The Classics Question
The question of the role of the classics is hot right now. This issue is not new. As long as there has been literature, the audience has been at odds as to what is worthwhile and what is not. But in time, certain books and certain authors gain canonical influence; we regard them as the standards.
The argument over the classics is without resolve and difficult to bring to application; the facts evade and challenge any easy generalization. Instead of a quantity approach as to how many people read what, let us start from quality, an approach based on admitted observations and values. Here the predisposition is that some books are better than others are, and accordingly, it is better for readers to pay attention to them. Cues come from a couple of authors who are
“classic” in the original sense; they wrote in Latin and came from the first class of citizens.
Cicero, an industrious provincial, so rigorously applied himself to study and self-improvement that he became the most noted Roman orator of his day. In so doing, he gained great political influence and suffered many enemies. In his later years, he labored to preserve the republic against dictatorship and to pass on to his compatriots the learning inherited from the Greeks. Towards the end of On the Orator, he says
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain forever a child. For what is the gain in human existence, unless it be woven into the lives of our ancestors through the records of history? – De Oratore, III, 120 (55 BCE).
Quintillian, an admirer of Cicero, came along a century later. He headed Rome’s foremost school of oratory, the first to be paid at state expense, taught the Emperor Domitian’s grand-
nephews, and received from Emperor Vespasian the designation “Professor of Rhetoric.” In retirement, he wrote The Training of the Orator that is in part a technical work. Of greater value is his declaration on the principles of education, including character formation from earliest
childhood, and reviews of prior Greek and Latin literature.
…I have already said that some profit may be derived from every author. But we must wait till our powers have been developed and established to the full before we turn to these poets. Similarly, at banquets we take our fill of the best fare and then turn to other food that, in spite of its comparative inferiority, is still attractive owing to its variety. …But until we have acquired that assured facility of which I spoke, we must form our minds and develop an appropriate tone by reading that is deep rather than wide – Institutio Oratoria, X, 1, 58-59 (ca. 95 CE).
The values implicit in the classical approach are that each individual lives in the long run of history, shares an inherited culture, and develops in association with the others who surround and interact through everyday life. So to mature into the society and to equip oneself for the fullest opportunity and development, learners will necessarily, as appropriate to them, hone in first on the best sources of the human experience to gain knowledge and understanding. Since young learners have no way to know what is best for them, it is left to their seniors to responsibly lead the way.
You can see that the classical position is based upon an enormous assumption: parents, teachers and other exemplars know their duty and will tend to it. In fact, the upper classes
of Rome often left their children in the hands of unlettered slaves, just as today children are babysat by an indifferent television. And so we must admit that routine reading has always been a minority activity, and intensive reading of the classics, as Quintillian wanted, an activity with an even smaller minority.
We are hard pressed to find any book that is shared among the population as a whole or among any majority of it. The 39 books of the Old Testament canon, a library of varied writing in itself, likely come closest, but even this possibility does not quite fill the bill. When was the last time any random group of people launched into a discussion on the anguish of Job, the bravery of Esther, the tragedies of King David, or the wondrous poetry of the Psalms?
We are so imbued with notions of equality; as educators and librarians we want everyone to have every opportunity and consequent success in equal proportion. We castigate ourselves when we fail at this goal; we hang back from initiatives unless they are going to reach everyone. Yet what can we do in the face of the undeniable realities that daunt us?
Are the classics in decline? Quintillian 1900 years ago thought so then. Yet they do not go away in total. In 1998 an advisory panel to the Modern Library imprint of Random House selected the 100 best English language novels of the Twentieth century. See Newsweek (3August 1998) 64-65. That August I owned 69 of the 100 and my local public library had a comparable number, though a different mix of titles. However, the combined public libraries of the southeast region had all but one. That was Henry Green’s Loving (1945), not a title on the tip of anyone’s tongue.
A standby guide for library acquisitions is The Readers Adviser that over the 20th century grew to 6 volumes comprising approximately 45,000 entries. All of the titles listed in a full range of subjects are judged to be “the best” of their particular field or genre. Another more focused
volume, Literature Lover’s Companion (2001), calls itself “the essential reference to the world’s greatest writers – past and present, popular and classical.” It touts the works of over 1000 authors from Homer, 9th century BCE, to Ben Okri, a Nigerian, born in 1959. Five to eight titles represent most authors. These two guides recommend items for first purchase in greater number than most libraries hold.
We need also to recognize that one influence of the classics is an indirect one, through their effect on the writing of other authors. About twenty years ago, two Minnesota state university professors surveyed entering students at Mankato state as to their favorite authors. Hands down, the favorite was Stephen King. These students as seniors answered the same survey four years later to show how their tastes had changed. And the favorite was Stephen King, a discovery that brought considerable alarm to academics. In 2000, King published “a memoir of the craft” On Writing. In an appendix, he credits his reading of other authors as making him a writer and lists about 100 entertaining books. Most are contemporary to King, but among them are Heart of Darkness (1902), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), As I Lay Dying (1930), Brideshead Revisited (1945), A Death in the Family (1957) and Our Man in Havana (1959).
Currently, Francine Prose, a well-established writer, but no Stephen King as to popularity, harked back to Quintillian’s emphasis on intensive reading by pointing out how a number of classic authors achieved their successes. Her appendix of 115 titles in Reading Like a Writer (2006) is definitely more literary than King’s and shares only two titles with his preferences, Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From and Richard Price’s Freedomland. Among the older titles Prose lists are Sophocles’ Oedipus in the Young translation, the medieval Song of Roland in Sayer’s translation, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Two by Austen, now enjoying a great revival of interest, start off the 19th century – Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Curiously, she also lists Loving, the absent title mentioned above, along with another of Green’s novels, Doting.
That King and Prose have two entirely different takes on reading and writing is typical and highlights the basic situation. We are so overrun with good books that the constant question remains: how do the classics fit in?
While many choices as to title emphasis are possible, I recommend the following overall principles and objectives.
• Everyone should come to understand that relatively few books out of the millions published have lasting influence.
• Books of the past have more than historical importance when they speak to the continuance of human experience; these books continue to affect and change lives.
• These books provide a common ground to understanding ourselves amongst others.
• As works of art, classics are meant for enjoyment, not study, and never picked to pieces.
• Because such books last through time, one can reread them during a lifetime with increased pleasure and greater understanding.
• To whet the appetite for such reading, families, libraries and teachers need to provide, model and encourage quality choices as their charges develop their own personalities, interests and abilities.
• Worthy titles are those that provide readers both enough attainment for satisfaction and additional enticement for more books.
• Everyone should recognize that it takes more than a lifetime to read all the most highly recommended books.
• Everyone should learn how to pursue and obtain more books than are readily or easily available.
I believe that to some extent, we all work towards these ends. The challenge is to do it more consistently, with more resources, and more enthusiasm.
_____
“The Classics Question” appeared in an earlier version in MEMOrandom, v.16 no.4 (January 2007) 6-7, and is here revised.
© 2007, 2009 by Roger Sween.
I welcome substantive comments on the content in this blog. Personal comments may be sent to me at my email address given above.
Showing posts with label Books and reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Books and reading. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Quality
Questions of Quality in Reading
In education, we aim in summary at two comprehensive ends for all learners. The two goals are the fulfillment of human potential and the attainment of humanity’s cultural heritage. Certainly potential and heritage, being vast and complicated, are long-term and seldom fall nicely and completely into place for any individual educator during their temporary time with the learner. Further, since the individual psyche thrives on its own individuality, no educator can actually command learning. Rather, education as a life process needs first to be won and then gradually surrendered to the self-direction of the learner. Never mind that the human potential and the human heritage are mutual; everyone has to sort out the intricacies of these particular relationships for themselves.
Reading, nevertheless, is central to the process of learning and has the principle virtue of being an educational engine in itself that is more diverse, more companionable, and more lasting than any other single educator.
From a practical point of view, the existence of so many million books pressures each reader to spend their time on the select few titles most beneficial to themselves. ‘Select few,’ means a few thousand compared to sixty million trade editions since the invention of printing.[1] Select reading always exists thanks to the reading choices every reader necessarily makes. Choice is inescapable and exists along a continuum from refusal to read or inattention to reading – each no better than the inability to read – all the way to the most active and dedicated of lifetime reading plans.
People make choices beneficial to themselves in lots of different ways. Hopefully, their reading selections develop along the lines of informed and judicious selections. Still the process of making productive choices can be difficult and full of challenges. For some, obstacles discourage reading and block the way to exercising choice. Parents, teachers, library and media professionals are all educators who work to overcome and remove obstacles for the benefit of the learner in their charge.
Learners can be educated as to the options in their choices, but not all with the same realization or to the same extent.[2] Not all learners become readers in the same way or at the same level. Whatever our desires that every person learn, every learner read, and every reader excel, likely no society has ever had a preponderance of readers in any full sense. Take together considerations of deliberate, planned, regular, persistent, serious and deep reading, and you will find few that measure up to this totality. Still we try to do the most we can amidst the whole population. At the height of reading achievement are those readers who become writers.[3]
Questions of what reading is worth seek some foundation of what is meaningful enough to win and hold potential readers. Many are the values offered on behalf of reading’s importance: reading engages, reading extends beyond experience; reading transmits heritage; reading plumbs the depths of being. In every value named, reading goes beyond bare humanity, humanity in association with others, and humanity as lived. Reading enriches; that is the short of it. At least, such a claim is reading’s promise and potential.
Of course, reading is non-existent without readers, and through each of those previously valued interactions, the reader discovers and experiences each value as known and made real. Yet each transaction between reader and text differs. When two or more get together to compare responses and understandings as to what they have read, they discover their varying readings. It is the same text, exactly, but the reading experience is not the same for everyone. Further, the experience upon successive readings is not the same, especially as the years go by. As readers age, mature, and change, they will not bring their same selves to the text each time.
I read Baum’s Oz books when I was ten years old, lucky to find them in my small town public library. At that time, critics already considered the Oz books as mediocre because they doomed any series to be questionable merit. Later in life, the children’s literature class I took surprised me: I learned how poor Baum was considered to be. I wondered how this could be since I especially remembered some of the titles very fondly. Fifty years after my first reading, the year 2000 was the centennial of The Wizard of Oz, and Baum once again enjoyed the passing attention of the day. I decided then to re-read or read new all his books. Seeing them as an aged critic myself, I noted their general unevenness and several flaws. But at their best, those that had been my favorites in 1950 were still my favorites despite the decades.
Out of fourteen Oz novels that Baum wrote over a twenty-year period, three titles emerged in my estimation as better than the rest—The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), The Emerald City of Oz (1910), and The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913). What I admired about these three from the intervening perspective of reading hundreds of novels, myths, legends, fairytales, and works of fantasy and science fiction was Baum’s élan that breathed itself into the achievement of each favored book. These three are truly innovative and Baum does not copy himself, except as to the background that grows richer. The characters are ingeniously individual, robust, and likeable. Baum shows great humor and delectable irony. The stories come to surprising and satisfactory endings that contribute to the environment of the whole series. While Baum entertained and amused me when I was ten, at sixty he gave me a finer aesthetic enjoyment with the same texts. To me this makes unarguable that reading is a unique experience for every individual at every time of their reading.[4]
The particular learning I have come to over the decades of reading a great deal of varied texts is that a person comes to prize some works over others because they are better. “Better” means that some books demonstrate ”qualities” or ‘characteristics that qualify’ them in such a way or ways as to set them apart from the general mass of readily available reading material. The qualities speak to or evidence the particular values that the reader has come to hold in some kind of hierarchy. Just as the reading experience varies with the reader, judgments of quality are also going to vary. Popularity, timeliness, excitement, consciousness-raising, the attraction and relevance of any of the numerous disciplines of knowledge, and the pursuit of hard or theoretical truths all have their appeal. The book market is alive with variables from the blockbuster bestseller to the most abstruse treatise, and they all find their audiences, however mammoth or minute those audiences may be.
Critics, mostly of the professional variety, based on their preferred aesthetic or critical theory, will argue that certain named works are good, less good or otherwise lesser all the way to bad. Choosing-up sides as to good and bad books is a human activity; everyone likes to be on the good side, the right side. Certainly, criticism has its values when it provides tools for looking at texts and helping to evaluate them, but no criticism is the textual work in itself. Always, the piece of literature must speak for itself and not through the filter of someone else’s criticism.
As we educators go beyond the mechanics of reading to the content of reading, we take various approaches to point to the merits of literature so that maturing readers use those sample qualities as they will, may or can in making their own judgments. Given the difficulty of imposing standards of right and wrong in anything, let alone reading taste, let us examine the use of good examples and model behavior, a method whose sanction is as old as Aristotle.
First, give heed to wise old Montaigne. His father had Montaigne’s tutors submerse the infant in Latin and allowed no spoken French within earshot until by the age of six the child had gained such proficiency in the language that the only way to test him was to require him to turn bad Latin into good. This Montaigne, whose essays have set the standard for that genre, said,[5]
Teachers are for ever bawling into our ears as though pouring knowledge down through a funnel: our task is merely to repeat what we have been told. I would want our tutor to put that right: as soon as the mind in his charge allows it, he should make it show its fettle by appreciating and selecting things – and by distinguishing between them…
Bees ransack flowers here and there: but then they make their own honey, which is entirely theirs and no longer thyme or marjoram. Similarly the boy will transform his borrowings; he will confound their forms so that the end-product is entirely his; namely, his judgment, the forming of which is the only aim of his toil, his study and his education.
Readers are of two kinds, those that are nurtured and those that read despite nurturing or the lack of it. Nurturing is the only thing that we can hope to have any control over. As far as early reading is concerned, there is little substitute for oral tradition from early childhood, or in the womb, as some say, and for parents and other family members reading to children. Happy and productive is the family that adopts a routine reading ritual. All this telling and reading to children, which is likely continued, supplemented and expanded in schools and at public libraries, has an aim. We aim to exemplify reading in its humanness, pleasure and cognitive content prior to and alongside unraveling the mechanics.
The aim of the mechanics of reading is that learners become able to read on their own and to pursue their own reading as they will. Primary school readers move beyond their first books and begin to fill out reading wheels with a growing variety of literature types. They distinguish poetry, fairy tales, biographies, and other kinds of fact books from one another. They are learning the bases of the structures of literature as they discover them.
Such discovery learning is not new; you can find it in Socrates. When I left college in the early 1960s, instead of the whole class reading the same text, some English teachers had their classes read half a dozen novels divided among the students. The class then discussed what makes the novel a novel as they reached for the elements common to those six titles. I’ve never found such methods very widespread; whatever the virtues of this discovery system, it requires more preparation of the teacher and expects more attention from the students. Serafini warns of the dangers, difficulties, and experience required on the part of teachers and students to conduct such profitable examinations. I recommend his article highly.[6]
Mostly what Serafini warns about is the omnipresent possibility of the teacher insisting on his reading of the text as the correct reading. The same thing may happen in stifling student discovery in a study group activity where some students dominate others or students as a group seek to discern the mind of the teacher and please that one in charge. Searafini worries too that the current emphasis on high stakes testing is inimical to students developing their critical senses and their examination of quality measures in what they read. These judging skills are marked down as of little importance in the tests or are not easily tested.
Of course, school media and public librarians are in excellent positions to do a lot for younger readers in their development of strong reading habits and developmental reading abilities. It always seemed to me as I was growing up that I was the fortunate one of the gods because I had the same two personal librarians from birth to age eighteen, and both of them knew me. One was in the public library and the other in the public school. They always showed great interest in what I was reading, were ready to exchange a few words or a lot of words about what I read, and with greater acumen than Amazon or Netflix does today could recommend other items of interest to me and answer my questions. As time went by, they set books aside for me that they knew I would like. The public librarian even broke the state rules and requested interlibrary loan for me even though in those days this service was not available to children.
I think it was those dyadic conversations at the check-out desk that made all the difference for me in my life. I was always fortunate to always find more books I wanted to read than I could read. The pervading idea that books are wealth proved inescapable. I came to realize, likely after high school, that I had learned more from reading books from the library and those of my own purchase, than I had from textbooks, class time or and from all my teachers. This concept may be a dangerous one, but I found it unavoidable. My range of ideas, attitudes, knowledge and habits had come from books, not from classrooms. To me the books, especially the ones I favored and continued to think about, seemed the most determinative.
Many books go out of date and lose appeal when readers grow as suspicious of their worn exteriors as their fallible contents. Best sellers peak and pale; you can look at the history of bestsellers over the history of the United States and see the vast numbers of titles that once attracted the highest interest. Most of them have few readers today. Yet some books have long staying power, not for everyone necessarily but for some respectable readership. To attract readers and bolster them with quality examples, the challenge becomes to acquire for their choosing most of the best that one can. You cannot dictate readership, but you can enable it by concentrating on quality in selection.
Quality evidences itself in two principal ways. One is the extrinsic quality of affect, that is, certain books pull at and impress certain readers in ways that by emotional result touch or change them. The other is the intrinsic quality of construct; the way the message, as delivered, becomes appreciable in itself. These two kinds of qualities are not mutually exclusive, though they vary in proportion. Many readers seek affect; fewer construct. And it is easy to relish the affect of, say, To Kill a Mockingbird, even when you are twenty, as I was, and miss the construct until later, or to be overwhelmed by the construct in Huckleberry Finn and miss the affect until later. Alas, many of us are not mature enough to absorb a book as we might just because we have read it before were ready to appreciate it.
Often I worry about Silas Marner and other dreaded “classics,” which so many of us in my generation had to read and hated. Well, ‘no literature was ever written to be studied.’ (I believe I paraphrase Winston Churchill.) What would those of us in the silent generation think now if we read George Eliot again? At about 200 pages, Silas Marner doesn’t take long to comprehend.
_____
© 2009 by Roger Sween
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to me at the email address above.
[1] See my calculations in “The Reader as a Self-Directed Learner,” Update newsletter (August 1999) 5-10.
[2] Robert Scholes in The Crafty Reader (2001) discusses ways in which readers gain the abilities to decode and follow the crafts that authors employ in different genres and styles of literature.
[3] Compare “Why Bother?” aka “The Harper Essay” (1996) by Jonathan Franzen in How to Be Alone: Essays (2002).
[4] See also two others who have written extensively on their childhood and youthful reading: Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life (1997) and Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built (2002).
[5] Michel de Montaigne, “On Educating Children,” The Complete Essays I:26 (M. A. Screech) 1991, p.169, 171.
[6] F. Serafini, “Getting Beyond ‘I like the book’: Impediments to Quality Literature Discussions.” 2/13/05. http://serafini.nevada.edu/WebArticles/Lit/LitDiscussions.htm.
In education, we aim in summary at two comprehensive ends for all learners. The two goals are the fulfillment of human potential and the attainment of humanity’s cultural heritage. Certainly potential and heritage, being vast and complicated, are long-term and seldom fall nicely and completely into place for any individual educator during their temporary time with the learner. Further, since the individual psyche thrives on its own individuality, no educator can actually command learning. Rather, education as a life process needs first to be won and then gradually surrendered to the self-direction of the learner. Never mind that the human potential and the human heritage are mutual; everyone has to sort out the intricacies of these particular relationships for themselves.
Reading, nevertheless, is central to the process of learning and has the principle virtue of being an educational engine in itself that is more diverse, more companionable, and more lasting than any other single educator.
From a practical point of view, the existence of so many million books pressures each reader to spend their time on the select few titles most beneficial to themselves. ‘Select few,’ means a few thousand compared to sixty million trade editions since the invention of printing.[1] Select reading always exists thanks to the reading choices every reader necessarily makes. Choice is inescapable and exists along a continuum from refusal to read or inattention to reading – each no better than the inability to read – all the way to the most active and dedicated of lifetime reading plans.
People make choices beneficial to themselves in lots of different ways. Hopefully, their reading selections develop along the lines of informed and judicious selections. Still the process of making productive choices can be difficult and full of challenges. For some, obstacles discourage reading and block the way to exercising choice. Parents, teachers, library and media professionals are all educators who work to overcome and remove obstacles for the benefit of the learner in their charge.
Learners can be educated as to the options in their choices, but not all with the same realization or to the same extent.[2] Not all learners become readers in the same way or at the same level. Whatever our desires that every person learn, every learner read, and every reader excel, likely no society has ever had a preponderance of readers in any full sense. Take together considerations of deliberate, planned, regular, persistent, serious and deep reading, and you will find few that measure up to this totality. Still we try to do the most we can amidst the whole population. At the height of reading achievement are those readers who become writers.[3]
Questions of what reading is worth seek some foundation of what is meaningful enough to win and hold potential readers. Many are the values offered on behalf of reading’s importance: reading engages, reading extends beyond experience; reading transmits heritage; reading plumbs the depths of being. In every value named, reading goes beyond bare humanity, humanity in association with others, and humanity as lived. Reading enriches; that is the short of it. At least, such a claim is reading’s promise and potential.
Of course, reading is non-existent without readers, and through each of those previously valued interactions, the reader discovers and experiences each value as known and made real. Yet each transaction between reader and text differs. When two or more get together to compare responses and understandings as to what they have read, they discover their varying readings. It is the same text, exactly, but the reading experience is not the same for everyone. Further, the experience upon successive readings is not the same, especially as the years go by. As readers age, mature, and change, they will not bring their same selves to the text each time.
I read Baum’s Oz books when I was ten years old, lucky to find them in my small town public library. At that time, critics already considered the Oz books as mediocre because they doomed any series to be questionable merit. Later in life, the children’s literature class I took surprised me: I learned how poor Baum was considered to be. I wondered how this could be since I especially remembered some of the titles very fondly. Fifty years after my first reading, the year 2000 was the centennial of The Wizard of Oz, and Baum once again enjoyed the passing attention of the day. I decided then to re-read or read new all his books. Seeing them as an aged critic myself, I noted their general unevenness and several flaws. But at their best, those that had been my favorites in 1950 were still my favorites despite the decades.
Out of fourteen Oz novels that Baum wrote over a twenty-year period, three titles emerged in my estimation as better than the rest—The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), The Emerald City of Oz (1910), and The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913). What I admired about these three from the intervening perspective of reading hundreds of novels, myths, legends, fairytales, and works of fantasy and science fiction was Baum’s élan that breathed itself into the achievement of each favored book. These three are truly innovative and Baum does not copy himself, except as to the background that grows richer. The characters are ingeniously individual, robust, and likeable. Baum shows great humor and delectable irony. The stories come to surprising and satisfactory endings that contribute to the environment of the whole series. While Baum entertained and amused me when I was ten, at sixty he gave me a finer aesthetic enjoyment with the same texts. To me this makes unarguable that reading is a unique experience for every individual at every time of their reading.[4]
The particular learning I have come to over the decades of reading a great deal of varied texts is that a person comes to prize some works over others because they are better. “Better” means that some books demonstrate ”qualities” or ‘characteristics that qualify’ them in such a way or ways as to set them apart from the general mass of readily available reading material. The qualities speak to or evidence the particular values that the reader has come to hold in some kind of hierarchy. Just as the reading experience varies with the reader, judgments of quality are also going to vary. Popularity, timeliness, excitement, consciousness-raising, the attraction and relevance of any of the numerous disciplines of knowledge, and the pursuit of hard or theoretical truths all have their appeal. The book market is alive with variables from the blockbuster bestseller to the most abstruse treatise, and they all find their audiences, however mammoth or minute those audiences may be.
Critics, mostly of the professional variety, based on their preferred aesthetic or critical theory, will argue that certain named works are good, less good or otherwise lesser all the way to bad. Choosing-up sides as to good and bad books is a human activity; everyone likes to be on the good side, the right side. Certainly, criticism has its values when it provides tools for looking at texts and helping to evaluate them, but no criticism is the textual work in itself. Always, the piece of literature must speak for itself and not through the filter of someone else’s criticism.
As we educators go beyond the mechanics of reading to the content of reading, we take various approaches to point to the merits of literature so that maturing readers use those sample qualities as they will, may or can in making their own judgments. Given the difficulty of imposing standards of right and wrong in anything, let alone reading taste, let us examine the use of good examples and model behavior, a method whose sanction is as old as Aristotle.
First, give heed to wise old Montaigne. His father had Montaigne’s tutors submerse the infant in Latin and allowed no spoken French within earshot until by the age of six the child had gained such proficiency in the language that the only way to test him was to require him to turn bad Latin into good. This Montaigne, whose essays have set the standard for that genre, said,[5]
Teachers are for ever bawling into our ears as though pouring knowledge down through a funnel: our task is merely to repeat what we have been told. I would want our tutor to put that right: as soon as the mind in his charge allows it, he should make it show its fettle by appreciating and selecting things – and by distinguishing between them…
Bees ransack flowers here and there: but then they make their own honey, which is entirely theirs and no longer thyme or marjoram. Similarly the boy will transform his borrowings; he will confound their forms so that the end-product is entirely his; namely, his judgment, the forming of which is the only aim of his toil, his study and his education.
Readers are of two kinds, those that are nurtured and those that read despite nurturing or the lack of it. Nurturing is the only thing that we can hope to have any control over. As far as early reading is concerned, there is little substitute for oral tradition from early childhood, or in the womb, as some say, and for parents and other family members reading to children. Happy and productive is the family that adopts a routine reading ritual. All this telling and reading to children, which is likely continued, supplemented and expanded in schools and at public libraries, has an aim. We aim to exemplify reading in its humanness, pleasure and cognitive content prior to and alongside unraveling the mechanics.
The aim of the mechanics of reading is that learners become able to read on their own and to pursue their own reading as they will. Primary school readers move beyond their first books and begin to fill out reading wheels with a growing variety of literature types. They distinguish poetry, fairy tales, biographies, and other kinds of fact books from one another. They are learning the bases of the structures of literature as they discover them.
Such discovery learning is not new; you can find it in Socrates. When I left college in the early 1960s, instead of the whole class reading the same text, some English teachers had their classes read half a dozen novels divided among the students. The class then discussed what makes the novel a novel as they reached for the elements common to those six titles. I’ve never found such methods very widespread; whatever the virtues of this discovery system, it requires more preparation of the teacher and expects more attention from the students. Serafini warns of the dangers, difficulties, and experience required on the part of teachers and students to conduct such profitable examinations. I recommend his article highly.[6]
Mostly what Serafini warns about is the omnipresent possibility of the teacher insisting on his reading of the text as the correct reading. The same thing may happen in stifling student discovery in a study group activity where some students dominate others or students as a group seek to discern the mind of the teacher and please that one in charge. Searafini worries too that the current emphasis on high stakes testing is inimical to students developing their critical senses and their examination of quality measures in what they read. These judging skills are marked down as of little importance in the tests or are not easily tested.
Of course, school media and public librarians are in excellent positions to do a lot for younger readers in their development of strong reading habits and developmental reading abilities. It always seemed to me as I was growing up that I was the fortunate one of the gods because I had the same two personal librarians from birth to age eighteen, and both of them knew me. One was in the public library and the other in the public school. They always showed great interest in what I was reading, were ready to exchange a few words or a lot of words about what I read, and with greater acumen than Amazon or Netflix does today could recommend other items of interest to me and answer my questions. As time went by, they set books aside for me that they knew I would like. The public librarian even broke the state rules and requested interlibrary loan for me even though in those days this service was not available to children.
I think it was those dyadic conversations at the check-out desk that made all the difference for me in my life. I was always fortunate to always find more books I wanted to read than I could read. The pervading idea that books are wealth proved inescapable. I came to realize, likely after high school, that I had learned more from reading books from the library and those of my own purchase, than I had from textbooks, class time or and from all my teachers. This concept may be a dangerous one, but I found it unavoidable. My range of ideas, attitudes, knowledge and habits had come from books, not from classrooms. To me the books, especially the ones I favored and continued to think about, seemed the most determinative.
Many books go out of date and lose appeal when readers grow as suspicious of their worn exteriors as their fallible contents. Best sellers peak and pale; you can look at the history of bestsellers over the history of the United States and see the vast numbers of titles that once attracted the highest interest. Most of them have few readers today. Yet some books have long staying power, not for everyone necessarily but for some respectable readership. To attract readers and bolster them with quality examples, the challenge becomes to acquire for their choosing most of the best that one can. You cannot dictate readership, but you can enable it by concentrating on quality in selection.
Quality evidences itself in two principal ways. One is the extrinsic quality of affect, that is, certain books pull at and impress certain readers in ways that by emotional result touch or change them. The other is the intrinsic quality of construct; the way the message, as delivered, becomes appreciable in itself. These two kinds of qualities are not mutually exclusive, though they vary in proportion. Many readers seek affect; fewer construct. And it is easy to relish the affect of, say, To Kill a Mockingbird, even when you are twenty, as I was, and miss the construct until later, or to be overwhelmed by the construct in Huckleberry Finn and miss the affect until later. Alas, many of us are not mature enough to absorb a book as we might just because we have read it before were ready to appreciate it.
Often I worry about Silas Marner and other dreaded “classics,” which so many of us in my generation had to read and hated. Well, ‘no literature was ever written to be studied.’ (I believe I paraphrase Winston Churchill.) What would those of us in the silent generation think now if we read George Eliot again? At about 200 pages, Silas Marner doesn’t take long to comprehend.
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© 2009 by Roger Sween
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to me at the email address above.
[1] See my calculations in “The Reader as a Self-Directed Learner,” Update newsletter (August 1999) 5-10.
[2] Robert Scholes in The Crafty Reader (2001) discusses ways in which readers gain the abilities to decode and follow the crafts that authors employ in different genres and styles of literature.
[3] Compare “Why Bother?” aka “The Harper Essay” (1996) by Jonathan Franzen in How to Be Alone: Essays (2002).
[4] See also two others who have written extensively on their childhood and youthful reading: Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life (1997) and Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built (2002).
[5] Michel de Montaigne, “On Educating Children,” The Complete Essays I:26 (M. A. Screech) 1991, p.169, 171.
[6] F. Serafini, “Getting Beyond ‘I like the book’: Impediments to Quality Literature Discussions.” 2/13/05. http://serafini.nevada.edu/WebArticles/Lit/LitDiscussions.htm.
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