Charlie Clark '11 ("Oh the Humanities," Sept. 27) recently argued that if we as a college truly appreciated and valued the humanities, we would reshape the curriculum by reducing specialization and establishing a core curriculum. While I sympathize with his proposal, and have myself argued along similar lines before, I think there are deeper systemic problems in the education of most Dartmouth students that mere specialization could not remedy.
We, as products of this particular historical moment, are simply not equipped to understand and engage with the great works of art, thought and culture around which Clark's core curriculum would be based. It's not that students today are less intelligent than students of past generations. Rather, it is simply the case that the way that American students are educated today does not give us the background skills and knowledge necessary to approach the classic works of culture, philosophy and literature that formerly characterize Western education.
This claim has been borne out in every academic setting I've ever been in. Every year in my high school, for example, we had to read a different Shakespeare play for English class. Most students bought or found online some kind of "modern translation" of Shakespeare because they could not understand him in his original English. In a philosophy class I took here this summer, the students continually expressed bewilderment not only at the logical progression of the arguments, but also at the vocabulary and syntax of the author. Even more importantly than this inability just to read the text, however, we aren't able to engage many of the ideas and questions raised by these works. The greatest philosophy and literature has become unintelligible to us because it largely deals with questions that we simply don't ask anymore, and was written from within a particular cultural and moral universe that we no longer inhabit. Much of this work was written from within or as a reaction to the Christian tradition. Even paradigmatically modern philosophers like Hobbes and Descartes were reacting to Christian scholastic philosophy. Having talked to a number of students here about Christianity, I have often been overwhelmed by our lack of religious literacy. People simply do not understand Christianity today, as a recent Pew Forum Poll clearly demonstrated, and the little they do know they associate with fundamentalist megachurches which represent a kind of Christianity that, regardless of its theological merits, has very little to do with the kind of Christianity that shaped and gave rise to so much of our literary and philosophical patrimony. Because we can't understand Christianity and the moral and cultural vision it engendered, we can't understand the classics.
The seed of the humanities needs to fall on fertile soil if it is to bear fruit in the lives of students. Hence why I think a core curriculum would be inadvisable for Dartmouth. Luckily, there might be a way out of this problem. John Senior, a 20th century philosopher and professor, made the interesting suggestion that in order to understand the thoughts contained in what are commonly called "the great books," we first need to have read and absorbed what he calls "the good books," that body of literature which kids and young adults used to read for pleasure and which prepared them to read, say, Shakespeare or Dante.
Take, for instance, a sentence from "The Wind in the Willows," a book Senior puts on his list: "They recalled the languorous siesta of hot mid-day, deep in green undergrowth, the sun striking through in tiny golden shafts and spots; the bathing and boating of the afternoon, the rambles along dusty lanes and through yellow cornfields; and the long, cool evening at last, when so many threads where gathered up, so many friendships rounded, and so many adventures planned for the morrow." This used to be considered children's literature. Is there any doubt that a child who could master a whole book full of such sentences would be better prepared for engaging with Plato or Alexander Pope?
For a start, primary and secondary schools need to reorder their curriculums around the good books. And as for those of us who are no longer schoolchildren and won't be schoolteachers, we need to spend some time over breaks or whenever we can familiarizing ourselves with books like "Aesop's Fables," "Gulliver's Travels" and "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." Only then will the greater works have any relevance.
