I am 83, still functioning but past my prime. Most of the college professors and high-school teachers in my cohort have already been shuffled out of the classroom. I concede I shouldn’t be running for president or chairman of a board at my age. I’m terrible at understanding new trends and technologies. But history and literature—the events and works of the past—don’t change at all. All we can do is to try to understand why long-gone people did what they did and said what they said.
That’s where guys like me come in. Old people are good at looking back because our lives are made up almost entirely of the past. We think about it all the time. We know that our futures are likely to be brief. The Greeks called it paideia, the passing of traditions and customs to the next generation. Youth always rebels against age—the Olympians had to defeat the Titans—but Prometheus, a Titan, brought us fire.
Young people usually don’t think about the past. They should be running things today because tomorrow is their concern, not mine. Teaching history and literature, on the other hand, begins with perspective—something older people should be good at.
Here’s rule No. 1: Survey courses are the most important classes taught in high school and college. In English literature it’s “Beowulf” to Virginia Woolf—or maybe up to
Seamus Heaney
and
Czeslaw Milosz.
But nothing from the past 20 years. We simply haven’t had the time to sort all that out.
John Donne
doesn’t sound like
Alexander Pope,
who doesn’t sound like Percy Shelley, who doesn’t sound like
Robert Browning,
who doesn’t sound like
T.S. Eliot.
With a little time and guidance, kids can figure all this out.
Charles Dickens
doesn’t view the world the way
Jane Austen
does.
For American literature the same principle applies. A student who hasn’t read half a dozen poems by
William Cullen Bryant
doesn’t understand American literature. High schools offer almost none of this. The teachers, who may not be great readers themselves, cherry-pick current favorites. Teaching the survey course would benefit the faculty as well.
History survey…
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