The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (21 page)

Now, I have nothing against a few good facts, or making an argument based on evidence—our twenty-first-century version of facts—both are essential to any good assessment of literature or just about anything else. And I would agree with Dr. Coleman that there is a problem as this skill is not in evidence in the papers of a good number of American college students. But must he be so dismissive and reductive? Must he decide that students no longer need to learn about metaphors and that the concept of a synonym is “esoteric”? Must we really believe, with him, that no one should care about what others think and feel?

“It is rare in a working environment,” he memorably opined, “that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that, I need a compelling account of your childhood.’”

Now, we all know that there is more to a liberal arts education than telling childhood stories, and I doubt that is the problem facing either Coleman’s imaginary Johnson or his boss. It might help both of them if Johnson had chosen a job he loved, something that engaged him and that he had a passion for, which would guarantee his devotion to his job far more than the offer of all the money in the world. But regardless, however proficient Johnson may be at making money, would he be satisfied with the notion that he should be prepared to give up his life for his country only because it gave him a job, a car, a house? Or would he, in the back of his mind, think that the material aspects of life might be secondary to more abstract concepts such as meaning and fulfillment? When the physicist Robert Wilson, the founding director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the site of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, appeared before Congress to ask for the allocation of a considerable sum of money, he was asked to justify his demand by explaining its contribution to national defense. “It has nothing to do directly with defending our country,” he said, “except to make it worth defending.” If Johnson were ever to study what the nation’s founders had to say about education, he might find this answer just as applicable.

In his parting words to his fellow countrymen as he stepped down as America’s first president, George Washington told them they should be thankful that their nation had been created at such an auspicious time, when it was possible to realize the legacy of the Enlightenment. The era had arrived when a majority of people could benefit from privileges that until then had belonged to only the few. Among these were the right to education, by which he meant an education both in science and the liberal arts, for, as Washington said succinctly, “there is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”

Most of the founders were proficient in Greek and Latin, and Benjamin Rush, the patron of America’s first public schools, recommended the study of the “dead languages” as central to the practitioners of “law, physic or divinity.” It now occurs to me that Johnson, should he wish to know more about the foundations of his country, might want to spend more time reading Locke and Cicero than “informational texts” like “Recommended Levels of Insulation,” issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, and the “Invasive Plant Inventory,” courtesy of the California Invasive Plant Council. I say this not to belittle environmental issues, which are at the heart of so many contemporary problems, but rather to point out that if you want children to care for the environment, you need to educate them by providing them with knowledge and not simply information.

The “critical thinking” that the Common Core claims to wish to instill in our youth will not come from simply teaching them to decipher informational texts. Anyone, especially nowadays, can find information about almost anything in the world with a few keystrokes on Google, but not everyone can understand the nuances of that information, and even fewer will have the patience to place it in a relevant context or to be objective enough, responsible enough and passionate enough about the truth not to mind what its discovery might mean for their beliefs or short-term benefits. If our children have not been learning how to think critically, you cannot blame this on their being stuffed with too much poetry or history. Far from it. You can blame it on a culture that makes access to free thinking costly and irrelevant. You can blame it on overloaded and underpaid teachers, on a lack of public funding for education, a lack of discipline or respect either for learning or for teachers; you can blame it on a culture too focused on money, on success, on entertainment, on making life more easy than meaningful.

In a letter to his grandson, Francis Wayles Eppes, Thomas Jefferson advised him to “undertake a regular course of History and Poetry” in both Greek and Latin. This does not mean that Jefferson was not concerned with science or the material aspects of public life. Far from it. In fact, in a letter to Joel Barlow in 1807, he wote, “People generally have more feeling for canals and roads than education. However, I hope we can advance them with equal pace.” He knew there could be no innovation and progress, no canals and roads, in the long term without a well-rounded education.

I am not suggesting that we should all be reading Latin and Greek, or that we should revive the educational curriculum of the founding fathers, but it is a long way between mastering Tacitus, Virgil, Horace and Herodotus and reading about recommended levels of insulation. The trouble with the Common Core is that it treats all these texts as simple texts. It asks for passages from Ovid, the Gettysburg Address,
Romeo and Juliet
and EPA reports all to be taught in the same manner, a dry and brittle exercise that takes no account of the need, as even Babbitt understood, for a little “vision” and fantasy.

Imagine that Mr. Coleman’s hardworking Johnson had been persuaded to stop fidgeting in the history class in which he was assigned the Gettysburg Address (assuming it was in fact a history class, as history is a low priority these days). He might have been interested to learn that Lincoln’s language—which is as inspiring and heartbreaking now as it must have been then—was colored by his readings of Milton, Shakespeare and the Bible. But alas, this is something his successors will never know if their teachers meticulously follow the instructions mapped out by the progenitors of the Common Core. And if he had stuck with that history lesson, he might also have learned that every movement for equality and justice—the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the environmental movement and, more recently, the gay rights movement—was affected (or perhaps “infected” is a more suitable word) by this same spirit. Words, ideas—they can be quite powerful, at least as powerful as math and science. They move people to dream and do exceptional things.

If we want our children to learn, they’ll need more than rigid guidelines and “evidence-based” standards; they’ll need good teachers. And if we want good teachers, we will have to treat them with respect and appreciation and give them a say in how the school curriculum is shaped and implemented. While I have not studied educational pedagogy, I have taught students for more than thirty years, and I cannot help but think that cutting art, music and fiction from the classroom is not the best way to foster creativity or innovation, or to inspire future voting citizens. “The vocation of teacher is among the highest known to [man],” said Frederick Douglass, in a statement that now sounds so very naive. He called it a “permanent vocation,” claiming that “neither politics nor religion present to us a calling higher than this primary business of unfolding and strengthening the powers of the human soul.”

Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs were not mere spinners of words, someone you might begrudgingly read to get a good grade on your final exam before moving on to bigger and better things, as Babbitt advises his son, Ted, to do. They were inspiration for great deeds, reasons to seek and achieve, reminders of what it means to be human.

Now, the founders were on the whole a group of aristocratic gentlemen, and it is true that they did not think of democracy in the way we do. But they saw democracy as inextricably linked to education. Washington wanted to create a national university in the nation’s capital, and his successor, John Adams, was if anything even more emphatic on the subject. In a letter to Mathew Robinson Jr. in 1786, he addresses Robinson’s ideas on “American affairs” and begins by expressing hope that a time will come when the “Sciences and the art of Government” will be rid of superstition and imposture and “Authority” will come from the people and not from the “the skies in Miracles and mistery.” Adams continues, explaining that before such time arrives and before any great things are accomplished, a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. . . . The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.” In another letter he said, “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.”

So much for Rand Paul’s contention that schools are fine and great but should not be funded by the federal government. Speaking of Senator Paul’s state, Kentucky, he might be interested to know that in 1822 James Madison commended the State of Kentucky for appropriating funds for a general system of education. In a letter to William Taylor Berry in August of that year, he stated that “a popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

By now it should be clear to Johnson that prosperity and enlightenment were the two pillars of both the idea of America and the American dream, and the most important achievement of American pragmatism was to recognize that one could not survive without the other. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization,” Jefferson remarked, “it expects what never was and never will be.”

“Liberty” and “knowledge”: one finds these two words repeated time and again in the early years of the republic. Johnson might be as surprised as I was to discover how farsighted some of the founders were. They knew the value of engineers, of people who build roads, canals and bridges, but they also knew that dictatorships could build roads, canals and bridges, and they believed that what a free society needed was an enlightened and civic-minded public that could prevent tyranny from taking root. “In despotic governments, the people should have little or no education, except what tends to inspire them with a servile fear,” said Daniel Webster. “Information is fatal to despotism. . . . In our American republics, where [government] is in the hands of the people, knowledge should be universally diffused by means of public schools.” He believed that “the more generally knowledge is diffused among the substantial yeomanry, the more perfect will be the laws of a republican state.” And here is Madison: “Learned Institutions . . . throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.”

Why was Giordano Bruno burned at the stake, and why did Galileo face the Inquisition? Why is it that today countries with rigid educational systems, such as China, Saudi Arabia and even Japan, have realized that without more liberal education they will not progress beyond a certain point? Why does the supreme leader in Iran attack universities, threatening to close them down and accusing them of fomenting unrest?

To a writer, a philosopher, a teacher, a musician or an artist, freedom of expression is like bread and water—it is that without which they cannot survive. This is why in every tyrannical society, they become the first targets and are the first to raise their voices. Rather than worry that Chinese students are surpassing us in mathematics, we should perhaps celebrate the fact that the Chinese and the Saudis and so many others come to the United States looking for a blueprint from which to build new liberal arts colleges. Oil-rich countries can buy technology and import engineers from all over the world, but they cannot buy original thought. What these societies lack—what citizens in Iran and China go to jail and are tortured for, what tyrants are afraid of when they talk about Western democracies—is not technology or scientific prowess but a culture of democracy, a culture that understands and respects freedom of expression, of ideas, of imagination.

The only engineers and computer scientists in jail in totalitarian societies are the ones who speak their minds. There are more writers, artists, musicians and poets than mathematicians and businessmen, and that is part of the reason why the humanities are so much more valued in these societies than in our own. But do we need the stark contrast with a totalitarian society to be reminded of the value of free thinking? Why do tyrants understand the dangers of a democratic imagination more than our policy makers appreciate its necessity?

Many things change with time, but certain basic human traits remain eternal: curiosity and empathy, the urge to know and the urge to connect. These twin attributes are our means of existence and tools for survival. They are the keys to knowledge, whether scientific or literary. Those who think the humanities are old-fashioned and out of date in the era of technology should perhaps take a look at their own history—and fairly recent history at that, let us say twentieth-century history—and consider the results of divorcing technology from its human implications.

Now, perhaps, we can better understand George Babbitt’s intuitive aversion to ideas and works of fiction. In the novel, when Myra Babbitt takes their youngest daughter, Tinka, and goes east, Babbitt finds himself alone in the house for the first time in a long while. He wanders into his daughter’s room, trying to amuse himself, and finds her books: Conrad’s
The Rescue,
a book of “quite irregular poetry” by Vachel Lindsay, and “highly improper essays” by H. L. Mencken that poke fun at “the church and all the decencies.” He dislikes these books, finding in them “a spirit of rebellion against niceness and solid-citizenship.”