It’s been eons since I read any of “The Great Books” of Western Civilization.
On the college track in high school and an English major once I got to college, I had little choice but to sometimes struggle through Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets and John Milton’s poems. I’m glad I was “forced” to do it because I managed to glean valuable insights in the process.
Reading Shakespeare and Milton are also part of a “classical” education, which begins with the works of Greek and Roman poets like Homer and Virgil. These writings also mark the beginning of the western canon. The world’s great authors and philosophers have been influenced by what came before them in some way or another.
Contained in the great works are ideas we now take for granted, patterns that reveal the whole picture of civilization and provide glimpses into the human mind. They teach us who we are and how we came to be. From the Code of Hammurabi (the first written body of laws laid down by a Babylonian king), the Hebrew Bible (written and compiled by the hand of God through inspired men), the works of men like Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Blaise Pascal, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Alexis de Tocqueville, Leo Tolstoy, and women like Jane Austen, to the body of knowledge still accumulating through the efforts of people with a love for learning and creating, we are indeed blessed to have free access to these writings.
We all should study history more often because it reminds us that before we (individual you) arrived on the scene, there existed a wide range of events and people molding and shaping the world as we know it today. Each moment in history is like a link in a chain, connecting one event to another to form the whole, for better or for worse.
Imagine what all those accumulated events look like as a whole from the eyes of an omnipotent being outside time and space. Behind it all is a purpose that we can’t see or quite comprehend. Christians believe that one day, we’ll see and understand that purpose clearly.
In a nutshell, that’s what the hype of western civ is all about. Naysayers have always and will continue to dispute the significance of books that make up the western canon and the people who decided the canon (also known as “Dead White Males”). But the greatness of that vast body of knowledge cannot be convincingly disputed.
That’s my public service announcement and lecture for today, prompted by an article I read in the Washington Post called “Writing Off Reading” (free registration required).
Michael Skube, a journalism professor at Elon University in Elon, NC, reports that some of his students think that Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, is a great writer. Relatively speaking, the book is a good read. Brown does all the formulaic stuff that keeps you turning the pages. But a great writer compared to…William Faulkner? According to Skube, Brown “was the only writer they could think of.”
Yikes.
Skube says that words like impetus, ramshackle, lucid, advocate, derelict, satire (no English lit classes in high school?), and afflict stumped his private university students, the same ones who graduated from high school with grade point averages of 3.5 and higher.
You don’t need a study to determine what’s going on. These students either don’t read or don’t read widely enough. If A-students admitted to private schools don’t know the meaning of simple words and aren’t inclined to look them up, what hope do students in badly performing public schools have?
A love for learning seems largely absent these days. I was never the best student nor anywhere close to being the best, but I always respected learning. A passion for reading and writing was instilled in me very early. I want to share that passion with children, especially those who think they hate school or don’t do well in school or don’t believe they’re smart enough.
The human mind is a wondrous thing.
Update: Blogger Jared of Total Depravity writes in the comment section:
The simplest way to learn good writing is to read it, and that means reading the classics.
I also used to tell my students that, for all practical purposes, there are no new ideas. The chances are excellent that someone, somewhere, has struggled with the same thoughts roiling in your head, and have expressed them much more clearly than you ever will, and in ways you’ve never considered. And he probably wrote a book about it.
Emphasis added.
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