Reading
Erin O’Connor says some very interesting things in this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. They’re things I’ve been thinking for some time myself.
But almost everyone agrees with the astounding premise that it’s reasonable to use the freshman reading program to stage a political debate…On both sides of the debate, a book’s politics are assumed to matter more than its scholarly merit or literary quality…The tacit assumption by both liberals and conservatives that Chapel Hill’s summer reading program is more about politics than about reading should give us pause. We ought to be asking what it means to read opinionated works as either a confirmation or negation of identity — but instead we are fighting endlessly about whose identity gets top billing when readings are assigned.
Just so. One of the things that has soured or curdled or at least altered my leftist views or commitments – I still have them, but they tend to be hedged about with sighs or snarls or rolled eyes these days – is just that claustrophobic idea that politics is the only way to think. That if one is not thinking politically one is not thinking at all, and then that politics boils down to identity politics. What a deadly combination. First, come up with a radically diminished impoverished and in many ways regressive idea of what politics is about, and then make everything be about (that version of) politics. Then run absolutely everything in life through that dreary wringer and see the result: we’re not allowed to read Shakespeare or Austen any more without getting an endless turgid point-missing lecture on their failure to be as right-on about Colonialism or queer theory as we are. Yawn.
Yes, they are exposing the program’s considerable liberal slant, but only on the way to revealing their own embarrassingly impoverished concept of reading…Both liberals and conservatives should remember that there is no book worth reading that is not somehow partial to something, and that there is no education worth having that does not involve exposure to partialities other than one’s own.
And even that there are partialities that have little or nothing to do with politics, especially with politics in the narrow boring parochial sense in which we’ve taken to defining it.
I’ve been out of education for a very long time, so I seem to have missed something here.
When I was a student, even a freshman, I was expected to read all sorts of books from all sorts of perspectives whether I agreed with them or not. If I disagreed I was expected to argue cogently against the thesis I disliked, and if my argument was weak, my teachers took me up on it.
At no time was it suggested that I might only read books which reinforced my existing prejudices, and if anyone had suggested such a thing they would have been ridiculed by left and right alike. Is this no longer the case?
And if not, what the hell is going on?
Yes, I’ve been out of education for a long time myself. As far as I can tell, these single books chosen for first year students to read as part of their ‘orientation’ (this is all very American and will sound odd to our UK readers, I should think) are a new idea. So apparently, because it’s one book that the entire class or year is expected to read, there is more scrutiny by outsiders than there is of reading for courses. Mind you, even there, there’ve always been a few people wringing their hands over the subversive books Our Kids read at University.
Really, as O’Connoer implies in her account, the main problem is that there are all these new students who don’t even have a habit of reading (and no, watching ‘films’ is not a useful substitute, see comments on ‘Pedantry’ below) when they arrive. The thought seems to be that assigning A Book right at the beginning will kind of give them the idea: okay, kids, here’s what you’re going to be doing a fair amount of for the next four years, you might want to get used to it. Of course, they ought to have learned that some six or eight years earlier, but…