Author: Eric MacKnight

[An open letter to my fellow English teachers near and far.]

Thought flows in terms of stories – stories about events, stories about people, and stories about intentions and achievements. The best teachers are the best story tellers. We learn in the form of stories.

—Frank Smith, Canadian psycholinguist

Dear Colleagues,

As the IBO prepares to join the crowd swimming downstream and dilute its English A1 course by splitting it into two ‘options’, one for Language and the other for Literature*, the Wiser Voice in my head says to me, “It’s over. Just shut up.”

But of course I won’t.

Humans are the only animals that tell stories. The most important stories we tell delve into the most profound questions about our existence, the questions at the heart of life and learning: Who are we? Where are we? What are we doing, and what should we be doing?

We do not, contrary to the inane compartmentalizations of The School, tell stories only in English class. Religious beliefs consist of a series of interconnected stories: how the world was created, who created it, for what purpose, why we suffer, how we should live, etc. History (another core subject that has been devalued by the utilitarians and dethroned in the curriculum by “social studies”) is collective storytelling. Scientific theories are, at their core, stories explaining how things work. Even mathematics is based on certain ‘stories’ that assume, for example, that space is three-dimensional and parallel lines don’t meet.

We think in metaphors, and metaphors are nothing but little stories, or the germs of stories, or comparisons rooted in a certain story about how things are. This, we say, is like that.

Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us.

(“Thinking Literally” http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/27/thinking_literally/).

It is virtually impossible to think without using metaphors, and thus storytelling is at the very heart of how we understand the world and ourselves. Any curriculum that makes the study of history and literature into ‘options’ fails utterly to understand how human beings live, think, and learn. If students do not become adept readers of stories, how can they ever hope to critically analyze and respond to the stories that will be thrown at them all their lives by politicians, by governments, by marketers, not to mention friends, family members, and perfect strangers?

We should keep the study of stories at the heart of education, and we should keep the most important stories at the heart of our curriculum. As Goethe wrote,

Anyone who cannot give an account to oneself of the past three thousand years remains in darkness, without experience, living from day to day.

How can one possibly give an account of the last 3,000 years without knowing history and literature? When I began teaching nearly thirty years ago, students in my high school whose skills were poor were shunted off into courses with titles like “Writers’ Workshop”. These students were not taught Shakespeare, because it they were thought to be incapable of understanding Shakespeare. I argued then that this was a terrible policy. One can teach Shakespeare in a variety of ways. His original audiences, after all, included large numbers of illiterates. To exclude students from the study of Shakespeare is to commit a kind of cultural apartheid. The bizarre twists and turns of American ‘culture wars’, in which the multiculturalists go to battle against the misogynistic, Eurocentric ‘canon’, should not be allowed to infect our thinking and distract us from our essential task. The culture that we have inherited from our ancestors belongs to all of us, and it is immoral, in my view, to say to a student, “You are not good enough to be part of our cultural inheritance.” It is tantamount to saying to them, “You are not good enough to be considered fully human.” It is our duty as teachers to educate children, and that does not mean simply teaching them to “decode” language and numbers. It means transmitting to them our common cultural inheritance. One cannot be considered an educated person otherwise.

This duty weighs even more heavily on secondary teachers than it used to, because colleges and universities have, with a few noble exceptions, largely abandoned any effort to provide a liberal education to their students. If a student doesn’t read Homer, Shakespeare, and Dickens in high school, it is quite likely she never will.

I earnestly hope that whatever new dispensation arrives from whichever curricular source, we will hold firmly to the conviction that the study of storytelling is at the core of any good education and must not be marginalized. All students should study history and literature, every year, and any curricular options should be considered only as additions, not as substitutes, for those core subjects. In the upcoming revision to the IB Language A1 offerings, if we have a choice, we should choose not to offer the Language option. If we must offer it, we should vigorously advise students to choose Literature, not Language. And if, as I understand is the case with the new IB Language A course, we have a choice of including more literature or less**, we should include as much as possible.

Notes, Clarifications, Corrections

*The two options are actually (a) Literature, and (b) a course that is half Literature and half Language.

**I am now not sure this is the case.

Pete Kittle, who was a student of mine in the early part of my career, has written a beautiful piece concerning the death of his father which I hope you will take a few moments to read.

William M. Chace, professor of English and former president of two U.S. universities, tells the sad tale in The American Scholar.

University students who major in business are so misguided: every intelligent and successful businessman or -woman will tell you that a broad knowledge of literature, history, science, people, and the world—in other words, a liberal arts education—is the best preparation for a business career. At the same time, most U.S. colleges and universities have simply given up on the liberal arts.

The only secure bastion of liberal arts education that I know of is St. John’s College, with campuses in Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Everyone who teaches Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl will be interested in Leonard Lopate’s interview of Francine Prose, whose new book is Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, in which she argues that the diary was not simply a diary, but a heavily revised work of literature that Anne hoped to publish after the war.

To listen, go to the show archives for WNYC’s ‘Leonard Lopate Show’ and scroll down to October 1, 2009. Or you can download the podcast from my public folder. The path is Podcasts / English Podcasts / Interviews with Authors / Francine Prose on Anne Frank.

A query on Twitter caught my eye this morning:

#MYP DP Theory of Knowledge … where is it in the MYP? Is it missing? Is it necessary? [from @krea_frobro747]

I replied, “ATL should be taught as a weekly or biweekly pre-TOK class.”

TOK is a great course, and the concept behind it is compelling, but its implementation in most schools falls far short. Typically, only a handful of teachers teach TOK or know anything about it. Its weighting in the IBDP grading system contributes to this marginalization, which belies the original vision of TOK at the heart of the program, the hub of the wheel connected by spokes to all the subject areas. I’ve long argued that the course should be taught by pairs of teachers, one more experienced, and that every teacher should rotate through a TOK teaching assignment. Then TOK would truly permeate the program, as it was intended to do.

But this morning’s tweet points to another issue for TOK: before the first day of Grade 11, students have little or no experience thinking about the sort of issues that arise in TOK. The first half-year of TOK is spent dealing with that deer-in-headlights shock and confusion.

Why, indeed, is there no analogous course in the Middle Years’ Programme? I can’t think of a good reason.

However, as my response above suggests, there is a solution at hand. Of all the ‘Areas of Interaction’ in the MYP, ‘Approaches to Learning’ receives the least attention. Not surprisingly. Schools have always done a lousy job of teaching students how to learn. It’s not just study skills: it’s work habits, study habits, personal habits . . . it is, in fact, ‘approaches to learning’. What could be more important? And yet, most teachers are far too busy teaching content to teach ‘approaches to learning’, except incidentally and by osmosis. Which is why I ended up writing my book, Good Habits, Good Students.

So let’s solve two problems at once. A weekly or biweekly ATL course in the Middle Years program would provide an opportunity to address learning habits and skills explicitly, and to engage in the kind of age-appropriate discourse that would give students invaluable practice thinking about how they think, so that when they arrived for their first TOK class in Grade 11 they would resemble fish in water, instead of deer in headlights.

. . . is laid out in a modest (22 slides) and minimalist (black & white, mostly) presentation that you can download either as a Keynote file or a Powerpoint document (click on the one you prefer).

Like Ric Murry, I’ve been reading Daniel T. Willingham’s book, Why Don’t Students Like School?, in which he applies what we know about cognitive science to what we should be doing in classrooms, and this presentation is based on Willingham’s research, along with my own experiences teaching for almost three decades (!).

Phillip Lopate, the writer, is interviewed by his older brother Leonard, the former painter and longtime broadcaster on WNYC in New York, in a podcast from ‘The Leonard Lopate Show’ that will fascinate and entertain anyone interested in literature, the arts, and brothers. Both students and teachers will enjoy it.

Two books underlie the interview. Lopate’s most recent work is Notes on Sontag, a book-length essay reflecting on the work of the late Susan Sontag, one of America’s foremost essayists and critics of the postwar era. And he contributed an essay to a recent collection of pieces written by brothers about their brothers called Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry. Phillip’s essay, of course, is about Leonard, who talks with him about both books and a variety of related topics. What follows cannot begin to convey the charm of their conversation.

On Sontag, Phillip remarks on her conviction and courage as a writer. Born in the western United States, feeling alienated by mainstream American culture, she migrated to New York, studied philosophy, and turned herself into a European-style intellectual. Her writing style, densely philosophical and aphoristic, reflects this European sensibility. Lopate talks about the persona she creates in her essays, which he says convey a very strong sense of her personality even though she didn’t use “I” and strove to write impersonally. Noting that her fiction is less successful than her non-fiction, Lopate says this is because she lacked a strong sense of humour and a ‘ready sympathy’ for people.

Phillip begins by remarking that he wanted to write about Sontag because he is ambivalent about her. Ambivalence makes for a good topic, he says, because you are then forced to work out your mixed feelings on paper.

Some of these ideas spill over into the other part of the conversation concerning brothers. Phillip implies, without ever saying it, that there is some ambivalence in his feelings towards Leonard, or else he never could have written an essay about him. What exactly this ambivalence might be is unclear, since on air they both in what they say and how they speak to each other, it’s clear that they love each other very much. This makes me want to read his essay! He also discusses the problem of personal essays: how to know where to stop. It’s a question of both revealing and concealing at the same time, revealing enough to make the essay interesting but not so much that you ‘cross the line’ and reveal what would be hurtful or embarrassing. He also has interesting things to say about the process of writing. He ‘overwrites’, he says, and then goes back with a critical eye to censor, edit, and revise. Students who get stuck because they start editing too soon can learn from this.

In another part of the conversation they talk about old poems being like old photographs—snapshots of who we were when we wrote them. Phillip contrasts W.B. Yeats, who in his old age revised poems he had written years earlier, with Walt Whitman, who simply kept adding new poems to his grand opus, Leaves of Grass.

There’s lots more that interesting and entertaining, so have a listen at WNYC.org or iTunes, or if you wish you can download the podcast from my public folder. The path is Podcasts / English Podcasts / Interviews with Authors / Phillip Lopate.

The usual attacks on ye olde 5-paragraph essay are a bit like attacks on the sonnet. Are formal constraints really the problem? After all, the vast majority of sonnets ever written—the ones that have mercifully made their way into Time’s recycling bin—were undoubtedly very bad pieces of writing. Instead of criticizing the 5-paragraph essay, shouldn’t we give our attention to the writers’ and teachers’ lack of imagination and art?

Even if we consider the 5-paragraph essay as a ‘mere exercise’, is that so bad? Musicians practice scales and chord changes. Cooks begin by following recipes. The 5-paragraph essay similarly teaches fundamental elements of good writing: beginning, middle, and end; stating a thesis; catching the reader’s interest; organizing one’s ideas; developing them with examples, illustrations, and explanation; constructing a coherent argument; concluding in a way that is both artful and interesting. Along the way, the student practices choosing the right word, crafting an effective sentence, employing rhythm and variety, and so on.

At a certain point in European intellectual history Aristotle became the whipping boy for the new philosophers, who for the most part had never read Aristotle but only the medieval Scholastic distortions of Aristotle. In the same way, I suspect that most attacks on the 5-paragraph essay are misdirected. The real problem is not five paragraphs, but bad teaching.

The assumption of sole authorship underlies writing assessments in school, but in reality good writing almost always results from collaboration.

This post by American free-lance writer Dan Baum—

Writing as Contact Sport

—makes me wonder about how we teach writing in schools. Baum’s post is a response to criticism he received after revealing that his wife, Margaret Knox, is also his editor. But he got my attention with his remarks on the important role of editing:

Maybe some people write brilliantly entirely on their own. I don’t know any, though. And I’m certainly not one. Back in the day, people understood the importance of editors – Max Perkins, etc. Back then, editors edited. They engaged the copy. They made good writing better. That’s what Margaret does for me. (I’ve been thrice blessed. I’ve had great editing, in addition, at several magazines. And the editor of Nine Lives was an energetic genius who really improved the book.)

There’s no shame in relying on an editor. That’s how it’s always worked.

And yet in school, most of the time, a student whose work is edited by someone else is regarded as . . . a cheater!

I know: the teacher is the editor; there’s peer-editing; etc. But I’m not sure any of that adds up to an adequate defense. It appears that the need to assess is in direct conflict with the best practices of good writers.

Let’s look, for example, at the declaration that all IB students sign when submitting work for external assessment:

The assignment(s) I am submitting is (are) my own work. I have acknowledged each use of the words or ideas of another person, whether written or oral.

Is that a standard that professional writers collaborating with editors could meet? I doubt it. Now let’s look at a piece by Paul Graham, one of the best essayists I know. It’s called “Why Nerds are Unpopular”, and at the end of it we find this:

Thanks to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, and Jackie Weicker for reading drafts of this essay, and Maria Daniels for scanning photos. –PG

When we read Graham’s essay, we accept it as his work, and understand that he had help thinking it through and revising it. But if he were a student and handed in the same essay with the same notice of thanks appended, how many teachers would refuse to give him credit on the grounds that we can’t tell which bits are his, and his alone, and which bits came from Sarah, Trevor, Robert, Eric, and/or Jackie? A lot, I would think. And that disconnect between the way we teach and assess writing in school, on the one hand, and how real writers work, on the other, seems to me highly troubling.

At a U.S. high school a couple of teachers discovered by accident that students do better when the usual procedures are reversed:

Watch the video.

Hat tip to someone in my Twitter stream—lost the tweet, but thanks, whoever you are.

. . . for our secondary school:

• Is our MYP curriculum rigorous enough? Does it prepare students to succeed in the Diploma Programme?
• How are we dealing with the ‘Areas of Interaction’? Is our approach effective? Can it be improved?
• ‘Approaches to Learning’: are we teaching students how to learn? Are we helping them to cultivate habits that will lead to success in school?
• What are we doing to encourage students to become ‘lifelong learners’? Is that phrase just empty rhetoric? If not, what do we do, as a school, to encourage ‘lifelong learning’?
• Where and how do we as a faculty engage in professional discourse? Could we benefit from more professional discourse? If so, how can we promote professional discourse both within the school and with our peers in other schools?
• What is technology good for in a school? Are we getting maximum benefit from the technology we use? If not, how can we do better?

Just came across this Google presentation doc—via Twitter, of course: “Twenty-Three Interesting Ways* to use Twitter in the Classroom”.

Food for thought.

Bud Hunt (@budtheteacher) and I had a Twitter conversation the other day. He was reading Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s book, Schooling by Design, their follow-on to Understanding by Design, and he twittered the question that is the title of Chapter 4:

Bud: “How Should Teaching Be Appropriately Depersonalized?”
Me: “The same way love should be depersonalized. It shouldn’t be. Schooling is depersonalized. Teaching is personal. It’s like saying learning should be depersonalized.”
Bud: “I think it’s a question of what’s a good system – and a good system is larger than a person.”

Wiggins and McTighe want to make schools better. They see that much bad and ineffective teaching hides behind the defense of being ‘personal’, and they want to replace such practices with better teaching—”depersonalized teaching”—based on rational, proven procedures that result in effective ‘transfer of knowledge and skills’.

If Wiggins and McTighe succeed, schools will be better, but they will not be any different. That is, they will be doing the same thing they are trying to do now, but more successfully.

My problem is, I am fundamentally uninterested in what schools are doing, or trying to do. Since I’m a teacher, this is perhaps a surprising position to take, so let me explain.

Schools are the servants of the State and the Economy. The State wants good citizens; the Economy wants productive workers. Parents by and large share these goals—they don’t want their children to be criminals or bums. So they send the children to school, where it is hoped that the children will learn to be Obedient and Productive.

If I emerge from my schooling a good citizen and wage-earner, the State is happy, the Economy is happy, and my parents are, well, at least happier than they would be if I were a criminal and a bum. But am I happy? I don’t know.

I don’t know because while good citizenship and productivity are necessary prerequisites for a good life, they are not sufficient to create a good life. Real education pursues a good life by asking important questions. Nancie Atwell, a great teacher, identifies the big questions as these: Who am I? Where am I? and What am I doing? The pronouns can change—Who are we? Where are we? What are we doing?—and the last question can become “What should we be doing?—but the basic three questions remain. And they were asked first, of course, by the ancient Greeks.

And the answers are, 1. We don’t know. 2. We don’t know. and 3. We don’t know.

People interested in maintaining the State, building the Economy, and improving schools will at this point say, OK, let’s move on: questions without answers are not useful to us.

You see, the State, the Economy, and the schools that support them have absolutely no interest in me insofar as I am an individual human being trying to understand my existence. If I never ask such questions, the State and the Economy will be perfectly happy. (Schools and parents usually regard such questions as an adolescent phase similar to acne.)

Mind, this does not make me an anarchist. I appreciate living in a well-ordered state, and enjoy having a certain amount of freedom. I am happy to pay taxes to the state so that roads, schools, hospitals, etc., can make my life and everyone else’s better. A certain amount of obedience is a good thing; being able to support oneself is a good thing. They are good, however, in the way that engine oil and gasoline are good in a car: necessary, but not very interesting. I want to know where the car is going.

It is those three questions—Who are we? Where are we? What are we doing?—that interest me, that seem important to me. And while as a teacher I do traffic in knowledge and skills, and do try to ‘transfer’ them efficiently and effectively, that’s not what’s really important. Because ‘transferring knowledge and skills’ is not real teaching. Or to put it another way, as Socrates said, there is no such thing as teaching—there is only learning. The teacher, as Socrates put it, is a kind of midwife, helping to bring ideas to life by asking questions. Not questions like, “What were the major causes of World War I?” but questions like Who are we? and Where are we? and What are we doing? Once a student begins seriously considering such questions, there is only one path to follow: learning.

So for me good teaching boils down to two tasks: 1. Inspiring students to want to learn, and 2. Helping them when they need help. And most of Wiggins and McTighe’s excellent advice about structuring learning boils down to this: Don’t waste students’ time. If the activity’s purpose is unclear and/or trivial, then it is a waste of time. Such an activity should either be re-designed or scrapped. If the curriculum has no coherent rationale behind it, it will waste the students’ time. Here we totally agree.

But Wiggins and McTighe don’t talk about inspiration because inspiration is personal. It can’t be systemized. It can’t be measured or counted, nor can its effects always be perceived, even. As I wrote to Bud, Wiggins and McTighe are working for baseline competence—which would, yes, be a big step forward in many cases. But when I think about great teaching, I think of those gifted individuals who inspire their students. Socrates, of course, is the archetype. But Ron Jones, Diane Mensch, and Bobbie Booth, three of my high school teachers; Page Smith; Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy; Jim Manuel, who supervised my student teaching; Tom Ferté, a “personal” and unsystematic teacher if there ever was one; Charles G. Bell, eccentric genius of St. John’s College, Santa Fe; Henry David Thoreau—these are some of the teachers who have made a difference in my life. If you asked me what knowledge and skills Charles G. Bell transferred to me, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. But he certainly inspired me to learn. The work of these teachers was intensely personal, not because they got to know their students personally, but because they themselves were persons who recognized their students as persons and understood the mysterious power of a person seeking to understand his identity, his world, and his life: Who am I? Where am I? What am I doing?

Of course, as school administrators see it, the view is rather different. They are trying to manage a system, and the system is inefficient because teachers are not like machines. Some of them are mediocre, some are pretty good, some are excellent, some are terrible. The mediocre and terrible teachers are, of course, a big problem. But even the good and excellent ones don’t work in the same way, so that inequity is built in to a school. Johnny, in Mrs. A’s class, will not have the same experience as Lucy, who is in Mrs. B’s class. The ‘system’ is not systematic. Wiggins and McTighe are trying to improve things by introducing rational methods that will ensure greater consistency and more effective teaching, i.e., ‘transfer of knowledge and skills’. They and the teachers and administrators working with them or along the same lines are doing noble work, in their own way—quixotic, perhaps, but admirable nonetheless. Few tasks in life are as discouraging and soul-destroying as trying to improve schools, because this is essentially a political problem, and it is a rare soul that is not destroyed by politics.

So I wish them all well, but having dipped my toes in that pool a time or two, I will be off elsewhere, thanks, doing what I see as the real work of teaching, as best I can: trying to inspire my students, and helping them when they need help. It’s very personal work.

A recent Twitter conversation got me thinking about great teachers who have inspired me, and one of the names that came to mind was Charles G. Bell. I met him in his ‘preceptorial’ about American literature in the summer Graduate Institute of 1984 at St. John’s College, Santa Fe (New Mexico). He would have been 68 or so at the time, but he still climbed trees for exercise and was infamous for, among other things, skinny-dipping when invited to parties by pool-owners.

Mr. Bell had, apparently, read every book ever written on every subject under the sun, and could read, write, and speak several languages. He was a polymath who started out studying physics but then switched to English. The St. John’s ‘tutors’ teach all the subjects, but he was one of the few who could rightfully claim expertise in almost all of them. He was also mentor and friend to the poet Galway Kinnell and, most importantly to me, a wonderfully kind, sympathetic, and inspiring teacher.

I keep writing in the past tense because I haven’t seen him in many years, but he apparently is still alive, well into his 90s, in Maine with one of his daughters. If anyone knows for sure, please drop a comment! UPDATE: Mr. Bell passed away on Christmas morning, 2010. His obituary in the Santa Fe New Mexican is worth reading.

Mr. Bell wrote both poetry and novels, but his great opus is Symbolic History, a comprehensive slide-and-sound history of everything. His autobiographical sketch, also on the Symbolic History site, is well worth reading.

Years ago I took a job as Head of a small private school with about 200 students, K-12. It was my first job as an administrator and I wanted the teachers to regard me as their colleague. I soon found out, however, that they wanted a boss, not a colleague. I met with each of them individually and asked what they needed from me. “Support”, they said.

Here’s what I wish I had said in response:

When you put students first, I will support you. When you model integrity, honesty, hard work, and lifelong learning, I will support you. When you do everything in your power to inspire your students, I will support you. When you are a reflective practitioner, a teacher who reads and talks and searches constantly to find better ways to help students learn, I will support you. If you need time off because of illness or family problems, I will support you.

However, if you fail to treat students with compassion, courtesy, and respect; if you are dishonest or lazy; if you make no effort to inspire students, and show no interest in developing your knowledge and skills as a teacher; if you go through the motions, make minimal effort, and repeat the same uninspired lessons year after year; then you will get no support from me—quite the contrary.

It would not have made a great difference, perhaps, but it would have been the right thing to say.

I’ve just discovered a great resource for teaching narrative technique: H. Porter Abbott’s Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature), 2nd Edition (2008). The paperback edition is under $20 on Amazon.com (U.S. dollars).

Abbott writes clearly and uses examples that high school students will be able to understand. More arcane points are covered in sidebars, where they may be ignored if you wish. He defines terms carefully but avoids jargon. He is aware of all the various schools of narratology that have sprung up in the last generation or so, refers to them from time to time, but is not enthralled by any particular theory. His view is broad and tolerant, but he is not afraid, either, to take his own positions and defend them. 

This is a great book to help students begin thinking about how stories work, instead of reading naively. Highly recommended to anyone teaching literature in Grades 10-12, and beyond.

High-school teachers who think their job is to prepare students to succeed in their university studies will be sobered by this column by Stanley Fish in the New York Times. In it he reviews and comments on “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the University,” by Frank Donoghue.

According to Fish and Donoghue, liberal-arts education is fast disappearing and being replaced by “a model that begins and ends with the imperative to deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment”. This new model has no place for “an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration”. 

In this latter model , the mode of delivery – a disc, a computer screen, a video hook-up – doesn’t matter so long as delivery occurs. Insofar as there are real-life faculty in the picture, their credentials and publications (if they have any) are beside the point, for they are just “delivery people.”

Is that sobering enough for you? 

Of course there will always be a place, even if it is off in the corners here and there, for real teaching and learning, because the human spirit will demand it. But the capitulation of the university to the marketplace makes it even more important for elementary and secondary schools to focus on real learning. It may have once been possible to think, ‘My job is to get these kids into college—then their real education can begin’. If Fish and Donoghue are right, however, we who teach children and adolescents now bear the burden.

I have known for a long time, as an English teacher, that if students don’t read Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Dante, and Chaucer in my class, the chances are very good they will never read these authors at all, because the fashions of literary criticism have dictated for a generation or more that such Dead White European Males are unworthy of attention. 

Now it appears that if we want to turn our children into educated persons—literate readers and thinkers—we will have to do it before they graduate from high school, because after that they will simply be buying job skills.