Classical Education vs. The Cancel Culture
An article published recently in the Wall Street Journal has caused a bit of a kerfuffle online, arousing the usual passions stirred by our ongoing culture wars. The article described the efforts of some high school teachers to eliminate the works of “white authors” from their curricula, in a supposed attempt to impose racial equity in our schools. Teachers boasted of removing works like the Odyssey and The Scarlet Letter from English class reading lists in order to save children an encounter with the purported bigotry of the worldview they would find there. As one of the teachers put it, “Think of US society before then & the values that shaped this nation afterwards. THAT is what is in those books.”
The truly astonishing thing about this article, to anyone paying attention to American education over the last few decades, is not that schools are eliminating The Scarlet Letter from their curricula. The astonishing thing is that there are any schools left in America which still teach The Scarlet Letter. One would have thought it had been eliminated from most curricula a long time ago. After all, the move to abolish the “Western canon,” and replace the “dead white men” honored there with authors selected for their racial or sexual identities, has been progressing apace for roughly half a century. What the Journal was noting was nothing more than the mopping up stage of an offensive whose victory has been secured for a long time. There is something faintly ridiculous about these teachers parading their efforts to introduce “diversity” into their reading lists as something cutting edge. But likewise, there is something ridiculous about the consternation being expressed towards those efforts, as though the objective these teachers are pursuing hadn’t been achieved, in all material respects, decades ago.
If there is anything noteworthy in the article, it is the breathtaking lack of professionalism on display from the teachers featured there. Their inclusion of The Odyssey on their list of proscribed books is particularly revealing. Any half-way competent literature teacher who has worked with this text recognizes its unrivaled fitness for the high school classroom. It may not be the greatest book ever written, but it is certainly the most teachable.
As teachers, we walk into a room filled with earnest and bewildered young souls, eager to turn their nobler instincts to some effect, but utterly at a loss how to go about doing so. Then we open the first pages of The Odyssey, and almost immediately encounter a young man who is earnest and bewildered, eager to turn his nobler instincts to some to some effect, but utterly at a loss how to go about doing so. Like our students sometimes, he is awkward and prone to embarrassing episodes, like when he breaks down in tears before the suitors. Like our students, he has yet to realize his potential for virtue. Our contemporaries assume that students will find characters of their own race and gender “relatable,” but in fact, this reflects their own shallow understanding of the way literature works. It is a precisely rendered figure like Telemachus, in whom the burdens and the promises of youth are so aptly portrayed, that truly resounds in the hearts of attentive young readers.
And what happens next? Our young hero-to-be finds a mentor (literally, Athena disguised as an elder named Mentor) who instructs him on the actions he must take to extricate himself from a position of weakness. He travels to the court of two great kings, and hears stories about his father’s extraordinary tactical prowess, his composure, his courage. Through these stories he imbibes a sense of the qualities he must master in the course of his own development. He is reunited at last with that father, and as they patiently plot the downfall of the suitors, he emulates, in a very intimate way, the virtue that Odysseus is demonstrating before his very eyes, until, at the story’s culmination, he proves to be as steadfast and resourceful as the heroic father alongside whom he fights. What Telemachus learns, and what all students who encounter his story learn, is the indispensable role that models play in the moral development of young people.
A properly fashioned curriculum is stuffed with such models. All those old books that used to recur on school reading lists were there because in different ways they delineate for young minds all the shapes, for good or ill, that a human life can take, and thus provide the material upon which their burgeoning powers of judgement are to be tested and honed. Educators who can see nothing in those old books but alleged expressions of bigotry are entirely unfit for the classroom. No parent with even a minimal concern for their child’s intellectual growth will entrust his or her schooling to such people.
This is why I have to admit that my initial reaction to the Journal article had a twinge of satisfaction to it. Quite frankly, the more this nonsense becomes prevalent in America’s schools, the better it is for business among classical schools. Ignorance cannot hide for long behind airy platitudes; sooner or later, the public will recognize cultural vandalism for what it is, and as they do, they will seek to shelter their students from its effects in the only place left to do so – in the classical classroom. With every month and week that passes, the historically critical role that classical education is destined to play in our times becomes clearer and clearer.