The New York Times published a great article today that reviews the 1987 publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, the book whose role was central to “The Canon Wars”, a fiery debate between the importance of the Western canon versus Multiculturalism in university core curriculums. The book argues that the decline of the Western canon has led to an American public who has lacks basic information and by pandering to feminists and members of minorities, the rigor of academic life has waned.
Funny enough, last night I finished the novel Silas Marner by British writer George Eliot (nee Mary Ann Evans), a fantastic, slim, classic published in 1861. I bought this book back in 1998 because I vaguely recalled having heard it included on some sort of “must read” lists for high school students that I consulted once and eventually disregarded. (Every now and then, though, I make it a point to I read a few classics based on my memory of the contents of this list.) In fact, my copy of Silas Marner was used through and through, I can tell from the notes in the pages it had been used at one point by a student.
The only book I recall on that “must read” list that involved any member of a minority was To Kill a Mockingbird, but my have things changed. I googled Silas Marner and could hardly find it anywhere among the published reading lists for high school or college students.
A counterpoint to the Canon war follows that the canon of Western authors excludes members of minority groups, women, and homosexuals, and that this exclusion is oppressive. In the end, the Multiculturalists won and new authors have been included in high school and college reading lists since the late 1980s. How does this work? The Times cites “reading lists are a zero-sum game: for every writer added, another is dropped.”
“In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T. S. Eliot, according to a survey by the National Association of Scholars, an organization committed to preserving “the Western intellectual heritage.” In 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison.”
Today, the canon argument considers at its core what should be the nature of an educational experience: should it condition a person to address their own environment or open up the mind and liberate one’s thinking by the introduction of foreign people and histories? Nationwide high school reading lists have altered to the fact that kids want to read stories they can “relate to” meaning, that easily reflect their expectations and experiences.
Race, gender, and sexuality aside, if young people want to read texts that reflect themselves, the biggest problem might be that most books long-considered part of the canon were published over one-hundred years ago. Another issue is that few were written in America. In the article, Mark Lilla, a professor of political philosophy and religion, defends the new curriculums, stating “When you read Toni Morrison, there’s no alienation. It affirms your Americanism.”
Not necessarily so. “Americanism” can be interpreted through many substrains. Some would champion the inclusion of Morrison as an American writer, others may just as easily rebuff, citing alienation because her subjects are black. And in one hundred years, I suppose her work will be too “old” to read. But do these things really matter? Shouldn’t a person learn to appreciate a book regardless of these details? Maybe this is the attitude I have had adopted as a person of color in America-you learn to interpret universality through narratives that were not written for you. After all, for having been written by an old, dead, white woman, Silas Marner was a great book.
It’s tricky: with a masters degree in Africana Studies, I am in very much in favor of multiculturalism, but not in favor of the zero-sum tactics to deny older classic literature. Academics must decide what information is necessary for the times we are living in. However, a person cannot understand these times without a context of the habits and values of the past-including past curriculums.
Personally I believe there is something to this statement:
As Alan Wolfe puts it, “Everyone’s read ‘Things Fall Apart’ ” — Chinua Achebe’s novel about postcolonial Nigeria — “but few people have read the Yeats poem that the title comes from.”
