Pop Quiz: How to Teach (and NOT teach) the Western Canon

I took this exam in Contemporary Civilizations in 1981.

I wonder if the woman dressed in a kaffiyeh in front of Hamilton Hall, the representative from the Palestinian Liberation Zone last spring, now teaching the same course, could get a passing grade?

I doubt it. Here's the question (back to this later):

The Contemporary Civilization syllabus, like all the core courses is set by committee, and of course, it does change from time to time. But except for the initiated, for those in our activist/instructor's class, it will be the MOST BORING course ever. Every work will be exactly the same: a marker of racism, colonialism, patriarchy, gender ideology (but never antisemitism).

I am one of the lucky ones: I was in the last cohort of graduate students in the Humanities taught how to read. The mission of the current Humanities can be fulfilled through reciting the catechisms of woke theology. So why take the trouble and have the courage to learn how to read?

Education by the the dots is much easier. The diversity of the Western tradition reduced to a Theory, each work just a footnote to the readers' political orthodoxy. Check. Check. Check.

But neoconservative moralist 'intellectuals,' claiming to be guardians of that tradition are no better. Teaching the Western canon as an antidote for relativism, as a repository for values or morals, is equally misguided. It shows the desperation of people who in their fear of reading also see works as mirror-images of themselves.

But the lesson for both right and left: poetry cannot be reduced to ideology.

Great writers like Homer, Milton, and Virgil do not teach ideas (which will always be boring), but READING.

But as readers, we know that just because Homer depicts a patriarchal society of toxic masculinity, it does not mean he actually advocates it. Does Scorsese's Goodfellas advocate the violence it represents?

Literature isn’t about simple-minded theological or political allegories, but the complexity of how stories are told and retold. Homer doesn’t just mirror his world; he transforms it, revealing truths beyond the literal.

Great works - what we call classics - anticipate the readers and writers that will follow them. Homer says read Virgil, Virgil says read Dante, and they all say, read Milton. They anticipate the readers they never knew, but prepare us for them. Classics, in actuality, only fulfill themselves in the readings (in the plural) that they allow.

My teacher for Contemporary Civilizations, Jay Schecter, died a couple of years after I graduated. But before he died, he taught me how to read, to find my voice, to discover that I had a voice.

Jay described himself as Frankfurt School Marxist, but he never taught ideas, but how great books could help us understand ourselves and the world. And he showed us how works of the past - even written by people with whom we do not agree - do not determine identity, but empower.

Jay knew that you are only determined by the past when you pretend it does not exist.

Today, pedagogy is no longer about questioning, but protecting the arrested identities that woke students demand, and that their professors so willingly accommodate.

We need a new courageous pedagogy today - one which gives our students the courage to think for themselves, to create for themselves, to be themselves.

First we have to be courageous ourselves.

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