Wisdom, Information and Wonder
Writing about the dangers of academic specialization in Wisdom, Information and Wonder: What is Knowledge For?, Mary Midgley points out that:
Academic literary critics… have been moving steadily further and further away from their traditional function. They no longer want to be thought of as ready to help readers in using great literature to deepen and enlarge their vision of the world, a vision meant to be actively used and lived by. Instead, these critics are more and more occupied with highbrow technical battles between various theories of criticism – theories which are not even meant to concern anybody but other scholars.
Political philosopher John Gray is even more trenchant in his criticisms, arguing that:
It is hard to see why any sensible person would enrol in a humanities degree at the present time. […] What is being inculcated is not freedom of mind, but freedom from thought. Losing the ability to think while attending a university may be considered a misfortune. Incurring fifty or sixty thousand pounds of debt in order to do so looks like carelessness.
It is, therefore, refreshing to find that there are still some pockets of resistance. Here, for example, is the webpage of Michael Hurley, Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of Cambridge:
Whereas contemporary literary criticism is often marked by a so-called ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ — bent on exposing what’s limited or bigoted about a given text — I believe there is more profit (and pleasure) in exploring what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once called art’s ‘secret inner light’; that is, its goodness, truth, and beauty.
I love that idea of a secret inner light. That is what we all want our children to find. We want them to be immersed in goodness, truth, and beauty. So how can we help them on their way?
We are crying out for a Liberal Arts College in this country which would place goodness, truth, and beauty at the heart of its work, but in the meantime we can concentrate on ensuring that these transcendentals have a central place in our homes. Reading aloud to our children for as long as we can is a good place to start. And when I say “for as long as I can”, I don’t mean reading The Lord of the Rings from beginning to end in one session! What I really mean is that we don’t have to stop reading to our children when they turn eleven. Keeping the habit of a bedtime story is one option, but other families I know have family reading time during the day. DEAR is what they call it: Drop Everything And Read. And we needn’t assume this is only a task for parents: older siblings can also read to younger ones (and their parents), not to test their reading ability but so everyone in the family can enjoy the story.
Reading ourselves is also important. I wonder how many children see their parents reading books any more? If we read - and if we read good books - our children are more likely to pick up and retain the habit too. This means that we may also need to invest in our own home libraries, whatever the collateral damage, because, sadly, we can no longer rely on our public libraries to provide an endless supply of good books. In fact, we might need to find ways of establishing our own lending libraries among like-minded families.
What happens in the home is hugely important but there is a danger that what we do at home is then contradicted in schools, where the hermeneutic of suspicion is rapidly gaining ground. There is a great deal of work to be done here to re-establish what Mary Midgley calls the “traditional function” of literary critics, not least because many exam boards are actively encouraging the hermeneutic of suspicion in their public exams.
This is one area where home educators have a great advantage. Last year my eldest daughter read the following books as part of her home education programme: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Heidi, The Railway Children, Pollyanna, Treasure Island, Pinocchio, The Jungle Book, A Wrinkle in Time, The Swiss Family Robinson, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Secret Garden, Louisa May Alcott’s Jack and Jill, and some traditional Japanese tales.
It’s a fascinating list but more important, I think, is the approach that was taken with these books. There was no attempt to dissect them, as though they were dead things on a slab, but rather there was a strong desire to read, understand, and appreciate them for that secret, inner light which Solzhenitsyn and Hurley identified. If that is the approach we take then we need not despair. We and our children will soon discover that wisdom, information and wonder are as powerful as they ever have been.