Will your child be introduced to the great heritage of Great Literature? Hardly...

On the Academic Hostility to Great Literature

by Anthony Esolen

In several recent articles at Crisis and elsewhere, I’ve been arguing that Catholic schools should reject the Common Corpse, the newest form of an old and largely successful campaign to banish good and great poems and stories from our classrooms. I’ve been charged with exaggeration. Surely things cannot be that bad. The sky still stretches above us, and the moon is not yet as red as blood.

The critics are right. Things are not that bad. They are worse.

It’s hard for me to catch up with the plague, since the school where I teach has been an island of relative health. It has long been teetering on the brink of Catholicism, and that has helped to keep the plague at bay. Every member of my department actually loves literature for its own sake, and not just for some supposed political utility—well, almost every member all of the time, and every member at least some of the time.

That’s not because we are good and wise people. It is partly because our professors are at least fitfully aware of that true sky above us, the one most aptly called heaven, with its call to wonder and adore. It is also partly because our faculty made a fateful choice more than forty years ago. On the other side of the river, there’s a notorious college which just at that time had discarded its curriculum. That was the fad then. It wasn’t called Common Corpse, because it wasn’t being sold as something to unify a people and provide their children with a core of knowledge, while actually subjugating them to the whims of bureaucrats, technocrats, publishing houses on the make, and giant testing companies, and reducing literature to inert matter to work upon, to acquire what are called, without any sense of irony, “skills.”

No, the fad then was freedom. “Milton hath not scribbled / Here his graffiti!” I can hear them crying. Anyway, they told Milton where he and his epic could go, and the professors at my school told them where they and their freedom could go. The fad there was to go a-slumming with pop culture, rich kids pretending to a proletarianism to which they were not born. Our decision was to give to the sons and daughters of electricians and construction workers the same riches we had been giving to a very few honors students. So my worthy predecessors fashioned a two-year-long, twenty credit, team-taught course in the Development of Western Civilization, required of every freshman and sophomore.

.......................

Read more: www.crisismagazine.com