Why You Need to Read the Great Books

 

            Yeah, right. Dusty, old books written hundreds of years ago? 'Sup wit dat? Who needs 'em?

 

            You do, Buster. A K-12 education that skimps on classic books is a skimpy education, indeed. Not only is it civilizing and fulfilling to be well-read, you learn how much history repeats itself and today's problems are just new versions of the old ones.

 

            Who knew, for example, that the masterpiece, "Anna Karenina," by Tolstoy, was about divorce and a dysfunctional family? Or that Proust was a special-needs kid, sick and confined to his bed, but that disability was the source of his tremendous insight?

 

             Consider what author Diane Ravitch has to say about K-12 language arts courses that censor the classics, minimize them or leave them out altogether:

 

            "By refusing to name those writers and their key works, the education system abdicates its responsibility for transmitting our cultural heritage and improving the taste and judgment of the younger generation....

 

            "This unwillingness to teach the poems, plays, novels, essays, and short stories that have long been recognized for the excellence and significance abandons young people to be shaped by others.  Untouched by enduring and inspiring literature, the students are left to be molded by the commercial popular culture.

 

            "The popular culture-making machine cares not a whit for taste and judgment but reaches insistently for the lowest common denominator, the point at which its purveyors can maximize their profit....

 

            "We are systematically failing to introduce the younger generation to the writers who might enlarge their imaginations, enrich their emotional lives, and challenge their settled ways of thinking."

 

                        -- Ravitch, "The Language Police," Knopf, 2003, pp123-126

 

            By Susan Darst Williams • www.GoBigEd.com • Read to Me 001 • © 2006