I still have not read Anthony Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, recommended to me by a knowing friend, because (1) our library, which has otherwise been marvelously responsive to my suggestions for books to acquire, declined this one with the inexplicable excuse, "I'm sorry but this title does not fit our collection guidelines and we are unable to order it. It is a scholarly, university-level book."; and (2) while I expect I'll agree with much of what he says, I also suspect a sexist vein in his philosophy that would drive me nuts the way John Eldredge did. Someday, maybe.
In the meantime, Esolen continues to fascinate me. I can't personally say much about the new Common Core standards and all the kerfuffle they have generated, because I am blissfully beyond that stage of life in its practical application and therefore have not given the mess much attention. Nonetheless, I harbor an automatic suspicion of anything that moves educational decisions farther up the food chain, and so Esolen's How Common Core Devalues Great Literature sounds great to me.
The Common Corers get things exactly backwards. You do not read The Wind in the Willows so that you can gain some utilitarian skill for handling “text.” If anything, we want our children to gain a little bit of linguistic maturity so that they can read The Wind in the Willows. That is the aim. I want my college students to read Milton so that they can enter the world that Milton holds forth for us. I show them some of his techniques as an artist, since they’re mature enough to appreciate them, but not so that they can reduce the poem to an exercise in rhetoric. I show them those techniques so that they may understand and cherish the poem all the more. I want them to become “friends” with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. I want them to climb with Dante and Virgil the glorious mountain of Purgatory. I want them to stand heart to heart with the Geats as they watch the flames devour the body of their deceased king Beowulf.
Those are the important things, the permanent things. If you are not reading The Wind in the Willows as Theodore and Edith Roosevelt and their children were reading it, then you should not read it at all. If you are turning Tom Sawyer into a linguistic exercise with a veneer of intellectual sophistication, then you should not read Tom Sawyer—in fact, you cannot have understood a blessed thing about Tom Sawyer. If you are reading The Jungle Book for any other reason than to enter the jungle with Mowgli, Bagheera, and Baloo, then you had best stay out of the world of art, keep to your little cubbyhole, cram yourself with pointless exercises preparatory for the SAT, a job at Microsoft, creature comforts, old age, and death.
Preach it, brother!
