Same is true about the study of the hard sciences, or engineering. Or medicine. I admire Shakespeare, but I also admire Newton and Florey and Chain (antibiotics). I find that people who only studied the classics at university have a very limited view of their cultural heritage, engineering students know about Shakespeare, but how many arts students know about Maxwell?

And I’m also puzzled about something:
You say ” I grew up reading Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, etc. Now I’ve seen students reading a lot of multi-culti literature… ” as if the multi-cultural literature is a negative compared with your reading when you were growing up.
But I’ve read Shakespeare and he comes from a very different culture to contemperary NZ, British or American culture. Didn’t you grow up reading multi-cultural stuff as well?

Furthermore, I’ve read Tolstoy, Dvostesky, Austen, Homer, Dante (well I didn’t finish the Paradise section), and I have a Tale of Genji on my reading list, all traditional great authors and all from different cultures to my own. What’s wrong with reading multi-cultural literature? I would hate to be confined to only books about my culture, one of the things I love about the classics is that they give me views of different cultures, and how people can vary in many ways and also how we are the same in many ways. And we can learn from other cultures and enrich our own cultural heritage, if Shakespeare had only drawn from English culture and not drawn on such multi-cultural sources as the Italians, Ancient Greeks, Ancient Romans, the Scots (Macbeth), etc, our own cultural heritage would have been diminished surely.

I think the PC idea that everyone should only look to their own cultural heritage and that people, or in more moderate versions, children, should not be exposed to “multi-cultural” literature out of fear of wrecking the poor kiddies’ self-esteem is based on a very limited, ignorant view of history, people have at many times in the past drawn on other cultures to enrich their own. If your ancestors came from anywhere but a remote tribal village in the Amazonian rainforest or a Papa New Guinean/Indoneisan mountain range, your cultural heritage is already multi-cultural, it has already been changed by exposure to new ideas from other cultures. So in exposing yourself to multi-cultural literature you are continuing in your proud cultural history. (I don’t have any objection either to people from those remote uncontacted tribes learning from other cultures too, I’m just pointing out the contradiction of trying to preserve a culture by avoiding multi-cultural stuff when the culture was formed in the first place in part by interactions with other cultures).

And new books *do* get added to the Canon over time, for example Fitzgerald was only born in 1986, after the start of the development of the Canon, so if he can be added, why not other authors? Do you think that good quality authors stopped being produced at some date after Fitzgerald?

Ben F – I just read Crime and Punishment last year for the first time, on top of a full-time job, and it was amazing, mind-blowing. I’ve also belonged to a book club in the past, and enjoyed it greatly and am rejoining one this year. I didn’t take English at university, but I did have to take English at high school, and I found it boring, compared with what I get from my own reading and sharing with like-minded people. Now perhaps I just had a run of bad teachers in English class and -perhaps if I had done English at university I would have had a far more fantastic experience. But the people I know who did do English at university don’t appear to have enjoyed it any better than those who did sciences or professional subjects (some loved it, but then some loved the sciences or professional subjects), and I’ve never managed to learn maths outside of a formal classroom setting while I do enjoy reading the classics separately.

allen: I have no problem with reducing the number of Americans who attend college, provided we beef up the k-12 curriculum. Based on conversations I’ve had with Europeans, their twelfth graders are way better educated than many American college graduates I know.

That should probably read – “Yet another reason why society should subsidize university education for a small percentage of students who have to pass rigorous tests, like they do in Europe.” – which is to say that subsidies would be best withdrawn if you want a college education to be more widely affordable. It’s the subsidies, to a very large degree, that’ve relentlessly driven up the cost of a college education by obviating efforts to hold down costs.

I also majored in English (theater minor)–picking up coursework in journalism and fine arts post graduation. I have never regretted, nor found a lack of work applications for my fine arts background. However, I hasten to point out that the world in 1971 was considerably different than that today. The path through college might easily be stretched out over any number of years (as some draft avoiders did) for the simple enjoyment of being in school, or to delay commitment to a single field of study. It was not at all difficult to leave college and get a job earning a wage that could support a family on an assembly line or other factory work in a union environment. Those low-skill, adequately paid jobs no longer exist. Is it any wonder that the current school population is more worried about future employment than about enlightenment?

Personally, I would enjoy teaching a class that links English to the workplace (especially using Death of a Salesman as content), not only because of the literature, but because I see such a need for practical writing ability. A resume is not longer simply a list of former jobs and degrees. It has to communicate exactly what the applicant has accomplished within each of those jobs, and do it in a single sentence. Certainly this is a writing discipline as worthy as trying to cram a thought into the limited syllables of a haiku, or Shakespeare’s writing exercise of producing sonnets. I don’t yet twitter–but I see a worthy writing challenge in the ability to craft meaningful statements into a short format. It requires careful thought and selection of detail and words to do well–like poetry.

As I get older–I find inspiration not in lookinf for ways to perpetuate the forms of earlier years, with which I am familiar, but in finding commonalities and new uses in the forms that are current.

The study of classics is important because it fosters pride in one’s cultural heritage. I grew up reading Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, etc. Now I’ve seen students reading a lot of multi-culti literature or modern day teen trash (I’d say the Babysitter’s Club series of books had more literary value than some of the new assigned readings). Students don’t seem to realize the troubles that our nation has gone through in the past (Civil War, Great Depression, etc) and seem to think that life in the US has always been hunky-dory. Rather, they focus on the plight of the African Continent and other impoverished areas.

Isn’t that what ‘career placement’ centers are for???

Exactly right, and competent academic advisors, no matter what the major, direct their students to those centers.

And, also, even if liberal arts is valuable, why should studying them as part of a full-time course at university be the way it should be done? Why not part-time over a lifetime? Even if you only studied the classics for 4 years flat at university you’re not going to get through them all. A maths-heavy degree might require some sustained concentration, but literature?
Perhaps universities’ humanities departments should be thinking about other ways of delivering their knowledge.

To Cal: every great culture of the past has esteemed its classics –think about China, for example. There is a reason classics become classics –they nourish the mind in a way that other texts do not. There is a reason the liberal arts are called “the liberal arts”: they liberate the mind from ignorance. Personally I’d prefer to live in a country that has many citizens who are well-versed in the classics, not just the latest business lit or how to sell phony financial products or programing sociopathic video games. I think subsidizing some kids’ study of Great Books would be an investment that would make our country a better, more civilized, more sane place.