American education
Howe, Irving
Notebook Irving Howe WHAT SHOULD WE BE TEACHING? Something important is happening in American universities, in the humanities especially; and serious people ought to be paying attention....
...Nor is it true, as Graff is reported to have said, that there "has never been any consensus about the best that had been thought and said and done...
...Now these are hardly new questions, and there is a scholarly literature on such topics...
...Precisely the "irrelevance" of the classics is what makes them relevant...
...And more to the point, can her experience address the classics...
...Such questions may well be considered in introductory classics courses—though not, one hopes, to disparage the classics...
...And it ought to be part of any serious university education that students be encouraged to get past the provincialism of the contemporary...
...Remember how widespread was the use in our universities of Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice until it turned out that the book was not exactly written by Cleaver and that the road from Black Panther rhetoric to big business conservatism was, for Cleaver, shorter than supposed...
...Perhaps after his retirement President Reagan will sit in...
...Canon bashers argue from two opposite premises: (1) The canon, as Atlas puts it, has been "for the most part . . . closed...
...When I began teaching at Brandeis in the 1950s, you could at least expect entering students to have read a play by Shakespeare and a novel by Dickens...
...One suspects that for people like Bennett, the great books are mainly seen as a barrier through which liberal and radical ideas cannot penetrate...
...Yet the reality of American academic and literary life these past several decades has, if anything, been very different: English departments have rushed, sometimes fecklessly, to embrace the new and the sensational...
...It is equally true that literary and academic communities exhibit a tendency to selCprotective behavior (which doesn't distinguish them from other communities...
...Still, it seems entirely plausible that, because of sexual bias, there have been women writers of the past who have been unduly neglected...
...The president, that is, who so admires the writings of Louis L'Amour...
...These latter are better dealt with in courses in history and sociology...
...Far more troubling is the canon bashing which proceeds out of a complicated mixture of motives...
...radical no...
...Nor can I conceive a course in American literature that failed to include such writers as Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, and Flannery O'Connor, to mention only a few of our distinguished women writers...
...If, tomorrow, Hispanic, Jewish and Asian groups were to demand "representation" in the humanities curriculum, would Stanford also yield to them...
...Bennett's devotion to the classics has its comic side...
...Eliminated, as I recall, were Flume, Locke and Mill...
...Finally the university yielded in part, retaining in the course books from the Bible, as well as selections from Plato, Augustine, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Marx...
...In a course on the classics, a distinct good may be served by teaching a non-Western text, when it is a great work like, say, The Tale of the Genji...
...Still, there is a difference between the general sociopolitical critique offered by feminism, essentially valid, and its particular applications to teaching and writing, which need to be considered case by case...
...A debate is now going forward—sometimes raging, sometimes smoldering—over the kind of curriculum that should be offered to college students in literature and the humanities generally...
...and one could as easily show, for instance, how the reputations of major writers like George Eliot and Thomas Hardy have undergone radical shifts...
...Yet there was something wrong about the way the Stanford decision was made, as a response to political pressures...
...Canon-busting is nothing new," Graff is quoted as saying...
...One (not the only) reason for reading the classics is that they widen and deepen our experience, pulling us out of the all-too-visible limits that any single self is likely to have...
...There have been sharp disagreements regarding relative merits and stresses...
...Students taking such a course, very likely with meager cultural backgrounds, will not end with much more than a new meagerness...
...They go to college in order to learn something they cannot learn in the streets, on TV, or even at a political rally...
...The two comments that follow merely glance at a problem to which we shall return...
...How shall a generation know its story If it will know no other...
...Populist maybe...
...With evident approbation Atlas focused on those professors, notably at Duke University, who are leading the charge against a traditional canon in teaching the humanities...
...Some students, led on one occasion by Jesse Jackson, picketed with the chant, "Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture's got to go...
...At its deepest levels, this debate touches on fundamental issues of culture and society—as was dimly recognized in a New York Times Magazine article (June 5, 1988) by James Atlas entitled "The Battle of the Books...
...They are wrong...
...Today that is often no longer the case...
...There has always been politics...
...Some is certainly due to recent critical approaches which induce skepticism, even a sort of routine nihilism, regarding distinctions of value in the reading of literature...
...Some may occasionally result from a feeling of young instructors that they are not well qualified to teach the great texts and would be better occupied with their own specialties...
...Traditions change, but with a continuity of value, judgment, sensibility...
...What can one reasonably conclude from the Stanford imbroglio...
...But when Professor Marjorie Garber of Harvard tells us that the eighteenth-century English writer Aphra Behn is "a major figure" or when attempts are made to blow up the reputations of decidedly minor nineteenth-century American women writers, then qualified literary people have grounds for skepticism...
...When reporters teased him about this indulgence, Bill replied: "Boys, nothing's too good for the proletariat...
...The old IWW leader Bill Haywood was once, in the early 1920s, seen smoking 250 cigars...
...A course in the Age of Shakespeare cannot, however, offer many women writers: that is a reality of history...
...There's a story I like, and you will immediately see its pertinence...
...One common criticism is that women writers are underrepresented in literature courses...
...The students complained that a required introductory course in the humanities did not include non-European and black authors and thereby revealed racist bias...
...Teaching Shakespeare instead of the classics was a radical innovation...
...The central tradition of socialism, which includes Marxism in its more humane versions, has always declared that the culture of the past (which one experiences as the culture of the present) ought to form a common human heritage and that a deeply objectionable aspect of class societies is that they deprive large segments of the population of proper access to that culture...
...Professor Jane Tompkins of Duke is quoted by Atlas as saying that a nineteenth-century novel by Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World, reissued last year by the Feminist Press, is a neglected valuable work...
...EDS...
...I don't suppose there can be many courses in the nineteenth-century English novel that fail to include such great writers as Jane Austen, Emily Bronte and George Eliot, and sometimes such important writers as Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell...
...Anyone acquainted with our universities might conclude that a good part of it has already gone, but let that be...
...The literary "tradition" has actually been a complex of competing traditions that represent sharply opposed intellectual outlooks...
...This means that the basic humanities curriculum becomes subject to bargaining by "constituencies," rather than determined by that community of learning which a faculty ought to be...
...the modern is not absolutely new, but a renovation of a classic which the action of time has obscured...
...he might well turn his passion for the great books to the Reagan cabinet members, and the president he reveres, before lecturing the Stanford faculty...
...Notebook Irving Howe WHAT SHOULD WE BE TEACHING...
...The Bible, Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Shakespeare are central to our culture...
...Nevertheless, we should acknowledge that there are also serious conservatives engaged with this issue, and that they sometimes say things with which we can agree...
...Teaching 478 • DISSENT Notebook Shakespeare instead of, say, Sophocles may have been unavoidable in the age of mass education, and there were probably some cultural losses involved...
...We should accept her suggestion to read this book and see if we agree...
...A non-European text would be added, with "substantial attention to issues of race, gender and class...
...Atlas's trendy piece is dealt with below by David Bromwich, and I will simply use it to cite a few professors whom Atlas quotes...
...What has dominated the teaching of literature has been not a rigid old-fogeyism but a cheerful pluralism bordering on incoherence...
...Democratic theories of education have stressed diffusion, not dilution...
...To guide students to works written as far back as somewhat before their date of birth, means to open them—you try, you hope, you don't always succeed—to the other, to an experience, an outlook different from their own...
...There is a substance that prevails, some deep persistence of response—otherwise, we would be living in the sheerest chaos, and not only would it not matter what was taught, Shakespeare or Louis L'Amour, there wouldn't even be any reason for hard-strapped parents to send their children to universities, since the paperback displays in drugstores would do as well...
...Professor Tompkins is quoted by Atlas as saying the classics "didn't address her own experience...
...At Duke, according to Atlas, the English department now offers courses in "the Western" which includes the work of that great writer Louis L'Amour...
...Why should they...
...Which brings us to "relevance," a throwback to the worst of the counterculture...
...Do traditional judgments about the classics still need to be respected...
...Nor is there any strong reason for giving "substantial attention to issues of race, gender and class" in such courses...
...Alice Walker is not an adequate substitute for George Eliot, and where it is pretended otherwise, students are being shortchanged...
...The current debate goes under the portentous name of "canon formation" —which in plain English means, how is the body of great works established...
...2) The contrary argument is advanced by Gerald Graff of Northwestern who is quoted by Atlas as saying there has never been a consensus as to what the great books are...
...Some is a hangover from the counterculture of the sixties...
...some knowledge of these or closely similar texts is part of any higher education worthy of the name, regardless of whether they provide "substantial" * Ex-Secretary of Education William Bennett chose this moment to attack Stanford for surrendering to "ignorance, irrationality, and intimidation...
...Think only of the Milton controversy in recent decades as reflected in the criticism of Eliot, Leavis, Empson and many others...
...It all depends...
...David Bromwich shows how ill-informed, to put it mildly, Atlas is...
...One curious aspect of canon bashing is the notion some of its adherents have that they are up to something "radical...
...have elite professorial and literary hierarchies handed down self-protective standards and preferences that choke off fresh or dissident views...
...For example, core humanities classes are sometimes offered to freshmen and sophomores as a survey of great texts, intended to made up for the deficiencies of our high schools, and indeed, of our culture...
...who decides...
...have there been ideological biases at work...
...Edgar Bowers In the America of today, with its avoidance of the historical sense and its fixation on the contemporary, there is an especially good reason for focusing (it needn't of course be exclusively so) on great works of the past...
...and in what ways can or should decisions be changed...
...But good teachers, including those who hold to the outlook of democratic socialism, ought to be dedicated to this concept of education...
...The most dramatic recent debate occurred earlier this year at Stanford University...
...But it meant replacing one great writer by another, while today the problem in the universities is something very different: an effort to disintegrate or at least damage the very idea of a classic and to replace it with a hodge-podge of currently fashionable items...
...Some is old-style American populism dressed up in new-style literary theory: a distaste for highbrow European authors picked up from imports of European criticism...
...That this creates grave and even intractable problems in teaching, we all know...
...Professor Tompkins explains that the interest in "canon formation" arises as a series of questions: how did the classics ever become classics...
...FALL • 1988 • 477 Notebook materials on "race, gender and class...
...Ideological and' class biases have of course influenced the making of cultural traditions, as they have entered every other department of human experience...
...Not a happy example, I'm afraid...
...but, with valuable internal shifts, the canon has persisted because, as Frank Kermode writes, "history is, under all the appearances of change, a unity...
...Should we train students to read a novel by Jane Austen or Dickens, or is it better to be "relevant" and offer, say, the fiction of Alice Walker or, as occurs in a major university, a course in "the texts of MTV...
...Some of the most urgent criticisms of the humanist canon come from feminist scholars, and these should be considered sympathetically...
Vol. 35 • September 1988 • No. 4
