Hildegarde

So–John says there’s “no longer an adult canon” and Michael asks if most people knew Shakespeare’s references anyway…

So let’s start there.

First, there is still definitely an adult canon.  A canon isn’t just a set of books everybody decides they want to know, or even that a bunch of people in power decide everyone has to know.

A canon is a vocabulary–it’s a language in which the people of a culture speak. 

And it’s not necessary that the people be able to read to speak it, either.   I don’t know about rural peasants in Shakespeare’s time, but his plays were wildly popular with the urban–and illiterate–lower classes, who picked up their cultural vocabulary in church and in (again) fairy tales.

We have a great deal of really wonderful art because the literate upper classes knew just how important it was that the illiterate lower classes be able to understand that canon, or at least the basic ideas and images of it.

They would, of course, have called that saving their souls.

But no culture in history has ever been able to survive for long without a shared cultural vocabulary, and this culture (meaning American, now) would fall apart in a heartbeat without it.

For better or for worse, we have spent the last century embarked on a great experiment to prove the whole of human history wrong–to prove that it is possible to take people of different races, ethnicities, religions and personal histories and make them into a single self-identified nation.

We took seven thousand years of “identity is blood and soil” and said, “nope, don’t have to do that, that’s the stupid way, we can do it better.”

What makes Americans Americans is a shared cultural vocabulary.  And most Americans have it.  It may not be the canon as traditionally understood–I’d make a good case for why it’s desperately important that every American know who and what Superman is–but it’s a canon nevertheless.

We’ve spent the last forty years or so pretending that this is not true, and that it does not matter what kids learn while they’re growing up, in school or out, but we’ve done it while keeping a dirty little secret.

The higher you want to go up the ladder of success and power in this country, the more of that canon you’d better know. 

A black kid with an absent father and a crack addicted mother who wants to sell her to a pimp for drugs is at more of a disadvantage because her school didn’t teach her fairy tales and the Federalist Papers than because of anything else in her background.

I used to tell my children that the most important thing was to make sure they knew how to read, because if you could read you could always find out for yourself what you needed to know.

An at least glancing acquaintance with an at least skeletal component of the canon is necessary to being able to read.   It’s impossible to get through the op-ed page of the daily New York Times without a singularly vast array of cultural knowledge, and not just the highbrow stuff, either.

Most of us have this culural vocabulary so deeply embedded in our minds by the time we’re adults that we don’t think of it as anything anybody has to learn in the first place.   We blow past references without even realizing they’re references because we know them so well, they feel “obvious,” or automatic.

And even distinctly low-brow, mass-trash stuff–stuff meant to sell to people who know virtually nothing–automatically assumes a fairly broad cultural vocabulary.  It was one of the shocks of my life when I realized that a solid majority of my students didn’t understand the lyrics to half the rock and pop songs they declared they  loved. 

Go look at the lyrics to a song called “Love Story” by Taylor Swift.

We no longer teach a defined canon of works in elementary and high schools because we’ve decided not to teach it.  That decision is not a force of nature against which we cannot hope to prevail, but a choice. 

As to that cable television service with the one hundred channels–most of them are showing the same things over and over again in different orders.   CSI versions alone appear on more than a dozen different channels on my cable system, the mini-true crime documentaries (American  Justice, Cold Case Files, Forensic Files, City Confidential) show up on A&E, Bravo, ID, Sleuth, Tru TV, and Bio, among others. 

A country without a shared cultural vocabulary is at best a mess of warring factions.  This country without a shared cultural vocabulary is a country on the brink of a civil war.

But the act is that we have such a shared cultural vocabulary.  We’ve just given up making sure that our least privilieged citizens acquire it. 

And to change that, I don’t think we need to change the schools–it would e nice, and it would help, but it seems to me to be too much trouble to bother.

We do need to start being honest about what an enormous disadvantage it is for a kid to walk into a college classroom–where we say we’re determined to put him–without it.