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In a recent column, I urged readers to consider religion’s public significance and meditate on the benefits that a civics education that includes religious studies might have for students.
Supposing our society averts a post-literate future, a problem arises naturally not just for which religious texts to include — is the Bible more apt for understanding the religious mind of this nation’s founders or the writings of Jonathan Mayhew, President John Adams’ heterodox pastor? The problem extends to which books in general to assign: why these and not those?
This question of arbitrariness is waiting to be raised against any so-called Great Books education, such as Texas seems to be pursuing and which might follow in other red states — at least in those red states where a cultural rather than economic motivation governs the ruling conservatives’ thought. In Indiana, for example, business-aligned Republicans’ policies have threatened to axe traditional studies like classical studies because degrees awarded in said fields do not correlate with fiscally handsome outcomes.
If artificial intelligence’s rate of advancement over the past few years is anything to judge by, the academic subject matters that will have currency in the next several years are sure to shift quickly. And if this manner of right-wing approach would cut those books whose study depreciates in the job market — this could be all books — a different criticism endangers Great Books education from the left. Progressives have tended to excise from the canon those works which we, in a more socially enlightened age, have found regressive in word or thought.
Both objections — economic and social redundancy — appear ultimately shallow and therefore unsatisfying. In either case, one gets the idea that their proponents, while they grant there is a common human experience across space, lack the sense that one exists through time. Market or societal conditions then determine entirely the content of my learning; not only, in this view, do I inhabit a different world from my ancestors or descendants, there is nothing substantively similar about our conditions — temporal or, indeed, spiritual — that insists upon having a shared education.
Scottish philosophers active around the time our country was founded, Adam Smith and David Hume, offer a possible way of considering which books to include and why, through a fast and loose appropriation of what later scholars call their “ideal observer theory.” This is the view that the best people possess the best taste. If we compile the works enjoyed and recommended by admirable people, over time, we will acquire a collection for ourselves. Truly excellent people come along rarely, so the classics are evaluated by generations.
Such an approach is perhaps as antithetical to the left’s tendency to discard the past as to the populist tendency in vogue among the right toward tasteless thrills — e.g., Donald Trump's birthday-Flag Day mixed martial arts bout broadcast from the White House lawn.
However, this answer is happily consistent with the wisdom of my favorite Supreme Court ruling, Pierce v. Society of Sisters. In a 9-0 ruling, the court held that a state government has no right to “standardize” the children within its jurisdiction. Rather than determining what students should study, the government recognizes the books that its revered citizens benefited from reading. Or, perhaps, local teachers and administrators may do so.
The conundrum of which texts to assign — in a culture where reading any book, let alone the Bible or other religious texts, has ceased to be valued — is thus averted.
That said, there are whispers of the return to reading — see Coach’s new line of bag charms. But it may be this merely signals a renaissance within a trendy remnant, similar to the return of flip phones among some members of Generation Z or the post-automobile vestige of equestrians.
Still, another concern, once the reading list is assembled, is that society is too accustomed to the “have-it-your-way” mentality to accept the best people’s judgments. Americans are currently so individualistic that they operate in their own versions of reality, from who won elections to what medicines are healthy for us, that such deference to authorities would be troubling, indeed. As much for the right, which would need to abandon the emperor’s illusory clothes, as for the left, which would have to reckon with some bounds restricting what humans should be and want.
In the meantime, we may be heading for a new world order in terms of education anyhow. Schools of all levels are figuring out what to do and how to keep doors open with fewer pupils. Red states are leaping forward in their efforts to divert public resources to charter schools. And over the next several decades, universities, which are institutions predominantly run by Democratically-persuaded people, will be undergoing the same demographic and policy realignments as Democrats at large, on the issues that divided academia a few years ago.
Eric Cannon (he/him) is a junior studying philosophy and political science and currently serves as a member of IU Student Government. And he doesn't really have the answers. Ross Douthat says, “Some columns are written for the columnist as well as for the reader!”
