The Death of Learning
An appraisal of John Argresto's cri de course
10 min read
·
Aug 26, 2022
How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What to Do about It
By John Agresto
A critique
More than half a century ago, the author of this book was asked by his high-school homeroom teacher if he thought a person “in this day and age” could be called educated if he hasn’t read The Iliad. Now, a distinguished college President Emeritus, (Saint John’s, Santa-Fe), former Chancellor, Provost and Academic Dean of the American University of Iraq, and high-up official in the National Endowment of the Humanities, not only has Agresto read Homer, but spent a lifetime as “a Cassandra and a nooge” advocating the Eurocentric Liberal Arts curriculum that begins with the word wrath.
Agresto comes to disinter the Western canon, not necessarily to praise it.
Not sing their praises, not intone pedantically about their high character, not praise them for virtues they may not have, not view them as some kind of universal medicine the admixture of which makes all things finer. No, to speak clearly about them, about their uses and uselessness; about their promise and their limitations; and, above all, about their value to different individuals, value to the country, and value to civilization in general.
He evokes a Golden Age when the liberal arts curriculum was a cornerstone of academic life:
Once, I believe, liberal education promised to be of immense value to both society and to the individual. Once it promised to make knowledgeable and thoughtful individuals who would, in turn, be intelligent and thoughtful citizens. Once liberal education promised to support the two most important parts of American life — the growth of ourselves as individuals and the betterment of our country. Now, . . . it looks like many if not most Americans — students, parents, and teachers — believe it supports neither.
Praise indeed — tinged with deep nostalgia.
What do the Western Great Books (caps his) mean in today’s cultural and intellectual environment? Can you really give the back of your hand (“indoctrination and political correctness”) to post-modern criticism — or to feminist, queer, post-colonial readings of literature? Can we really dismiss contemporary multiculturalism?
But the diversity/multiculturalism movement seemed never to have an interest in these kinds of serious questions. The movement appeared to have two main aims, aims that were surely contemporary but which never rose to the heights of what a true multicultural education might teach. First, it was an attempt to ratify the history and literature of groups that currently felt slighted or victimized by the European or American experience, primarily Blacks, women, Latinos, and homosexuals. Second, and more importantly, it was an attempt to weaken the central role of the West, its history and its ideas, and deny its having substantial merit or intrinsic worth. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.” (P 73–4)
Can we really posit a core curriculum that focusses solely on Western Great Books — Dante, Homer, the Bible — and, yes, Shakespeare, without considering the shifts in consciousness that have occurred over the past thirty years? And can we really shun readings of those Eternal Masterpieces that ignore the last thirty years of critical theory and social change?
These are issues that Agresto largely avoids — except to maintain a worshipful tone when invoking the ‘A’ list. He is in deep admiration of Jefferson, for example, but doesn’t entertain the possibility of adding Frederick Douglass to the pantheon. He doesn’t even propose a reading list of Great Western Texts for our consideration, but seems to assume we all know what they are.
This is a major flaw. Core syllabi at institutions that still maintain foundational requirements have evolved significantly since the 1990’s. Agresto doesn’t refer to the Columbia or University of Chicago college curricula, much less explore how they have adapted over time.
Columbia’s combination of Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, for example, now includes Sappho, Gilgamesh, Machado de Assis, W.E.B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Hannah Arendt, Fanon, and Foucault. Chicago has found ways to include film and media in its formidable array of required courses. What Agresto calls “the rogues gallery of dead white males” has long ceased to be etched in stone. Other foundational thinkers have been admitted to what was once a gentlemen’s club. All the better.
Instead, we mostly get a series of complaints about the lights going out in universities like Stanford. The book sets up straw-man after straw man, but, maddeningly, does not cite specific university courses, or even reading lists. Stanford abandoned its required Western Greats syllabus in 1988. They substituted a curriculum which one could critique as over-the-top multicultural. But there is no examination of specifics. Just generic ire.
Where the old liberal arts tried mightily to introduce students to inquiries as far-ranging as what constitutes great literature, the history of political thought, comparative religion, or the various components of what might be called human nature, much has been reduced to a fixation on matters of race, sexuality, and privilege. Perhaps an “Introduction to Queer Studies” can serve as an intro to the liberal arts, or “The History and Practice of Whiteness in the United States.” Or how about taking a course that touts “fighting racism, patriarchy, and capitalist exploitation…Field trips required”? (P 89)
At what university can I sign up for these courses? Alas, no citation, just sputter.
Agresto largely attributes the decline of the Western core to political correctness and pragmatism while ignoring the fact that, properly taught in small classes, Great Books courses are extremely expensive. Besides, students looking at decades of student loan payback may choose courses that lead to greater chances of employment in the short-term. As is so often the case, the bottom line is more important than the horizon.
The essential value of liberal education may lie as much in the pedagogy as the reading list. Specific texts may differ, but the approach, skeptical and Socratic, with students engaging each other as well as the texts, is not optional. You can’t teach the Great Books in vast lecture halls.
David’ Denby’s memoir in Great Books, My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World, of revisiting — midway on the journey of his life — the core courses he took as a freshman at Columbia makes its case for the value of these texts by narrating the living transmission of the material and its resonance, not only on his adult self, but on the young students encountering and discussing the canon thirty years after Denby first encountered it.
I wish Agresto had shared more of his own pedagogy, more anecdotal accounts of his own teaching, say, the Divine Comedy, to students in Baghdad. He is clearly a gifted teacher. His mastery and enthusiasm for the material comes across again and again.
The Great Books curriculum made its way from Oxford (PPE, Greats, Mods) to Columbia College (and then to Chicago) in the 1920’s. The immediate task was to have young men derive an understanding of the civilization they were fighting for.
“. . . its significance rested on the fundamental principle that in the long run man’s accomplishment can rise no higher than his ideals, and that an understanding of the worth of the cause for which one is fighting is a powerful weapon in the hands of an intelligent man.” — Dean Howard Hawkes.
So, we might ask, what is the task set before the liberal arts in the present era of neoliberal capitalism, of multiculturalism, of social media, of Donald Trump?
Agresto rightly belittles and condemns left-wing political correctness, as manifested in trigger warnings, speech codes, and excision of texts and speakers on ideological grounds. He heaps blame on establishment academia for the decline and fall.
But today the dismantling of the liberal arts comes from the professors, students, and administrators within bedrock universities and liberal arts colleges. It comes from radicalized departments of history, literature, classics, American studies, and all the myriad of other studies connected to ethnopolitical interest groups. It comes from virtually every school and college of education. This is why I have no hesitation in saying that liberal education in America is dying not by murder but by suicide. (P 86)
Crucially, Agresto neglects pernicious right-wing movements to politicize education by banning books on the grounds of “CRT”or by striking authors who explore alternative sexuality and gender from school curricula. Right wing ideologues like Christopher Rufo and Jordan Peterson don’t enter his purview. The movement to impose a straight, white Christianist “American” interpretation of literature and history is far more pervasive than what goes on in colleges like Oberlin. It’s brand of political correctness is enforced by the police power of the state.
Governor Ron DeSantis, and his allies in red states, are attacking tertiary education with a vengeance not seen since the McCarthy era. Florida’s Stop Woke Act imposes a series of stifling restraints on academic freedom.
A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.
Well, wasn’t Dante’s purpose in writing Inferno to describe guilt and anguish? How can one teach The Peloponnesian Wars without bringing up America’s military adventures in, say, Vietnam or Iraq? Guilt and anguish alert!
Yes, free expression should be sacred at every university and beyond. Why shouldn’t drag queens be allowed to read stories to children in San Antonio? Certainly, Aristophanes wouldn’t have objected.
I could go on, but you get the point. Great literature is and has always been dangerous, provocative, distressing in the extreme. Oedipus’ self-blinding is a cathartic manifestation of guilt and anguish. Conrad takes his readers on a voyage down the Congo where they confront the dark heart of the civilized West.
Sadly, Western Great Books has become a dog-whistle in today’s overcharged political climate. Colleges and institutes are popping up everywhere, funded by right-wing corporate billionaires (I mean you, Koch Industries). Their aim is to insinuate conservative ideology into education at both the tertiary and secondary levels. Agresto’s homiletic defense of liberal arts is not ideological, but he doesn’t come to grips with the coopting and fetishization of the “Western civilization” trope by ideologues. Institutions like Hillsdale College are cloaking the wolf of Christian nationalist indoctrination in the sheep’s clothing of Classical Civilization. Multiculturalism is out. Monoculturalism is in.
The alarm bell sounded for Agresto in 1988 when Stanford University succumbed to the chant
“Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!” It was that open revelation of motive, that showing of how curricular change could be simply another scalpel in the service of politics and ideology, which made Stanford the byword for intellectual retreat in the face of the political takeover of the life of the mind. (x)
In 2022, Governor DeSantis and others are applying multiple scalpels to works that might contradict right-wing ideological positions. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. Cf. McCarthy, Joseph. Alarm bells anyone?
This writer believes that Great Books do have a place. Absorbing and contending with Plato, Jefferson, Shakespeare, and company can bring young citizens to an understanding of where America and the world are at this critical juncture. The rationale is stated eloquently by Agresto himself.
Should we be manipulated by the latest slogan or the newest emotional crusade to come along? Should we be swayed by demagogues or by appeals to our passions and our biases? Should we choose as our leaders “celebrities” — those whose only claim is for being known for being known? Have we not suffered enough living under those who lead knowing ever so little, adulated by and drawing their strength (158–59)
Significantly this is as close as he gets to even alluding to Donald Trump and his followers. While Dante named names back in contemporary Florence; while Thucydides and Plato did the same back in Athens; while Thomas Jefferson’s immortal words addressed the current state of affairs back in 1776, Agresto, who reveres them all, cannot bring himself to apply eternal verities to contemporary agonies — agons.
Plato:
The tyrannical man is the son of the democratic man. He is the worst form of mandue to his being the most unjust and thus the furthest removed from any joy of the true kind. He is consumed by lawless desires which cause him to do many terrible things such as murdering and plundering. He comes closest to complete lawlessness. The idea of moderation does not exist to him. He is consumed by the basest pleasures in life, and being granted these pleasures at a whim destroys the type of pleasure only attainable through knowing pain. If he spends all of his money and becomes poor, the tyrant will steal and conquer to satiate his desires, but will eventually overreach and force unto himself a fear of those around him, effectively limiting his own freedom.
Hey, hey, ho, ho ****** ***** has got to go.
Agresto’s apologia seems frozen in time, locked in the aspic of the late 1990’s. It might have found a place among books by Bill Bennett and Harold Bloom back in the day, but, sadly, seems out of joint in the context of contemporary academia, not to mention contemporary cultural and political realities. There is nothing new under the sun?
Respectfully, there is.
The Death of Learning doesn’t address the challenges to implementing and teaching any sort of foundational core — Great Books, Western or otherwise — in the contemporary hyper-charged climate. In “this day and age”, educators are confronted not only with the death of learning, but also with the death of the constructs by which learning takes place: basic civility and epistemic consensus.
What would Jefferson say about the big lie? How do the humanities survive the brutal tug-of-war playing out in American culture? How do we get to the moment in the Iliad where Achilles and Priam reconcile? How do we cross the battlefield? How do we open the tent? How do we weep together?
He took the old man’s hand and pushed him gently away, and the two remembered, as Priam sat huddled at the feet of Achilleus and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor and Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again for Patroklos. The sound of their mourning moved in the house.
Homer: Iliad Book 24 (503 512) Lattimore translation
Rey Buono
Disclosure: I was Agresto’s contemporary at the same Jesuit high school — Brooklyn Prep.