What we should be teaching
Carpenter, Luther
The debate over what to teach—"the canon", "Great Books," core curriculum, Western civilization versus world civilization, the sins of Stanford, and so on—is one the least edifying debates...
...A lot of the static will disappear if we do this...
...Second, "Great Books" approaches to history or Western civilization are disembodied...
...If one doesn't take them seriously, the debate degenerates into student-bashing...
...Western industrial society has overwhelmed the world...
...I may well be teaching them the only history they'll get...
...Most need a lot of attention to skills...
...The students I have in mind are freshmen in mass universities...
...Of course I and my students want to hide from these questions, but we can't...
...it makes sense to test oneself against some of them, but not to give them the bulk of the curriculum...
...And it leads to democracy and its travails—the Constitution, which is the closest thing to a shared standard in the United States, but which is largely unknown...
...What are we confused about...
...They are inevitably presentminded — and it's worth reminding ourselves that today's eighteen-year-old is as far from the industrial 266 • DISSENT revolution, in terms of the volume of historical experience, as I was from the Renaissance in 1958...
...some works by members of these groups will help, others will not...
...modernism" per se has ceased to inspire many people...
...It's important to get this in, to talk about the experiences of women and "minorities" and Third World peoples and workers...
...They have a broader range of skills and backgrounds...
...I'm not going to derive a reading list from these questions, but I will suggest some orientations...
...What makes it even less edifying is that everyone brandishes book lists for different courses...
...This absence of a canon scares intellectuals and political elites...
...Western industrial societies had to reconstruct themselves after the war to prevent further depressions and to prevent a new fascism...
...and (2) What's the modern world really made of...
...The debate over what to teach—"the canon", "Great Books," core curriculum, Western civilization versus world civilization, the sins of Stanford, and so on—is one the least edifying debates of recent times...
...Communications If a reading list can't solve our intellectual disarray overnight, then I would suggest that we shift our focus to the disarray itself and derive our purposes from it...
...Many participants in the debate want to use their reading lists to impose their particular rules of behavior on the society...
...It leads to capitalism as having a history, as passing through a series of stages resulting in late industrial or postindustrial or welfare capitalism, not just pure competition taught as something eternal...
...They are not convinced that dead philosophers really changed the world...
...I read Plato's Republic...
...in turn, the overwhelmed have tried to make it respond to them, that is, to us...
...social history needs to be added, to be able to argue that ideas do affect living...
...It's not automatically true...
...they have to be convinced that argument is a way of testing truth...
...They are afraid of argument, of looking bad before their peers and the teacher...
...These questions aren't anything new...
...We can't just say that they should get what students in the elite colleges get, because the elite get "the best...
...Third, adding works by women and non-Europeans can matter, but isn't the real issue...
...I agree with Howe and Bromwich that it is desirable to give students the experience of other cultures and to develop empathy— but that doesn't mean that one has to travel to classical Greece or the Middle Ages...
...anti-Victorianism has spent its force...
...I cannot assume that my job is to provide "background" for other courses...
...Maybe—but the advantage that graduates of the elite universities have is shared connections more than shared curricula...
...what I crave is a real debate, framed in terms of our purposes and students' needs...
...Instead, everybody is feverishly waving book lists...
...the conflicts among rights...
...we're still living in the decaying results of that postwar synthesis...
...And even if they were the originators of our culture, they didn't determine what it has become...
...These topics are important, not because they're closest to us, but because they connect to my main questions...
...Should I set any limits to what I want and to what I will do to get ahead...
...The debate has been so badly framed that a wise person would stay out of it, but that's impossible for educators and for citizens: Our profession and our mental health are at stake...
...some of my stands may not apply to every situation, while others may provoke discussion...
...The problem is that it's not a debate at all...
...Once again, what matters is our questions, which can't be decided by waving reading lists...
...The second question leads me immediately to capitalism and democracy, what they mean and how they affect us...
...They want to find their way into a very complicated and manipulative society...
...And a reading list doesn't dictate how the great work is to be read...
...Unfortunately, Irving Howe's and David Bromwich's comments in Dissent (Fall 1988) didn't advance the debate...
...They approach their liberal arts courses very warily...
...So the issue isn't so much what to teach as what our purposes are in assigning something...
...Western culture is in disarray...
...They only reacted within the framework set up by the academic conservatives who created the messy fight in the first place...
...The first question is the issue of individualism, hedonism, the "American Dream": What are my needs...
...The real difficulty in the debate is that there are no universally accepted standards for deciding that something is part of the canon...
...Over half of my students work, part time or full time...
...I think that's unavoidable...
...That argument is an unnecessary distraction...
...Most classical philosophers were hostile to democracy and to working people...
...the friction between self-government and a democratic social order and individualism...
...How can I and my students make our identities out of what our histories and cultures provide, race and gender and class and codes...
...Most of my students are business majors who will take only a few liberal arts courses...
...The Great Depression and the Nazis both imperiled any conceivable way of living decently...
...I teach history and will talk in terms of an introductory college history course...
...Great Books" lists seem to always leave out the twentieth century, the disasters of nazism and the Great Depression, the reconstruction of Western industrial society after the war...
...I'm sure that other teachers are using them...
...I could be persuaded to change my questions and my reading lists...
...It follows that the oldest works are not the most important...
...they connect very indirectly with the things we need to explain...
...the uses and disuses of nationhood...
...The Victorian synthesis broke down long ago...
...Today's mass students are not the college students of the 1950s...
...we cannot assume that they will refine their skills as they do the work...
...that didn't make me crave a philosopher-king...
...I don't think this strategy can work: A reading list can't unify our culture, it's just not strong enough...
...They are diseases that Western industrial nations are vulnerable to—thus they connect to my second question...
...nineteenthcentury London or Paris in the French Revolution is already a different world...
...Nor should we assume that these students know modern history and society so that they can connect older histories and literature to the present...
...I know that many teachers and administrators reject them—but I have been unable to get those who reject them to tell me their questions rather than their reading lists...
...I think every teacher, on every level, has to face the issue of standards for deciding what to teach...
...The first step to arguing clearly and fairly is to say what students and courses we're talking about: high school or college, lit courses or humanities or introductory history...
...That's why the debate has broken out in this time and place...
...our purposes should determine our choices...
...These are the vast majority of eighteen-year-old college students...
...SPRING • 1989 267...
...I do not mean to put them down for lacking "background...
...They must be taken seriously or we can't work with them...
...I see two huge questions for myself and my students: (1) How may a person live decently in our society...
...There is a more plausible social dimension to this argument: Since the elite will be hiring the graduates of mass universities, shouldn't the mass study what the elite studied, to avoid looking foolish and ignorant...
...To argue that it's true, one has to have an independent standard of "the best," which is the real issue...
Vol. 36 • April 1989 • No. 2
