Battle of the Books: The Curriculum Debate
in America
by James Atlas was written in 1990 on the heels of the publication of two
significant books, E.D. Hirsh’s Cultural
Literacy, and Allan Bloom’s The Closing
of the American Mind. All three question: What Should Americans Know?
I
came across Atlas’ book where all gems get a second chance, a used bookstore,
and read it with deep interest. The
debate he waged three decades ago continues today, with disagreement at schools
over what everyone should be reading.
He
writes: “Indeed, at first glance, there appear to be several crises, beginning
with the curriculum debate that has flared up in the universities. Put simply:
Should there be books that are required
reading, and what books should they be? This
apparently innocent question provokes others that are more charged: How are these books chosen? Is there such thing as a “canon,” a core
curriculum of works that represents, in the words of Matthew Arnold, “the best
that is known and thought in the world”?
If so, how is this canon determined?
Do political and social interests figure in its composition? Are some books more universal than
others? Does “opening the canon” –
including works of other peoples and cultures that have been largely ignored,
or marginalized – promote tolerance
and widen our horizons, or does it produce an educational free-for-all, a
“Balkanization of culture,” in which no one learns anything? What does it mean to be educated in America
today?”
He
further questions: “Is the notion of a “collective culture” obsolete, or is it
necessary to our survival as a nation?
Does the widening of the curriculum to recognize the cultural
achievements of such disenfranchised constituencies as women, Blacks,
Hispanics, and Native Americans confirm our democratic charter, or does it
threaten to promote – in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s resonant phrase – “the
disuniting of America”? Is
multiculturalism a harbinger of anarchy?”
There
are books that tell us what to read, like 1,000
Books to read Before You Die or The Norton Anthology of English Literature or
Columbia Literary History of the United States. There are suggested reading lists in
magazines, libraries, schools, and online.
But is there a consensus on exactly what should be read?
“Our
nation is “an amalgam of diverse interests and identities,” says Atlas. But there needs to be a common bond in our
books. So I’ll leave you with this from Atlas:
“To hope for a consensus on the curriculum is futile; diversity is the
essence of a democratic society. But diversity has its limits. “Even a randomly picked group of intelligent
and educated people will agree on a handful of books that everyone should read
at some point, in some form,” Roger Shattuck asserts. What books?
It wouldn’t be hard to come up with a provisional list: the standard works of Aristotle and Plato,
St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante;
the English political philosophers who inspired those documents that make up
the written heritage of our own government; selections from the literature of
one European language, read in that language; the King James Bible; and a
sample of American literature – as it was before the New Americanists got to
it. The Library of America, a series of
volumes devoted to reprinting the classics of American literature, runs to some
sixty volumes so far, in handsome editions unburdened by scholarly apparatus,
from the works of Abraham Lincoln to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson
to Eugene O’Neill, Willa Cather to Henry James.
Plans are now afoot to reprint paperback editions of this series: why
not adopt them in our schools?
“Think
of the books we read in high school (my informal poll has turned up a virtually
uniform list): Hamlet; J.B., a play
by Archibald MacLeish; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; James Joyce’s Dubliners;
George Eliot’s Silas Marner; John
Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men;
Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. What do these books have in common? Why are they assigned by high school teachers
years after year? They’re easy to read, for one thing; they’re written with a
simplicity and economy that makes them (or made them) readily comprehensible to
the average sixteen-year-old; they’re pitched at the right level. More important, they seem familiar. MacLeish’s play is loosely based on the Book
of Job; Hamlet is perhaps
Shakespeare’s most accessible play, the great speeches so often quoted they’ve
become part of our everyday language; Hemingway is a showcase of the American vernacular;
Dubliners has the classic simplicity
of a hymn. Is it any wonder that
students identify with these books?
They’re the lore of our culture.
“This
isn’t to say that we should ignore minority literature, Third World literature,
the literature of peoples around the globe.
But without a common culture, a culture that possess certain shared
assumptions, there will soon be no America to imagine, no common myth around
with to organize our aspirations. The
study of American literature invests us in our own society by enabling us to
recognize ourselves in it – to find there a general representation of our
experience.”
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