By RUBY LAROCCA
Courtesy of The Daily Beast Editor’s Note: This article was written in response to a previous opinion article, “Distance Learning at IHS: Taking The Right Step Forward,” featured in the May issue of The Tattler.
In late April, philosopher Cornel West and educator Jere my Tate published an open letter in The Washington Post expressing their alarm at the dissolution of the Classics department at Howard University, a prominent historically Black university. By early May, The New York Times published a rebuttal written by two Howard professors: Brandon Hogan and Jacoby Carter. Their exchange is a microcosm of the ongoing debate about the relevance of Classics departments today. The incremental destruction or outright abolition of Classics depart ments in the US and abroad might be the natural consequence of what Hogan and Carter, in bureaucratic-speak, call “an intensive effort to determine how to best allocate university resources.” Or rather, it might be the sign of a pernicious trend in education—a trend that is now infiltrating K-12 education in our own school district.
When Howard got rid of its Classics department it helped to silence what West characterizes as a “conversation among great thinkers over generations that grows richer the more we add our own voices and the excellence of voices from Africa, Asia, Latin America and everywhere else in the world.” What’s more, Howard is setting the tone for the kind of education it plans to offer its students, embracing what West calls “utilitarian school ing” and further abandoning a “soul-forming education.” In other words, Howard is choosing to promote the acquisition of knowledge and skills, often following trends in the employment market, but denying their students the chance to become coura geous, virtuous, discerning, and intellectually independent.
For West, a classical education involves reading texts and studying cultures that help students reorient themselves, chal lenge their preconceptions, acknowledge the complexity of exis tence, and, as he says, become “human beings of courage, vision, and civic virtue.” The genuine education West envisions is one that is intimately tied to reading (and rereading) the dynamic, radical works of philosophical education that are found in the classical tradition. West centers his argument about Howard’s loss on the important fact that America’s greatest civil rights activists and leaders were profoundly transformed by their hard won classical education. He recalls that, while enslaved, Freder ick Douglass “risked mockery, abuse, beating and even death to study the likes of Socrates, Cato, and Cicero.” Douglass began Howard University dismantles its Classics department his intellectual emancipation by secretly reading these tran formative, emboldening texts in defiance of the wrongful laws that forbade his freedom. He was “empowered by the wisdom of contemporaries and classics alike to think as a free man.” One hundred years later, Martin Luther King Jr. was “galvanized by his reading in the classics as a young seminarian—he mentions Socrates three times in his 1963 ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail.’” As West helps us to see, learning to read in a way that calls for careful attention coupled with self-examination—an explicit feature of a classical education—“is united to the Black experi ence. It recognizes that the end and aim of education is really the anthem of Black people, which is to lift every voice. That means to find your voice, not an echo or imitation of others. But you can’t find your voice without being grounded in tradition, grounded in legacies, grounded in heritages.” In an attempt to support and encourage students’ voices, Howard is actually depriving them of the rich conversation that makes those voices audible and worth hearing.
In their acerbic reply to West, Professors Hogan and Carter assert that the move to dissolve Howard’s Classics department was precipitated by an assessment of “student interest, cost, benefit, and overall fit with the university’s mission.” Although “the university recognizes the value of humanistic inquiry,” they believe getting rid of the department was a “necessary” change. They present West’s argument as a “pronouncement from the ivory towers of predominantly white institutions” designed to “draw public attention” and “score political points.” They de clare that “only those of us who research and teach at historically Black colleges and universities—unlike Dr. West, who has primarily worked at institutions with huge endowments—have the kind of understanding that comes from experience.” Here, readers should note that the authors talk about the financial constraints of their own institution in order to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of West’s argument because he taught at well-endowed Harvard and Princeton. In fact, West has fa mously twice now left his Ivy League positions to teach at Union Theological Seminary, an establishment with an endowment of about 112 million, roughly one seventh of Howard’s endow ment. In sum, the piece is less focused on what students may lose or gain and more focused on targeting West and disqualify ing him as a speaker.
A third voice is relevant here: that of Anika Prather. Prather is a Howard professor in the Classics department. In a recent interview with NPR, she points out that the people who are making arguments against the Classics often don’t have a clear sense of what work is done inside those departments. For ex ample, Howard and Carter “lumped in Shakespeare and other works” with classical texts. The difference between Shakespeare and classical literature is the difference of thousands of years. It’s hard to grasp how much time we’re talking about in the gap between the classical world and our own—just the difference between two pillars in the field of Classics, Homer and Plato, is a period of about 400 years. Consider how much our own world has changed in the 15 years since the invention of the iPhone. This should give you a visceral sense of how much can change over time and how much the advance of time matters to chang es in culture. Hogan and Carter’s reference to Shakespeare as part of the classical tradition illuminates the problems that arise when we don’t understand the traditions we are working within and against.
Both Prather and West are attempting to help their readers understand what is at stake, what kind of work goes on in Clas sics departments, why reading texts from other ages is quite dif ferent from speaking with people in your own time. They want us to know what a genuine education looks, sounds, and feels like. In sharp contrast, Carter and Hogan’s target is West—the thrust of their argument is to disqualify West, to characterize him as ill-suited to speak to the importance of Classics for How ard University students. The very different approach adopted by West and Prather as opposed to Hogan and Carter emphasizes the real difference between people who are promoting under standing and people who are trying to silence and undermine the logic of individual authors through a denouncement of their personal character or right to speak. In short, the real intention of the Hogan and Carter essay is to disqualify the author rather than illuminate the problem and contribute to its solution.
It is also worth thinking about these very different approach es in regard to their effect on students. West and Prather want students to think about the works they encounter in school in the context the works emerged from, an approach which makes the texts we read even richer and more engaging. If students more and more often ask why they should be expected to study the established classics of literature and philosophy,
it is likely because when these works (and the modern master pieces they inspire) are taught, they are taught out of context and approached with a deep skepticism about their aims and assumptions. For any philosophical work to impact a reader, it must shine a light on matters of still-lively interest—matters of moral, social, and political concern. But in order to understand why a work is relevant to our lives now, we must see how the texts we’re studying also emerged out of their authors’ attempts to grapple with other provocative thinkers. For students to en gage in an active way with demanding texts, they need a sense of how the authors of the texts were themselves engaged. As an example of this loss of intertextuality, students at IHS only get to read and examine Martin Luther King Jr.’s astonishing, profound “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in AP Language and Composition and U.S. History, both of which are courses taken in 11th grade that require a large number of prerequisites. Presumably very few IHS students read this masterpiece in the context of the classical works that MLK himself was engaging. I mean only to point out that Howard and Carter’s approach allies school curriculums with current market trends and what students think they want to learn about, further eroding the kind of layered, contextualized program of studies that can inspire teachers and students and make education pleasurable. The more disjointed and cobbled together, while being expe dient and governed by current social trends our school work becomes, the less anything will feel worth studying. . . . .
In late March, I co-wrote a piece for The Tattler express ing alarm at the online environment fostered by the policies implemented by the school this year. By early May, The Tattler published a rebuttal from another IHS student. Our exchange reflects the same trend in education I’ve outlined above—one that has students arguing against their own right to be educat ed in the genuine and absorbing way that will allow them to be fulfilled in any line of work or study they choose to pursue.
Let’s start by investigating the core of the rebuttal’s criticism of the original distance learning piece (which I’ll refer to as “A Clear-Eyed Assessment”). The rebuttal, which I’ll refer to as “Taking the Right Step Forward,” feels like a perfect illustration of the newly formed allegiance between students and admin istrators—a worrisome alliance that displaces the traditional teacher-student relationship. “Taking the Right Step Forward” is emphatically loyal to ICSD’s “Culture of Love” and the poli cies the current administration is instituting to try to eliminate inequities, even though—some of us are arguing—these policies infantilize students and perpetuate inequities by making public education in the humanities so flat and toothless that it can hardly be expected to empower anyone to do anything.
“Taking the Right Step Forward” makes the academic side of school life—especially reading literature, or reading the kinds of texts that can’t be easily reduced to main points and key messages—look harmful to students: As fun as reading books is for those of us who engage in it as a hobby, it can feel labored, extra neous, and hopeless. The words swim before one’s eyes, all blending together, forming a whirlpool of boredom. It is not ICSD’s job to force this upon students in hopes of transferring to them a valuable skill simply by exposure. Assigning long readings in print books does not teach students to enjoy reading. Short articles are much more likely to be engaging in topic and style, and they give students the satisfaction of focusing long enough to absorb the takeaways of the reading, a feeling that is hard to come by as of late. Action meets the challenge of “providing an online (or in person) education that is energizing, varied, and aimed directly at the goal of preparing students for fulfilling future employment.” The phrase “fulfilling future employment” seems to have caused offense: “To hear the authors define the goal of secondary education in general as “preparing students for fulfilling future employment” is frankly disappointing.” Since fulfilling employ ment—of whatever kind—is work that makes people satisfied or happy, what exactly is the problem? Why would students argue against the full development of their own characters and abilities and thus of their future happiness and satisfaction?
One reason might be that they have little familiarity with classical philosophers’ sense (evident in the teachings of the Buddha In addition to thinking of books only in terms of the facts, lessons, and useful generalities students can mine from them (an approach to reading certain to turn students into glassy-eyed automatons), the arguments in “Taking the Right Step Forward” seem to spring from an assumption that “traditional” school work hurts students mentally and emotionally, and that what is really needed in K-12 education is a greater awareness and accommodation of student suffering and vulnerability. Further more, the authors of “A Clear-Eyed Assessment” are faulted for equating academic achievement with soul-crushing metrics, money-making, and other narrow-minded versions of success: “Distance Learning at IHS: A Clear-Eyed Assessment and a Call to Action” presents a particular type of standpoint on education. It is one that emphasizes a traditional definition of success— one that encompasses numerical grades, advanced classes, familiarity with classic literature, and preparedness to enter the workforce as a well-edu cated person. Even in a normal year, these are not values that should take priority over physical and mental well-being.
Certainly, the authors of the “A Clear-Eyed Assessment” would agree that a surplus of taxing, ill-conceived assignments and busy-work (assignments that are at once shallow and end less, that consume students’ precious late-night and weekend hours but accomplish very little in the way of real understand ing) do not serve students well. However, this sad view of school isn’t the one championed in “A Clear-Eyed Assessment,” nor do its authors equate student accomplishment with high standard ized test scores or high-powered, well-paying jobs. Instead, what is held out as the primary goal is intellectual emancipation and the ability to pursue your goals because you have the kind of ed ucation that allows you to be interested and interesting, to go on learning well after school is over, and to speak to others on your own behalf, clearly and convincingly.
One of the strangest moments in “Taking the Right Step Forward” is the author’s decision to denounce the hope, as ex pressed in “A Clear-Eyed Assessment,” that the IHS administraton and Confucius and Plato) that everyone is helped by having a philosophy of life or a philosophy for living. The Roman Stoics, for example, (Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus) had won derful, specific techniques for managing negative emotions and achieving a deep sense of well-being, especially during times of hardship and turmoil. The constructive, health and happi ness-promoting lessons of the Stoics offer just one example of how if we read good works, in the right spirit, together, account ing for the inevitable differences in students’ experiences and interests, we can in fact improve our mental health by way of our school studies.