EVERY MAN A GOETHE

LECTURE: Perplexing Dreams: Is There a Core Tradition in the Humanities? (Roger Shattuck, 1987, American Council of Learned Societies)

The eighth chapter of Life on the Mississippi reads like a parable on education. Mark Twain gave it a cleverly appropriate title, "Perplexing Dreams." Urged on by Mr. Bixby, an experienced river boat pilot, the narrator and cub pilot has "managed to pack my head full of islands, towns, bars, 'points,' and bends." One day when the boy has learned most of the names, Mr. Bixby turns on him.

'What is the shape of Walnut Bend?'
He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm.
By and by he said,-
'My boy, you've got to know the shape of the river perfectly. It is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night....You learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's in your head, and never mind the one that's before your eyes.'

With no time to adjust to his new task, the cub pilot learns a further factor: that the river's shape keeps changing.

Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was, that in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was, that he must learn it all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours.

How much comment belongs here? The classroom teacher might have a hard time with this secular American version of Pilgrim's Progress. How far need a teacher go to pick out the name writ large over the whole book: The River of Life? Mark Twain is content to keep the reader laughing at Twain's bedraggled self as a boy. For us here at this early morning meeting to cogitate about cores and traditions in the humanities, Mark Twain has provided a vivid metaphor for education itself. To gain initiation into the culture, you have to know the shape of things, not the names only. We shall come back to Mr. Bixby in the wheelhouse sputtering at his inept pupil.

All of us here are concerned with these cultural rites of passage not only because we may be professional educators, but primarily because we are citizens and parents. I envision the challenge that faces us in education as a two-headed dragon demanding daily human sacrifice to keep it placated and to prevent it from devouring the city. One awful head stands for the tens of millions of young minds all over the country waiting to receive nourishment, an almost sensible hunger for some form of knowledge that will make life possible and worth living. The second head rearing up with gaping jaws represents the other side of the same situation. It symbolizes the nearly one thousand hours each student and each teacher must spend in a classroom every year, time occupied by the long battle between boredom and alertness.

These two insatiable mouths must be fed. You know as well as I the enormous obstacles that stand in our way. For two centuries now, well meaning and convinced educationalists have been telling us to allow children to follow their natural proclivities. The great defender of childhood as the period of natural freedom, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, invented a term that should have opened our eyes long ago to his program. "The first education must be purely negative" (Emile, Book II). He means that we should withhold any systematic or formal education, including reading, until the age of twelve. We have practiced negative education so effectively that today many students are admitted to college still unschooled and have to educate themselves six years too late, when their memories are slowing down, their doubts increasing. Rousseau devised negative education theory for a very special, highly tractable, and imaginary pupil with a full-time tutor and other privileges. Carried on by progressive schools, the misbegotten scheme of negative education intersects another present danger-not a theory but a mood. For thirty years we have been living through a series of searing national traumas. Three major assassinations and the crises of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Iran-Contra affair may have left us disenchanted with the still fragile progress we have made toward true democracy and equal justice. Is it worth trying to maintain a rigorous universal education in an open, pluralistic society?

I shall not answer for others. Response must come primarily as a declaration of personal faith in chosen ideals. What I can insist on is a principle that operates as inexorably in a society as it does in physics. Nature abhors a vacuum. If we do not provide adequate knowledge to fill those hungry minds and empty schoolroom hours, something else will. That something else may well be deadening and corrupting-estrangement, anomie, idle vandalism, drugs, crime, suicide. These things cannot be said too often. In schools more than anywhere else, we can make an effort to establish the principle of equal opportunity by leveling everyone upward as far as possible. Family upbringing and college education quite properly tend to increase inequalities. Free public schools constitute our only major institution serving both all individuals and the national interest.

Yet think for a moment. No authoritative document sets out what high school students should know. Powerful legal suits challenge school boards for doing their duty. Can we blame state boards of education for wobbling? One readily available reference is the booklet, Academic Preparation for College: What Students Need to Know and Be Able to Do, published by the College Board (1983). In science and mathematics, the booklet describes fairly well-defined content requirements. In the humanities (English, the arts, and foreign languages) the emphasis falls entirely on what I call "empty skills"-to read, to write, to analyze, to describe, to evaluate. To what specifics or content are these skills to be applied?

Silence. Not a single work of art or literature is mentioned. One could surmise that basic academic competencies can be acquired by working with any materials at all. Still, someone will decide on substance; too often the buck is passed down to the individual teacher, who must fill all roles-planner, helper, taskmaster, and final judge. We are here to reflect on the question, "Is there a core tradition in the humanities?" Our answers should do something to help embattled teachers trying to maintain standards and should help put substance back into the humanities-and do so for the majority of students, not exclusively for the college-bound who read the College Board booklet.

The core of the humanities, as I envision it, is shaped less like the proverbial onion than like a simplified orange with three large sections or segments fitted closely together. My analysis leans inevitably toward a definition of culture, a term we have had in English in its general sense for barely a hundred years.

1. Official rituals and ceremonies and celebrations; monuments like the Statue of Liberty; the flag; the national anthem; the pledge of allegiance. These elements are mostly associated with some form of public enactment.

2. A loose, shared store of stories (legendary and historic); folklore (including proverbs); ideas and concepts; historical and presumed facts. This common knowledge may remain unwritten and orally transmitted.

3. A collection of concrete, lasting works (images, buildings, music, writings in poetry and prose) considered significant or revealed or great or beautiful.

All I ask of this schematic division is to help us deal with questions of content in education. Segment two, the common fund of lore and knowledge, corresponds to all the names cub pilot Mark Twain learned-and did well to learn-in order to begin to know the river. Segment three, the lasting works and particularly books used in schools, provide Mr. Bixby's "shape of the river"-never beheld all at once, endlessly changing, yet a shape held in the mind to refer to under the most difficult conditions. Reading is the principal activity that allows us to move between these two segments, a kind of two-way membrane or circuitry that makes the connections between an amorphous mass of materials and a collection of recognized forms. Reading gains pertinence when it mediates between our available cultural knowledge and another realm loosely called literature.

Schools are concerned with all three segments of the humanistic orange. Fortunately I am not going to have to talk about the whole fruit. Recently my colleague E. D. Hirsch at the University of Virginia published a book called Cultural Literacy. This intelligent synthesis of history of education, developmental psychology, and recent research on perception, memory, and reading eloquently reaffirms the principles of universal education in a democratic society. He diagnoses our national illness as a condition based on misguided educational theory after Rousseau and on a faulty conception of pluralism that dismisses a common culture. What Hirsch establishes persuasively is a truism we shouldn't have to be shown again.

But we do.

Folks who oppose immigration often cite a growing tendency towards multiculturalism in America as their main concern. This is a legitimate worry, but the problem lies not in immigrants who bring their own cultures with them, but in we natives who have failed to maintain and inculcate a common culture of our own.

Jeffrey Hart's book, Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education, opens with an especially appealing notion, one derived from a fellow Dartmouth professor, one he studied under, the philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy:

He had two phrases he repeated so often they remained in a student's mind.

He would say, "History must be told." He explained in various ways that history is to a civilization what personal memory is to an individual an essential part of identity and a source of meaning.

He also said that the goal of education is the citizen. He defined the citizen in a radical and original way arising out of his own twentieth-century experience. He said that a citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-create his civilization.

As Mr. Hart himself says, there's a particular urgency for us in this definition of the citizen because:

In a democracy such as ours the goal must be to have as many people as possible grasp their civilization this way, because they participate in the governing function either directly or indirectly and because they help to create the moral and cultural tone of the social environment we all share.

As Professor Hart notes, it is said that the last Western man who could recreate his civilization entire was Goethe. No one today--after the West has split into Two Cultures--could know, nor should they want to, all of the permutations of the sciences and all the esoterica of art and literary theory, let alone know the sociology and history of every immigrant group and religion that makes up our populace. But there's no reason that one should not have a sufficient grounding in the things that unite us as a society and can still serve as a common culture. This does though require that one study predominantly, though not exclusively, the history, thought, and art of the mostly white, male, Christian Europeans who bequeathed us a country, a political philosophy, a religious morality, and a prevailing artistic tradition. Where folk of other cultures/genders/races/etc. have contributed to these things or where they have been enfolded into the batter, it will be appropriate to study them too, but, in the main, the restoration of a common culture, one into which we can readily induct even the newest immigrants, will require us to return to a more traditional curriculum of study, one that we share not just with each other but with those who came before us. G.K. Chesterton referred to this traditionalism as a "democracy of the dead":

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

Too much these days, we leave the definition of what's worth studying up to precisely such oligarchs, who celebrate that which they think relevant because they've recently proposed it at the expense of that which has withstood the test of time. But if some newfangled idea--like Marxism or Freudianism or deconstructionism or Darwinism--really is worth knowing, it too will survive and those who come after us will incorporate it into the culture they inherit from us. It is no coincidence that most of these nonsensical theories managed to hang around long after they were discredited precisely because they were made a part of our educational regime well before they'd earned a place. Treated as if they were an important part of our vital tradition, they gained a respect they were not due.

Now the time has come for us to move ahead by looking back and to reclaim for ourselves a culture that we can share with the ancestors, to revitalize our democracy by sharing it both with the dead and with those still to come. Just so will we be able to maintain the kind of society that our Founders intended to create: knowledgeable, virtuous, and free. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 10, 2003 10:57 AM