they all deserve to get the boot.
Anyways, instead of going to a third-tier school like Providence, students are better off going to an elite Ivy school like Yale and reading the more important works as listed by the Women’s Faculty Forum than reading stuff by sexist dead white males at Podunk U.
Here is Hillsdale College’s core curriculum. The benefits to the students go beyond the classwork. Because everybody takes the same thing, they discuss what they’re reading outside of class. In addition, the courses inspire some students to go into fields they otherwise wouldn’t have thought of. These requirements also cause a pretty high dropout rate in the freshman year. No other year is as difficult as the first.
These are the required Freshman Rhetoric and Great Books courses:
ENG 101 – Freshman Rhetoric and Great Books
3 Credit(s)
The principles of rhetoric and their application; the literary content consists of a study of representative Great Books of the Western World. Selections include Homer, the Bible, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Vergil and Dante. The writing content includes at least five major papers exercising traditional compositional and rhetorical skills.
ENG 102 – Freshman Rhetoric and Great Books
3 Credit(s)
A continuation of 101 but with a somewhat stronger emphasis on the literary tradition. Selections include Shakespeare, Cervantes, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Goethe, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kafka and Sartre. The writing emphasis also continues with at least five additional major assignments.
And these are the two heritage courses:
HST 104 – The Western Heritage to 1600
3 Credit(s)
The course will focus on the development of political cultures in Western Europe before 1600. It begins with a consideration of Mesopotamian and Hebrew civilizations and culminates in a survey of early modern Europe. The purpose of the course is to acquaint students with the historical roots of the Western heritage and, in particular, to explore the ways in which modern man is indebted to Greco-Roman culture and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Required course for all students in the College, and except in extraordinary circumstances, must be taken in the fall semester of the freshman year.
HST 105 – The American Heritage
3 Credit(s)
This course, a continuation of HST 104, will emphasize the history of “the American experiment of liberty under law.” It covers from the colonial heritage and the founding of the republic to the increasing involvement of the United States in a world of ideologies and war. Such themes as the constitutional tensions between liberty and order, opportunity in an enterprising society, changing ideas about the individual and equality, and the development of the ideal of global democracy will be examined. Attention will also be given to themes of continuity and comparison with the modern Western world, especially the direct Western influences (classical, Christian and English) on the American founding, the extent to which the regime was and is “revolutionary,” and the common Western experience of modernization. Required course for all students in the College, and except in extraordinary circumstances, must be taken in the spring semester of the freshman year. Prerequisite: HST 104.
This one is required of all students also:
POL 101 – U.S. Constitution
3 Credit(s)
This course introduces students to early American political thought and its crowning political achievement, the United States Constitution. Focusing on The Federalist Papers and other original source documents from the Founding period, students learn basic American political concepts such as natural rights, social compact theory, religious liberty, and constitutional features such as limited government, separation of powers, and the rule of law. By studying the Constitution, students will understand better the nature of political justice and the serious challenges, especially those represented by the Civil War and the rise of progressivism, in preserving “the American experiment of self-government under law.”
Put your faith and trust in the Ivy League: Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell.
All of the Ivy League’s institutions place near the top in the U.S. News & World Report college and university rankings.
Obama went to Harvard. Let the Ivies lead the way. The future is bright! Hope and Change we can believe in.
BTW, any denigration or dismissal of the Ivies is just sour grapes. Don’t go there.
No, it’s racism.
I know who Dante is, but y’all are spelling his name wrong–it’s actually Don’ta. His last name is Hightower, and he’s a defensive back for the Alabama Crimson Tide, who unfortunately suffered a season-ending injury several weeks ago against Arkansas.
I have a 14 year old ninth grader, she read short portions of the Iliad and Odyssey as part of the K12 (virtual and homeschool program started by Bill Bennett) in seventh grade and read a young people’s edition of Julius Ceasar. She also read and was delighted to use Macauley’s City with complete plans for Roman cities. Last year they read the full version of Romeo and Juliet, Jane Eyre, Animal Farm, The Diary of Anne Frank, some truly great poems and bible stories with a guided curriculum that really gets to the human condition. This year looks equally promising.
My just graduated 18 year old went to a midwestern boarding school which uses a combined literature and history curriculum, a true humanities course. In ninth grade they begin with Homer and spend the year on classical and medieval history up to the renaissance. Tenth grade is the weak spot, due in part to the infiltration of the department by a lesbian feminist who sees teaching the humanities as an excuse to expose 16 year olds to how awful and oppressing western civilization has been. Having said that she doesn’t have complete control and the classics, such as Shakespeare must still be covered. My daughter’s tenth grade teacher was a graduate of St John’s in Baltimore with graduate work at the University of Chicago, but was unsuited to teaching and only lasted a couple of years.
American lit unfortunately has been reduced to Catcher in the Rye, Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and The Crucible. Fortunately my daughter missed much of that as she had the AP US History version of the class which was taught by a former RAF officer who was in love with American History and didn’t have any use for the above novels. She also took a course her senior year by the US History teacher’s wife in Dystopias and Utopias where they did in fact read The Divine comedy, More’s Utopia, Candide (which she detested) 1984 and a few others I can’t recall. Mind you this was class lasting only one quarter. A good education can be had, but I wish it were more even.
Shout out to Judy Warner, oldest is taking a gap year before heading to hillsdale in fall of 2010. Thinking hard about sending my youngest to Hillsdale Academy if we could work out logistics.
While these anecdotes are depressing, I wonder if the percentage of adults at any given age who have read the classics has really declined much compared to 50 or 100 years ago. We have far, far more people going to college than we used to. I don’t have time to look up stats farther back, but in 1940 only 4.6% of the adult population had a bachelor’s degree, compared to 24.4% in 2000. (source)
Maybe a hundred years ago everyone who went to college read Dante and Shakespeare, but hardly anyone went to college. But your average farm or factory worker, who maybe finished high school with the aid of a lot of shop courses? I don’t know.
>>Maybe a hundred years ago everyone who went to college read Dante and Shakespeare, but hardly anyone went to college. But your average farm or factory worker, who maybe finished high school with the aid of a lot of shop courses?<< A hundred years ago, most people didn't go to high school (and there were no shop classes), but "everyone" at least knew who Dante and Shakespeare were, even if they hadn't read them. Today, even the most highly educated portion of our society lives in a state of abysmal ignorance by the standards of a century ago.
Off-topic comments deleted. Stick to the immediate subject.
Matthias:
I see your point, but my problem with that argument is that even those uneducated factory workers had a common understanding of what the Good Life is or consisted of and that understanding was rooted in the ‘giants’ of western civilization (perhaps for this we’d have to go back farther than a hundred years). Currently, though more people go to school, what those schools impart can hardly be called an education. As someone currently in the education system, I would argue the unconscious and unstated goal of most modern American schools is to destroy any traditional understanding of what it means to be human.
I would much rather have an uneducated population that understood Beauty than a pack of ‘educated’, semi-marxist animals running around with a mandate to attack anything they view as ‘oppressive’.
One thing we overlook is the push in 19th century America, via private associations, to bring learning to the people. Lincoln, for instance, spoke to a Lyceum in Illinois about his opinions regarding slavery. The most remarkable thing about the speech, other than Lincoln’s sensible abhorrence of doing to someone else what you would not want done to you, is the fact that there was such a thing as a Lyceum. They were pretty common, I’m guessing. Then there was the Chautauqua movement.
Consider this sentence taken more or less at random from Boys’ Life magazine, March 1, 1911:
“Some peasants, who had been at work nearby, ran to our assistance, and were very anxious to help in getting the car to rights again; but this we would not consent to, for if we had allowed them to help us we should have been disqualified from the race.” The New York Times now would not let a sentence so long and yet so straightforward pass. Same magazine: “James E. West, executive secretary of the national organization, who came on from Washington to attend the meeting, said the movement now has about three hundred thousand boys affiliated with its work in the United States, the Hawaiian Islands and Porto Rico, with two thousand commissioned scout masters in direct charge.” On a typical page of the September 1925 issue, there are roughly 2000 words (the magazine is 60 pages long; allowing for advertisements, that still means that in one Boys’ Life magazine there would be about 100,000 words; and, as you see, the style, forthright and direct, is not dumbed down).
Then we forget too how little there was in the old days to make people downright stupid. Yes, there was booze, and that served for many. But what else was there? Some piously bad novels for ladies, some trash for men; but generally what did end up written was at least not stupid. When the men wrote home from the Civil War, they didn’t all sound like Macaulay, but they didn’t sound like Maureen Dowd, either. A lot of them sounded like people whose ears were ringing still with the language of Scripture, or of Watts’ hymns, and if that’s all you had, you’d be far from stupid. For stupidity’s a thing you have to work hard to attain …
My grandfather went to exactly one year of high school and dropped out. He can still recite the Tennyson he learned in 8th grade to this day. It’s only one anecdote, but I think it says something.
I know through a friend that English majors at Oberlin can also graduate without taking a class in Shakespeare.
There is a recent “Jaywalking” episode in which Leno stumps a Harvard English graduate asked to complete the titles of famous books such as _Count of Monte ______ and _Adventures of Tom _______.
I add that much of the “classics canon” took shape when college opened up to those who did not have a background in classical or modern languages and so needed to read the great books in translation.
There is a fascinating essay on the emerging sub-literate culture written by Thomas Bertonneau called “What, Me Read?”. Part one can be read here: http://www.popecenter.org/issues/article.html?id=2120. In this essay he recounts his experiences as a professor of literature, and remarks not just on the decline of literacy, but on the pride that students now take in their ignorance.
Tony: “… they didn’t sound like Maureen Dowd, either. … For stupidity’s a thing you have to work hard to attain …”.
Are you saying that Maureen Dowd has worked hard to attain her stupidity?
Could she then take consolation that it didn’t come naturally or easily?
“And, of course, such reading strengthened me and those like me to resist and reject the plausible blandishments of what call itself conservatism nowadays.”
“For stupidity’s a thing you have to work hard to attain …”.
“such reading strengthened me and those like me to resist and reject the plausible blandishments of what call itself conservatism nowadays.”
The key words in that statement being “what call itself” (sic). Often “what calls itself” conservatism today isn’t, being instead some variant of liberalism or other.
“What calls itself conservatism, that I can and do resist, is indulgence in malice, envy, and wrath, under cover of claims to moral sanity, framed as culture war, and promulgated as adherence to the principles of justice.”
How about giving a few concrete examples instead of these vaporous generalities? I’m suggesting that the “conservatism” you are criticizing isn’t conservatism at all, but is rather some sub-species of liberalism.