Hildegarde

No, I’m not kidding.  As I was coming here to teach, it was actually snowing.  It was warm, and it wasn’t sticking, but still.

So, I’ve been thinking about sincerety.  It seems to me that sincerity matters more in determining what the person is worth than in determining what the ideas are worth.

If you’re reading someone who is suggesting that you can make a change to your life, especially one that you don’t think is really possible, then whether or not he is able to follow his own advice can help you determine whether or not you’ll sign on for the program.

But even there, what you really need to know is whether anyone could follow the advice and succeed.  I quit smoking cold turkey in 1991.  I know it’s possible because I did it.  People around me know it’s possible because I did it.  If the guy recommending cold turkey on television is still a nicotine addict, it’s still the case that it’s possible and I know because I did it.

I agree with both Robert and Lymaree that the Hobbesian stance is probably the default stance, but I’m bemused by how many of you seem to assume dehumanization means blanking out entire groups.

Lately, the dehumanization I notice is of individuals by individuals, or individuals by institutions.  There are an incredible number of people out there who decide “this is the way you should behave,” and if you resist and disagree, feel justified in doing whatever it takes–lying manipulating, threatening, bullying–to get you to do it.

Okay, that sentence should be shot.  But my point is further this:  although Hobbes may be the default mode, I do think most of us in this society at this time have been brought up to believe that the default is a bad option, that we should behave differently.

It would embarrass me to do some of the things I see people do, and especially some of the things I see various officials of various organizations do.  Consider, for instance, the SLAPP lawsuit, which is fortunately illegal now in many states.

The SLAPP lawsuit works like this:  somebody in the community objects to the fact that your company wants to build a plant there, and publishes op-eds or sends letters to the editor of the local paper detailing all the awful things your company has done.

This somebody is telling the truth.  Your company really has done all these things.  You know that if you launch a lawsuit against this person for what she’s said, you’ll lose–

But you don’t have to win.  You only need to make the who process so expensive, your critic will be forced to shut up.  You also send a message to other potential critics–if they say anything you don’t like, you’ll cost them enough money to put their houses, their children’s educations, their very lives in jeopardy.

I’d really like to look into the mind of the person who thought up the SLAPP suit.  We’re not dealing here with a marginal issue.  That this course of action is both politically and morally wrong would be easily discerned by the vast majority of the population.  For one thing, the suit asserts a lie, since it claims defamation where the company knows none exists. 

The other thing I’ve seen, quite frequently, have been attempts to get workers or students to quit.

I’m not talking, now, about truly difficult situations where an employee cannot be fired or a student expelled, but his behavior is such that there has to be some way to get him out of there.

At one of the places I’ve taught, for instance, there was a tenured professor who’d  become an habitual drunk.  He’d come in drunk, teach drunk, and leave drunk.  His classes had degenerated into hour and tweny minute long rambles on his life, his tastes in music, whatever.  He was supposed to be teaching American government.  If students left papers in his campus mailbox, he would pick them up, then lose them, then forget he ever had them, then fail the students for never handing them in.

Firing a tenured professor is damned near impossible.  I don’t think the administration did anything wrong by going in for guerilla tactics–moving his parking space to a lot in the Sibera across the highway, “forgetting” he was supposed to have his check directly deposited into his account and giving it to him in check form instead (thereby causing a delay that bounced a whole stack of checks he’d written on the assumption the money would be there), finding it nearly impossible to get the air conditioning working in his office when the heat hit 100 degrees.

My problem is that I see too much of this when it’s completely unnecessary, and especially against students.  In one case I knew of, a teacher took a student’s note cards–nearly three hundred of them–when the student wasn’t looking, making the student incapable of finishing a research paper on time and giving the teacher the opportunity to hand over an F.  The F put the student’s GPA under the bar for staying in school.

And that was, in fact, the point.  The teacher wanted the student gone.  The student went.

If I was the one who wanted the student gone–and I admit that it isn’t the kind of thing I’m prone to–it would make sense to me to tell the student so, or to do something direct that would might get me what I wanted, like complain to the administration about the student’s behavior.

But even if I was unwilling to do that, I’d have a hard time stealing the notecards and then staging a convincing hissy fit over the student’s “irresponsibility.”  And irresponsibility is what this teacher accused this student of.  Of course, the student hadn’t really done all that work, made all those note cards.  He was just slacking off again.

My son calls this approach to human relations “corporate,” but it certainly doesn’t restrict itself to corporations. 

And unlike the practice of stigmatizing groups, it requires one person to directly face another, to look straight into someone’s eyes and do it anyway.

Am I really the only person left on the planet, or one of the few, who can’t do this sort of thing without at least looking guilty?

But I’m blithering again.  And I found my copy of The Intellectuals. 

So, here’s the thing.  Wor is going really well lately, and that means that I sometmes don’t get around to the blog.   Then there is the fried chicken situation, but that’s something else.

I’ve been thinking today about a book I read some time ago.  It’s still in print, as far as I know.  It’s called The Intellectuals, and it’s by a man named Paul  Johnson, who is sort of an interesting person.

Johnson is a Brit, and all I can say is that elementary and secondary education in the UK of his time must have been stellar, because he did not attend any university.   Instead, he worked for a long time as a journalist, and in his spare time he started a second career as an historian.

A good historian.

He’s written books on the history of Christianity, the history of the United States and the history of the Jews.  He wrote this book called The  Birth  of Modernity, which is about a fifteen year period near the beginning of the nineteenth century that gave us the habits of thought we have now.

The Intellectuals, however, is something of a departure from his usual stuff, because instead of being a single, well-reasoned narrative on an historical period, it’s a series of long essays on a number of important thinkers and writers. 

All of these thinkers and writers can be at least nominally defined as “left wing,” although in point of fact some of them lived before such designations had entered the language and some of them are “left wing” only in the sense that they’re obviously not conservative.

Living in a world where everything is supposed to fit into a bipolar scheme makes things difficult sometimes.

Johnson’s book covers the obvious figures–Rousseau, Marx, Sartre–and some less obvious ones, but the reason it’s been on my mind is that it asks the question that continues to bother me.

There’s a logical fallacy called the “ad hominem,” which is the practice of ignoring what someone is saying in order to attack him personally.

This is a fallacy because the truth of a statement most usually inheres in the statement, not in the person pronouncing it.  The earth would still be round if Hitler was the one who discovered it was not flat.

Any short acquaintance with the Net will reveal that people love ad hominem arguments, and that most of them adhere stringently to the idea that proving that the guy making the statement is a jerk or worse is enough to disprove the statement, or at least render it beneath consideration.

I don’t usually have much patience with ad hominem arguments, but I find myself coming up short when the  person I’m considering is a philosopher.

It’s not just that philosophers are supposed to tell us how to live, and that there might be some merit in knowing whether they can follow their own advice, or, if they follow it, what results it has.

It’s certainly perfectly possible for someone to give good advice he’s not able, or willing, to take himself.  There’s a wonderful article in this month’s issue of Skeptic magazine about  Ponzi schemes.   It’s written by a university professor who specializes in investigating gullibility and the way it leads people to buy into collective delusions and do all sorts of things they wouldn’t do if they were thinking straight.

The guy also had a lot of his mone wiped out in the Madoff mess.

I’m also very aware of the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect person.  Even the saints had flaws, and often big ones.  There isn’t a single historical figure, thinker, writer, novelist, grocery bagger, whatever, who hasn’t done something discreditable at some point in his life.  If you’re not going to liten to anybody unless they’re perfect, you’re not going to listen to anybody, and you should probably stop listening to yourself.

But.

The fact is that I’m also aware of the human capacity for self-justification and rationlization.  I know people can build vast mansions in the air to absolve themselves from guilt.

Deconstruction–the idea that what a text says on the surface is not what it really means; you have to “unpack” it, and sometimes it means the opposite–turns out to have been developed largely by people who had significant histories of wartime collaboration with the Nazis in France.   An awful lot of the various forms of moral relativism out there seem to be promoted by people who want to get away with things a non-relative morality wouldn’t allow them to touch.

Think of  Peter Singer.

I wis I knew where I was going with this, but I don’t.  I do know another book of essays could be written that concentrated on “right wing” writers and had pretty much the same effect, but at the moment that only book of this kind I have on offer is Johnson’s.

And I think I’m going to reread it if I can find it in the office. 

Because the issue of how we treat each other, how we make ourselves live civilization, isn’t minor for me. 

All the rest of it–Canons, and education, and English departments, and whatever–seems secondary. 

I wis I understood the process by which some human beings stop seeing other human beings as human beings–how they get to the place where they feel justified in treating other human beings as less than human.

Mostly when we pose this question, we’re asking about something big, like the Holocaust, or the Rwandan genocide.

The smaller things are more important, though, in the long run.  The way some of us feel that lying and manipulation is just fine when we’re dealing with that person, that gossip and defamation is just a lot of fun, that it’s all right to cheat and maneuver behond someone’s back because, hell, they don’t know what’s good for them anyway.

Yeah, okay, I’m back on this.

But it’s been a long couple of months.

I finally settled in to a book, and the book I found is called The Concord Quartet. It’s by Samuel A. Schreiner, Jr., and it has a lot of virtues given my state of mind.  For one thing, it’s relatively short.  For another, it’s very cleanly written.  And for a third, it’s one of the books I have stacked up to read for the essays I’m writing on the New England Renaissance.

But there’s soemthing else this book is:  it’s the kind of history we used to get in school before everybody got all sophisticated and confrontation.  That is, it’s a celebration of America, a presentation of the people and ideas involved in the Transcendentalist movement that accentuates the positive in every possible way.

One of the reasons I’m interested in the Transcendentalist movement, and in that entire New England flowering in the years just preceding the Civil War, is that it was our first flirtation with what we later called the Sixties Counterculture.

These were people who founded communes and went back to the land, who ditched orthodox Christianity for “spirituality” that saw God in every man and woman, who championed the emancipation of women and the emancipation of slaves.

And they were, as well, tourists at the revolution, or a lot of them were.  (Hawthorne, for all his faults, had more sense.)

Many of the New England Transcendentalists praised and feted John Brown the way Leonard  Bernstein and company entertained the Black Panthers.  Unwilling to engage in violence themselves, squeamish almost to the point of risibility, they romanticized it in Brown and romanticized it as a response to the continued existence of slavery in the south.

A lot f people like to say that the Sixties were a total waste, that nothing good or constructive came out of them, that they ruined the country.

But that isn’t true, any more than it would be true to say that Transcendentalism was a total waste.

The  Sixties brought equal rights for women in a way even Susan B. Anthony never imagined was possible, and they pushed for full equality for African Americans, which was a good thing, too.

It wasn’t wrong for the Transcendentalists to be opposed to slavery, or to champion total abolition instead of one of the more cautious approaches favored by even most of he anti-slavery politicans in Washington.  Thoreaus essay “Slavery in Massachusetts” is one of the great moral manifestoes in American literature, and when Emerson emerged from his fuzzy moods to write straightforwardly, he produced significant defenses of reason, science, education and political equality.

But here’s the thing–to the extent that there was anything not quite admirable in all these people, it is hardly mentioned in the book I’m reading.  The bad parts have been carefully excised out, or are presented in such a way as to make them seem negligible.

There is nothing particularly odd about this approach.  Up until a few years ago, this was the way history textbooks for elmentary and high schools were written, and going straight through the 1950s, there was a fair amount of history for adult general audiences that did the same.

Every culture has to recruit its members to its own defense, and this is one of the ways to do it.   There’s nothing more honest about accentuating the negative, which is what a lot of textbooks do now.

Somehow, however, it still bothers me.  I read about Bronson Alcott and the wonderful experiment at Fruitlands and I can’t forget that this was a feckless and destructive man, who made the lives of his wife and children miserable.  This was the man who told his daughter Louisa May that she was the evil one because she was dark instead of blonde like her sisters, who periodically called family meetings to announce that he didn’t believe in marriage and was going to leave it, who could never be bothered to make a living and lived most of his life off the generosity of Emerson.

Then there is the matter of John Brown, presented here, as he was in my fifth grade history class, as a fierty, righteous crusader for justice whose tactics may have been a little extreme but whose heart was in the right place.

In reality, Brown was a thug, and he’d raised his sons in the same mold.  He had no compunction about cold blooded murder as long as the victim could somehow be connected to “slavery,” even if the connection was so tenuous as merely being suspected of intending to vote in favor of it in Kansas.

Brown wasn’t a Transcendentalist, of course, but many of the Transcendalists loved him, supported him with money and aid, and were willing to pay to have him speak to them.  They threw parties for him.   They protested the attempts of the federal government to capture and stop him and in one case they helped him avoid arrest.

Like the guests at Lenoard Bernstein’s famous party more than a hundred years later, too many of them were thrilled to be standing right next to a “real” revolutionary, the kind that got blood on his hands.

I think there’s good reason to celebrate the Concord writers and the people who helped them and followed them.  They represent the first truly  American culture we ever had.  They gave us our first serious novelists and poets, and the essays of  Emerson and Thoreau outline a distinctly American sensibility in politics and morals.  

I’m not so happy with the idea that we should present these people as if they had no flaws, or as if what they wrote and thought was wonderful just because it happens to be ours.  

For one thing, there’s the danger that readers or students will stumble upon the darker side of the truth eventually, and will, in reaction, decide that “real” is just the bad and not the good.

For another thing, the lives and works of the New England Transcendalists have a lot to tell us about the culture the Sixties wrought.  The issues in politics and morals  then were very similar to what we’re ealing with now.

And, most of all, I think, there’s virtue in letting people understand that real life is not a children’s movies, that people who are truly great in some aspects of their lives are often condemnable in others. 

Or something like that.

Last night, Robert sent me an e-mail abou an article he’d read about small presses that print a number of copies of a ook and then, if the demand exceeds that number, print the rest as  POD.  I’ve been looking around for the article on the internet, but haven’t been able to find it.  It sounds funny, all about silly people who are horrified to realize that they copy they’re holding is not a “rea” book, but a  POD, which is unacceptable because…because.

Here’s the thing.  There actually is a because, and it’s the opposite of snobbery. 

The problem with print on demand is not that it’s print on demand, but that so much of it is vanity publishing.

And there’s a reason they call it vanity publishing.  You’d be amazed how many people there are out there who sincerely believe the’re great writers who are being held back from publication and success by a cabal of toffee nosed snobs who just won’t touch anything that isn’t written by their own little in-crowd.

And you’d be even more surprised to find how many of these people are wrong.

Look.  There are some fields where there is no shame in self publishing–most of the sports and gaming communities support self-published work with no problem at all.

But they can do that because the number of such books, or of any books, is relatively small compared to the audience and the reviewers who re intereted in it.   A decently sized gaming community that sees fifty or so books published a year can handle that number without too much trouble.   People have time to read through the available offerings and determine what’s bad and what’s good.

The last time I checked–and it was a few years ago, so the numbers may be down by now–there were 40,000 books published in the United States by commercial publishers alone.

Look at that number for a minute. 

Even dedicated review organs, the magazines that concentrate on reviews and nothing else, don’t manage more than about twenty reviews per issue.  Most review organs manage much less.  Any major reviewer with any major outlet, magazines or newspapers or websites, will be inundated with books on a daily basis.  We’re talking about ten to fifteen to twenty of the things coming in every day, and more for things like the New York  Times, which are perceived to be important to sales.

The original reason for restricting the books that can be considered for such attention as reviews and awards–or as qualifications for acceptance to professional writers’ groups–was n ot snobbery but volume control, and the rationale made perfect sense.

Publishers are in business.  They need to make money.  If they accept your book, they put a fair amount of time and money into its publication–they invest in you and your book.

And that means that they must think there’s something there worth investing in, that something about what you’re written will command the attention of an audience.

If I get a book from such a publisher, I know that somebody thought that that book was worth inventing in and put his money on the line to do it.  What’s more, the people who made this decision are professionals in the field who have seen hundreds of books and followed hundreds of publishing histories and who know something about what will and will not work.

I’m not trying to say here that such people are infallible.  They aren’t.  T.S. Eliot turned down Animal  Farm when he was a reader for  Faber and  Faber, and Kon-Tiki, one of the great commercial successes of its year, was turned down by fourteen or fifteen places before somebody decided to pick it up.

But mistakes notwithstanding, “this book is worth risking tens of thousands of dollars of my money to publish” isn’t a bad standard by which to judge the worth of the thing before you pick it up.

For one thing, it demands that writing have the reasonable expectation of an audience, that it not be the equivalent of the French film industry, where government pays the tab for what it decides is “worthwhile” whether any actual people want it or not.

No matter how insulated the publishing industry can seem–and it can not only seem, but get, pretty insulated–it’s driven by the numbers of books sold.  To insist that a book have a legitimate publisher to be considred a “real” publication is to insist that the book have a reasonable expectation of finding an audience.

This is not snobbish, and it’s not stupid.  It does assume that not every book is good enough, in a myriad number of ways that define “good,” to merit publication.

Maybe something will show up in the future that will make it more possible to handle the volume of novels that appear every year, but I don’t see how we’re going to manage it–or the nonfiction, either–without some way of sifting through the dross.

Well, I suppose we could go around in circles some more, but I still come down on the side of teaching what is necessary to know, not in trying to pick those parts of what is necessary to know that you think students might like, or giving up on what is necessary to know in order to pick other things students might like.

Robert thinks that what gets taught in  English classes is inevitably boring, and I’d agree, except that a lot of what he finds boring I found, and find, completely fascinating, and a lot of what he thinks is “a good story” I find dull, repetitious and predictable.  

But that doesn’t explain why I am now in one of those periods when I can’t find a book to read.  It’s not that I don’t have books around the house.   I’ve got tons of them, and a couple of weeks ago my editor sent me a nice package full of things wrritten by my fellow authors at SMP.  So I’ve got books I’ve had around for a while and new books both, and none of them seems to be what I want.

I  have no idea why this happens.   Most of the time, I can go from reading one thing to reading the next without a hitch.   My biggest delay in going from one book to another is finding out where I put the thing I want to read next.

But every once in a while, I get to a point where I just get stopped dead.  I’ve got books all over the house.  I’ve even got a book or two that I thought would be the next thing up.  I take them out and put them on the couch or the loveseat or the coffee table and stare at them.  I pick up one or the other and read a few pages and just can’t make myself go on.

Sometimes this happens because I’ve got something on my mind that would distract me from anything, but at the moment I don’t think that’s the case.  I do have something on my mind at the moment, but it’s not so pressing that I’m unable to read any more.   I got through my book of essays on  Renaissance art in a very happy frame of mind, and  was sure, when I did, that I was going to go on and read this big book of essays by  Samuel Johnson I’ve had sitting around the house for forever.  

I’ve never read anything by Johnson except scraps and quotations, and several writers I like a lot think he’s wonderful, so  I thought  I’d try him and see what he was like.  But I can’t make myself get into the book, no matter how hard I try, and I keep running up against a real weird road block:  I keep picturing  Robbie  Coltrane playing  Johnson in series three of Blackadder. 

If you don’t know Blackadder, you ought to try it.   Not only is it funny, but it stars Rowan Atkinson, who was one of the few people in British public life to stick up for freedom of speech and expression after the Danish cartoon mess.  Somehow, I don’t think he’s going to be in favor of the new UN ania for making “respect for religion” a “human right.”

Sometimes the reason  I can’t read something new is that the old writer had such a strong narrative voice that I can’t get it out of my head, and the new writers I’m looking at are nowhwere near as distinctive.

In this case, however, the last thing I read was an academic book, which was well written enough but hardly dramatically singular.  

And I have projects goin, which means I have books I need to read to complete them, but I can’t get myself interested in any of those, either. 

And sometimes, I just get sick of reading.  I’ve been reading and writing as a vocation as well as an avocation most of my adult life, and there get to be spots where I just want to chuck the whole thing for a month or two and go on safari or something.

This is not the same thing as not being able to read, because you just can’t focus, the way I was a few weeks ago.   This is more a feeling that  I’m getting stale in some ultimate way, that the world and life has to consist of more than words on a page.

And yet words on a page is what  I’ve loved for as long as I can remember.

And it’s words on a page, too, not “a good story” or whatever is “interesting.”   I read and have always read nearly everything–I read Nietzche for the first time at thirteen, and Aristotle before that.   By the time I hit junior high school, I’d made my way through most of the classics of nineteenth century fiction and fallen completely in love with the American expatriates in the Paris of the 1920s.

By the time I  hit high school proper I was infatuated with Camus and Sarte and Jean Annouilh.  Which I’ve probably just mispelled.  

There was a point in the Sixties when there were a lot of modern writers who were actually very good, and writing about something other than their insular lives.  That was the time when movies became something more than entertainment, too, so on top of what I was reading I had Lawrence of Arabia and A Man for All Seasons.  My big movie at that period, though, was Becket, which was of course by Jean Annouilh.

I saw my first serious stage production around this time, too, and it was a production of Dylan  Thomas’s Under Milk Wood put on at the summer stock theater in Westport.  Over the last few years, just before he died, Paul Newman was involved in a project to revive and revitalize that theater, and it always makes me a little depressed to think it ever had to be revitalized.

But you see where I’m going here–without the help of a single English teacher, I stumbled on just the kind of “literary” writing that makes some people here bored and annoyed. 

My English teachers, in fact, probably knew next to nothing about the contemporary stuff I was reading, and most of them wouldn’t have understood it if they had.  They were good at classics and at those squishy Tells A Moral Lesson contemporary books that elementary and junior high schools live and breathe on, but I’d have been lucky if they’d even heard of Camus.  Some of the other stuff I was reading–Ginsberg and Kerouac, for instance–would have horrified them.

This feeling that I’ve just spent too much of my life reading is very recent.  It started showing up about three or four years ago, and it comes and goes at uncertain intervals even now. 

It’s always difficult, because I read the way some people take in air–I just do it, it’s almost an automatic reflex, and everything feels wrong if I go too long without doing it. 

Usually, the best solution to this mood, at least for me, is to find something very straightforward and analytical.  The perfect thing would be, maybe, Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American  Novel, which I’ve been looking for for a while, but it’s lost in the office at the moment.  It could be months before I find it again.

I’ve got a big hardcover called Cultural  Amnesia, by Clive James, but I’m put off by the fact that it isn’t a comprehensive book but a series of short essays.  I’m not sure I want to bop from essay to essay like that, and especially not sure I want to do it when the essays are arranged in alphabetical order by the last name of the subjects.  Maybe I care too much about historical progressions.

Ack.  It’s getting late and I have to go get something done, and I’ve had no sleep, because of course my son’s trip was late last night, and then there was fog.

Maybe my biggest problem is that I can’t think of what I would do if I wasn’t reading.

There doesn’t seem to be anything else.

Today and tomorrow are going to be messes of days, with schedules off and sleep minimal, and I’ve been thinking about why so many parents are at odds with schools these days.

In almost any discussion of education you see on the web, especially in any discussion of American education, you’ll inevitably run up against the complaint that, unlike in the old days, parents just won’t back up the teachers.  Give the kid a bad grade?  Parents complain.  Discipline the kid for behaving badly?  Parents sue.

The assumption in all these discussions always seems to be that it’s the parents who are in the wrong.  The teachers know best, and are only trying to uphold standards.

But is that really true?

The parents who are complaining are, by and large, the products of the great post-War sea change in American schools, where we went beyond teaching subject matter to concerning ourselves with the “whole child.”

Forget for a moment what objections you may have to this approach on a practical level–yes, it leads to dumbing down the curriculum and teaching mindless platitudes instead of real subject matter–and consider for a moment how intrusive this kind of approach really is.

All of us have thoughts, feelings, and fantasies that we keep to ourselves, or restrict access to only a close friend or two.  Sometimes we do that because we’re ashamed of what we think or feel, or think other people wouldn’t understand it or make fun of it, but sometimes we do it just because we want some parts of us to belong to ourselves alone.

The “whole child” approach implicitly denies that children get to have any privacy at all, and demands that they be judged not on their peformance but on their total being.  Every thought, every feeling, every daydream is tested against a standard of “emotional wellbeing,” and if it fails, the school rushes in to “address” the “problem.”

The cultures of sc hools eing what they are, teachers and staff often define as “problems” things that children themselves, and often their parents, don’t see as problematic at all.  Love to read horror novels and write your own horror stories for English?  Why are you so morbid?  Maybe you’re our next school shooter! Hate doing homework and love being a slob?  You’re probably being absued at home!  Like being off by yourself and making up fantasy stories about elves and fairy princesses?  My  God, that could be childhood onset schizophrenia!

Most of the reactions to ordinary variations in personality in children aren’t so extreme, of course, but they are indicative of a system that has, for nearly fifty years now, seen children not as human beings but as masses of problems that need to be fixed.

And those children grow up to be parents who hate schools, hate teachers, and don’t trust either as far as they can through them.

My parents’ generation supported the schools.  My generation grew up to assume that their most important imperative was to protect their children from the schools at any cost.

I don’t think most parents are championing fluffy self-esteem in opposition to reasonable standards.  I think they’re simply assuming that when the school says there’s something wrong with their child, the school is not just wrong, but maliciously so. 

All of this, believe it or not, comes back to that whole issue of English teachers trying to foster the love of reading.

What we love and what we hate are our own.   We may be introduced to things by schools and teachers that we end up deciding we love, but our inner beliefs, our feelings, our passions should be our own.  Their not the business of the school, or of anybody we don’t choose to share them with.

Schools should teach subjects.  The content of those subjects should be determined by the requirements of the field of study, or the overall mission of the school to provide a basic understanding necessary  concepts and skills. Most students will not develop a love of math, or reading, or music.   Those that will, will do better being left to develop it on their own than they will ever do by having their emotions consulted when the reading list is drawn up.

What I want, more than anything else, is for schools to do their job and stop doing the jobs they aren’t suited for.  

Students who feel threatened by a prying, judgmental system that has them as a captive victim group for better than half the year will grow into parents determined to fight their  children’s schools on their children’s behalf.

And they’ll do that even when the schools are right.

If we’re going to have schools at all, then let them do what they’re good at doing–teaching subjects to students who either want to learn them or not, and therefore do learn them or not.

And if they don’t want to learn what they’re offered, maybe we ought to accept their own decisions.

First, let me say that I’m in the middle of finishing a book, and I’m late, due to the Big PRroblem which is still not entirely resolved–or even sort of, yet–so my posts to this blog may get a little sketchy.

Also,  I have a new book coming out in about a month, called Living Witness, and when it does, I’m going to be blogging at SMP for a week. 

So, you know, heads up.

But a couple of thins.  I still reject the idea that it is part of the job of English courese in elementary school and high school to teach “a love of reading.”  It’s a nice bonus if you can get it, but you wouldn’t ask the math teacher to make a “love of algebra” or  the science teacher to make a “love of biology” as one of the main goals of their teaching, and there’s no reason why English teachers should be expected to take on the psychological reconstruction of their students in a quest that is bound to fail ninety nine percent of the time anyway.

The purpose of taaching literature in high school is to make sure students are acquainted with literary forms and how to interpret them and to provide a (largely superficial) acquaintance with the touchstone works of the culture.  I’m not asking that students read Chaucer in high school.  I’m asking att they not receive a high school diploma without knowing who Chaucer was and why The Canterbury Tales is a milestone in the development of literature in English. 

That last is a lot easier and less onerous than most of you imagine.  “It was the first serious literary written in English instead of Latin so that it could be read by an audience that included a rising middle class of merchants as well as classically trained scholars and ecclesiastics” isn’t that hard a concept to grasp.

I also think that some of you have a very restricted idea of what the Canon is, and Robert seems to think that it includes everything he was asked to read in English classes.

In my experience, high school English classes in most places teach little or nothing of the Canon.   What they like are modern or contemporary books written to be “thoughful” and to “deal with issues” considered “important.”  That is, I think, how we end up with so many high school students asked to read To Kill A Mockingbird, which is a nice enough but largely minor novel with a bad case of Lord  Peter Wimsey syndrome.

Lord Peter Wimsey syndrome is what I call it when a woman writer invents  The Perfect Man–the one she’d like to marry, but can’d find–and turns him into the hero of her fiction.  Atticus Finch is ridculously pefect, and that is one of the reasons why Mockingbird is unlikely ever to actually make it into the  Canon. 

One of the other favorites of high school English courses that’s unlikely ever to make it into the Canon is  Catcher in the Rye, a book whose main virtue seems to be that so many people want to ban it.   It’s beautifully written.  The prose is incredibly clean in every possible way.  It just has litle or nothing to say unless you take adolescent angst to be necessarily insightful, which I don’t. 

But if you don’t mind my saying so, the inclusion of these two books on most high school reading lists is the result of that urge to teach students to “love to read,” mostly by giving them things teachers think they will find “interesting’ and “relevant.” 

It would make more sense to me simply to give students classics, different ones of different difficulty over time.  Classics are classics because people have read them year after year after year.

And no, getting the book assigned in English classes doesn’t turn it into a classic.  If that’s the only way the book is surviving, it will fall out of sight soon enough.

There weren’t even any university courses in English literature in American colleges and universities before the twentieth century, and right up until the 1950s the rule in such courses was that no book was included that hadn’t been in print for at least fifty years.  

You may find Joyce’s Ulysses annoying, but it sold to generations of readers who never had it assigned to them in any class.  And that goes double, or better, for  Dickens, who made it in print for a hundred years before he was ever assigned in a  course.  

Some books have survived because they’ve made an enormous impact on the culture, including on people who have never read them–Gone With The  Wind is one, so is Atlas  Shrugged. 

Robert suggests that some of Heinlein woul dhave to be included, but at least at this point nothing he’s done seems to me to hae risen to the level of all-pervasive public consciousness that pushes books into the status of cultural icons.  And some books that look as if they’re going to make it, because they’re enormously popular when they’re first published, disappear into nothingness a few years later.

Right now, I am so disappointed and frustrated with the contents of high school English courses in all but a very few top-end prep schools that I’m about to scream.  The book my younger son brings home from ninth grade  English make my teeth hurt.  The assignments he’s given just make me tired.  There seems to me to be no point to any of it, and I can’t imagine that he’s actually learning anything.

Last summer, he read The Odyssey.  In translation, of course, but start to finish, and he had a good time with mosters and disasters and all that good old classical swordplay.  Bill read Julius Ceasar to Matt when Matt was only six or so, and Matt still remembers most of it–which means that he knew more of Shakespeare than most of the people he went to high school with.

If I was going to yell and scream about education in  English these days on any level–elementary, high school, university–it wouldn’t be that the offerings are snobbish and dull, or that they’re politicaly correct, but that they’re negligible.

Too often,  English teachers these days are teaching nothing at all.

Okay, let me see if I can clear up a few things here.

1) I wasn’t saying that teachers shouldn’t try to make the material they teach interesting and engaging for their students.  Of course they should.  The ability to do that is the mark of a good teacher.

I was arguing against determining the content of the course by what we think will interest the students.

Basic algebra is basic algebra.  A gifted teacher may be able to get students excited about that, but even if nobody can, we still have to teach basic algebra.

We shouldn’t be including books or excluding them in literature courses because we think our students will or will not be interested in them.  Books should be included in such courses because they are part of the cultural heritage that every student must know.

The fact that some students will choose not to know them–will not do the work–is no reason to stop teaching them.   Some students will always refuse to do the work.  That’s a fact of life.

2) What Lymaree is suggesting belongs in elementary and middle school, not in high school (and certainly not in college).   And that is, in fact, what we do in elementary school.

Personally, I think we’re mistaken.   We can teach technique with The  Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well as with the latest popular novel, and then we kill two birds with one stone–we teach the technique and we acquaint the students with part of the Canon.

That said,  I think it’s funny that Lymaree chose Raymond Chandler, of all people, as an example.  I think Chandler is a terrible writer, overwrought and pretentious as hell.  I managed to force my way through exactly one book of his, and the second one became one of less than half a dozen than  I’ve ever failed to finish out of disgust.

You wouldn’t have gotten me interested by trying to shove  Chandler down my throat.  You’d have done better with Sayers, but she’s a pedestrian writer.  And neither of these authors present the kind of expanded vocabulary and complexity of sentence structure that we need to teach at this stage.

I do have at least one modern n ovel I think will wok in teaching technique in the sense I’ve been talking about it here.  That’s Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, which is one of the most amazing extended metaphors out there, and which requires literally buckets of cultural literacy just to follow.

For composition–not for lit–Ido assign that, and it sometimes works. 

But that kind of thing should stop at the eighth grade.

3) As for high school–I don’t think we will ever get most people to take part in the Great  Conversation, and high school is not the place for getting anybody to do that.

Elementary school is for teaching technique, high school is for presenting an outline of the nature and contents of the culture, and of prsenting the basic fields of knowledges, why and how they’re important, and the touchstones of each that broadly educated people should know.

In a sane world, only ten to fifteen percent of students would ever get past this part in any formal way.  Of that ten to fifteen percent, about two thirds will not only be introduced to the Great Conversation, but understand it, and about half of those will choose to continue it. 

And, of course, some of the people who stop with high school will end up both introduced to the Great Conversation and pursuing it on their own time. 

I had a grandmother from a small island in Greece who taught herself to read first Greek and then English and who then became one of the most knowledgable people I’ve ever met on the subject of the classical ballet.  Some people do because they do.

High school, however, has exactly two tasks:  to teach the outlines of the culture and to make students understand what the standards are for including or excluding works in that outline, and that those standards are neither arbitrary or subjective.

Most high school teachers right now couldn’t do any of that to save their lives.

4) Try to think of the teaching of literature in high school (not in college) as an offshoot of the teaching of history.   Practically everything we think of as a result of the “cultural revolution” of the Sixties had occured almost a hundred years before in the Transcendentalist movement–fascination with Eastern religions, utopian communes, free love, you name it. 

In fact, the ideas that gave rise to that outbreak of radicalism and to several since are embedded deeply in American culture.  They go back before the Revolution, and they are in many ways the philosophical underpinnings of–The Scarlet Letter.

Or rather, the conflict between them and the original Calvinist  principles is. 

Good historical novels are always about the way we live now–nobody can write a historical novel in the sense of one that is true to the ideas and assumptions of the history, and that means that the ideas and assumptions are always the ones that exist now, but placed in a different context in order to illuminate them.

Someday, go back and listen to Hester Prynne’s lecture on love and adultery.  If you didn’t know where it came from, and I tweaked the language to be a little less formal, you’d have thought somebody had delivered it in Berkeley in 1968.

5) Robert complained, in an e-mail to me, that it is impossible to talk about The Canon withhout a list of books–but I don’t think it’s that simple.  

For one thing, there are really several Canons, not one.  All a Canon is is an official list of books.  People talk about the Star Trek cCanon as well as the “literary” one. 

If we’re going to use the Canon of Westsern intellectual  history–the most expansive one for academic purposes–it’s going to include nonfiction as well as fiction, history and philosophy as well as novels and plays and poems.  And there’s good reason to insist that it also include some music and some painting, sculpture and even architecture.

Nobody is ever going to learn all that.  Even people like me, who get a kick out of trying, couldn’t do it in a single lifetime.  

For the present half second, what I’m most interested in for my students is that they be able to see that there are other ways to live than the ones they’re used to, and other ways to think than the ones they’re used to–and to be able to put those things in context.

But for my very poorest students, the ones with the crack addicted mothers and the garage in the hallwys, Jane Austen is considerably more of a shock than science fiction (or problem novels) could ever be.

Let me through out a couple of statements here and see what you think about them.

Kids really hate math.   All those abstractions turn them off, and practically nobody but math majors likes them anyway.   So, okay, let’s give them some of that if we have to, but let’s concentrate instead on the fun stuff like how to calculate betting odds and weird science statistics.  That way, maybe some of those kids will actually decide they like math and be willing to do some after they leave school.

History is really boring.  All those dates, and all those people from years ago who did stuff that just doesn’t make sense any more.  Kids hate history, and no wonder.   Instead of feeding them all that, we should concentrate on things like the history of rock music or the sexual revolution of the Sixties.  That way, maybe some kids will decide they like history and read it on their own time after they leave school.

Physics is really hard.   Maybe all those concepts were interesting to physicists once, or even physics majors now, but for most of us now they’re just hard to understand.  Instead of trying to force students to understand what’s so difficult for them, we should concentrate on common sense things like simple Newtonian mechanics.

The reason most of you out there will find what I just said to be outrageous is because you think math, history and physics are areas of study that have content students should learn wheither they like it or not, and whether they find it difficult or not.

The purpose of middle school and high school education in math, history and physics isn’t to induce a love of the subject in the students, but to make sure they learn basic concepts and operations.  If they also decide they love the subject, that’s nice, but not part of the goal.

I don’t think the Canon constitutes a “narrow slice” of literature.  It is, in fact, the broadest possible sample of literature, and includes books that could be classified in all of the genres, and plays and poetry as well. 

The decision to teach a book–rather than just to read it–cannot be about how students might love it and be inspired to read more, any more than the decision to teach one mathematical concept rather than another, or to teach one period of history rather than another, can be based on what we think students will like and emotionally respond to.

Almost all intellectual disciplines are difficult to learn at first, and frustrating at first.   We get beyond that point and what began as dificult becomes easy.  At that point, what started out as easy often begins to seem boring.

The long, complicated sentences f nineteenth century authors aren’t “good writing for their time,” they’re good writing.  The problem lies in the fact that our education is reading has been so dumbed down that we don’t know how to function in the face of subordinate clauses anymore.

And yet, being able to read complex sentences, subordinate clauses and all, isn’t a negligible skill.  Someday, take a look at the periodicals of the Victorian era covering things like politics, public policy, even science.  They were aimed for an audience of educated laymen, doctors and lawyers and businessmen who liked to keep up on things on the side.  They present articles so dense, and writing so complex, we wouldn’t expect most graduate students in the field to understand them these days. 

But society was better off when ordinary educated laymen not only could understand writing of that difficulty, but actually sought it out.

Literature does not exist in the curriculum so that we can induce students to “love reading.”  If that was the only point to it, then there would be no point to it, and it would rightly be removed from the list of subjects we expects students to master.

Literature exists in the curriculum because there are certain kinds of reading skills we need students to have, and because it represents part of the intellectual history of this civilization, and therefore presents ideas and works students ought to know if they are to function fully in the here and now.

I’ve never read Jennifer Cruise, but I know why The Scarlet Letter ought to be in the curriculum and I can see no reason, looking online to find out something about the book, why Bet Me should be there.

Like it or hate it, The Scarlet Letter is an extremely important work in the history of American letters.  It represents an entire generation’s attempt to make terms with its history and to fashion a new and uniquely American identity.  It presents one of the earliest attempts to define and negotiate an enduring theme in American public life, one we deal with even now, and even on this newsgroup–the nature of guilt and responsibility, the claims of the head and the heart, the tug of war between the people we now call “liberals” and “conservatives.”

Do I “like” The Scarlet Letter? As a matter of fact, I do.  I read it when I was very young, and on my own, not because it was assigned, and it engaged me and excited me and I read it over again just a week or so after I’d finished it the first time.

But none of that contitutes a reason for assigning the book in a class or making it a part of a curriculum.  If the other things did not exist, it would not belong in school.

What are the reasons for assigning Bet Me to students if the criteria is NOT “they might like it and get turned on to reading other stuff?” 

In other words, if you take literature seriously as an area of study, if you accept that it has content and skills that are necessary for students to learn–why would you assign a contemporary genre novel in class at all?  Most books that fall into that category (including mine) are ephemeral.   They don’t require students to develop or exercise higher order reading skills.  They don’t usually deal with enduring themes or point the way to the development of those themes in the culture at large.

The one case in which I can see assigning such stuff in class is not in a literature course, but in composition, where what you want is a simplified form of some literary form or device to teach to students who have not in fact learned what they should have learned in high school.

Janet did it with a book of mine, and I’ve done it with Terry  Pratchett’s Small  Gods–but that’s not teaching literature, it’s getting students to develop the skills they need to eventually read literature.

Why assign a contemporary romance novel when you can assign Sense and  Sensibility?  Why assign Raymond Chandler when you can assign Crime and  Punishment, or The Brothers Karamazov, or even Sherlock Holmes? 

Those of you who want English classes to be full of your favorite novels are doing the same thing the people who are assigning Judy  Blume do–you’re desperately fishing for something that will make the students “like” the subject.

It’s irrelevant if students like it.

It’s very relevant that they learn it.

Because I really don’t remember if I gave this title to a post already, and I’m too lazy to look it up.

First, I’m going to apologize to Janet.  I will say in my defense that I anticipated I would have to.  Sorry, I took the “more contemporary” in Janet’s comment to mean, well, right now.   Janet only meant “late enough in time so that there was actually plumbing.”

But something has finally occured to me, and that’s that I think I understand where Robert is coming from when he says that I and other people who teach literature approach reading like “eating your broccoli.”

Here’s the thing–I enjoy what I read, or I wouldn’t read it.  Sometimes I do get into a situation where I  have to read something as a professional obligation, but once I got past graduate school, that happened a lot less than you’d think.  

In general,  I read what I like, and as often as possible I read what I love–but what I love is very rarely genre fiction. 

If I was going to put together five books to take with me to be stranded for life on a desert island, the very first out of the box would be Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and Jose Saramago’s Blindness would come next.  Even Sherlock Holmes would only make it if I got to take ten instead of five.

But the fact that I like a book, or even love it, isn’t a reason to assign it to students or make it part of a curriculum in  English literature.

For one thing, we don’t all like the same things.   Janet thinks students will like Dickens, but Robert hated the one Dickens novel he was assigned in school.  My sons read Beowulf and Gilgamesh as small children and took to them as if they were superhero movies, but John doesn’t think he’d be able to stand them and wants Faulkner and Hemingway instead.  Everybody but Cheryl seems to think that Silas Marner is an evil plot to murder small children.

I’m not sure it’s really possible to give reasons for why we like something.  I know that several of you have criteria you think you’re using, but I think it’s mostly subjective. 

There’s the issue of the “good story,” for instance.  Most of you say you like a book if it has a “good story,” but what is a good story, exactly?  Robert came up with a set of rules to define that, and some of the rest of you have your own, but the simple fact is that a “good story” is whatever interests you.  It is not an objective criterion to judge a book.

Treasure Island bored me silly.   I could never get all the way through the book, and much as I like Hemingway’s writing, not only The Old Man and the Sea but all his go-out-and-hunt-things novels made my eyes glaze over. 

What makes a “good story” for me are intricate details of personal relationships between characters, a hero or heroine who undergoes a deep and permanent internal change because of the events of the novel,  and a narrative arc that concerns a character’s ability to finally walk out on a person or situation that is harming him.  Or her.

My guess is that what makes me happy when I read would make a lot of the rest of you bored or annoyed, and there’s no reason why that shouldn’t be so.   We don’t all like the same food, either.

But I get the feeling from some of the comments here that some of you think that people who teach English insist on reading and assigning books that they know are boring or distasteful, because those books are “good for us.”

The fact is, however, that part of the reason that people become English majors is the fact that what they actually like, what makes them happy, what they enjoy, are the same books you find boring–and what they find boring are the same books you enjoy.

For better or for worse, the criteria for selecting books for instruction has to rely on something other than taste, or a mad dash to find books students are going to “like.”

In fact,  I think that mad dash is how we ended up with all this Judy Blume.  We need something relevant!   We need something students will be interested in!

There’s something truly insane about restricting a curriculum to what sixteen year olds will be “interested in.”   They don’t actually know what they’re interested in.   Their experience of the world is limited, and that goes for even the ones with the kinds of advantages that took them on a tour of Prague at the age of seven.

Two of my abiding passions at the moment are things I knew nothing about until my early twenties.  Hell, in high school, I didn’t even realize there was such a thing as a harpsichord.

Sixteen year olds live in a bubble of a world with little or no connection to most of the great fields of human endeavor.   Most of them know little to nothing about history, literature, philosophy, muisic, science, mathematics, or those “other cultures” educationists are always babbling about.

At least part of the point of an elementary or a high school curriculum has to be to introduce students to those things.  Listening to an hour of Bach or a lecture on the instruments in a symphony orchestra may feel like being forced to eat your broccoli, but without those things our sixteen year old’s understanding of music comes down to The All American Rejects and  Brittney  Spears.

What’s more, students, like the rest of us, tend to take what is as “normal,” and probably eternal.  One of the reasons the culture is ‘coarse,” as  Victor David Hanson puts it, is that our media is saturated with coarseness.  Just as important, however, is the fact that our students see nothing else.

Some of the best things in life are distasteful at first acquaintance.  Eating your broccoli is a chore until you begin to like broccoli.  

And when your parents tell you that vegetables are delicious, you’re often convinced they must be lying.

If you ask me why I choose to read a book, I’ll tell you that I like it.  If you ask me why we should teach a certain book, or why that book is “good” or “bad,” my likes and dislikes do not, and should not, come into it.

But the fact that there are objectively good reasons to include a book in a curriculum doesn’t preclude my liking it, or even loving it–those are just two different questions with two different types of answers.