Great Books Are Essential

I wrote this entry in December 2012 and kept it as an unfinished draft until today. My thoughts and feelings about the importance of including the great works of the great authors, even if we have to read Faust in translation, have not changed. If anything, I value literature more as time goes by, and I see the strength it has given me to draw on through times of sorrow and challenge and sickness as I near my own back pages.

The Telegraph's story  December 7, 2012

The UK's Telegraph is reporting that there is to be a major change in the curricula of American schools. Books like Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird are to be replaced by nonfiction books that will help prepare students for jobs. The Telegraph reports that at least 70% of the reading material must be nonfiction greats such as a manual for installing insulation or an inventory of plants. Apparently Great Books are now reserved for the 1%, the 99% being worker bees who don't need to clutter their heads with Miss Havisham or the great Achilles or Oedipus Rex or Don Quixote or a hundred thousand others, not all of which I've gotten to myself because there are so many. And the biggest shock of all to me is that this plan is backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

I learned to understand mortality from Homer's Iliad. I saw for a brief moment of flashing insight what immortality stole from the Greek gods. They squandered time on their feuds, their petty jealousies, but it didn't matter. No one was going to die. They could always make up tomorrow. But for us time is precious, people are precious, because we are mortal. I learned about the code of honor, the sacred respect for a body whose soul has passed and what a crime desecration is. I learned from Achilles the danger of unrestrained anger. I came away from Homer actually glad to be mortal. I am blessed to be mortal because I can love in a way that the Greek gods never could. And I need to appreciate the people in my life because all things must pass.

In the late 1970's I taught King Lear to a class of high school seniors who cried over how Lear was treated by his children. I was so touched that the young people felt such compassion for old Lear despite his foolishness and mistakes. There is much about madness and betrayal, but there is also the true and pure love that Cordelia feels for her father, the King. And more, always more.

These texts makes us fully human. The enhance our humanity, bring it to maturity. They teach us how others have faced the problems we face so that we know we can live through whatever we are going through. They imbue us with hope, wisdom, courage, morality, love.

And like To Kill a Mockingbird, they teach us about justice and injustice, about what other people feel, people whose shoes we will never be able to walk in, like the poor black man wrongly charged with raping a white woman and like Boo Radley, one of life's different ones. I loved Scout, her spirit, her courage, her intelligence, her gentleness. And Atticus, oh wouldn't we all want to have his courage?

And they want to replace all this with insulation manuals and plant taxonomies? And Bill and Melinda Gates are in on this. God help us all.