A student just came in to drop my Shakespeare class. Not a remarkable event, really--but this is an interesting case. Here's a young man from Newbern, a small town just to the south of here, who is spending his first two years at this institution and planning to transfer to Berkeley, UCLA, or USC--in his words, "as far away as I can get."
I like him a lot--he's thoughtful, softspoken, a good writer--and terribly unsure of himself. After an introductory talk on Tragedy in which I mentioned Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Citizen Kane, Gatsby, etc., he came in wanting to drop because he hasn't "read enough." I told him all that stuff wasn't necessary, that it was just an attempt to show context and definitions, but he wanted to focus his energy on other classes. From a disinterested perspective, I couldn't help but agree, seeing as he is planning to transfer anyway.
As he left, he asked for a 'reading list.' I said to start with Plato. If I'd had my wits about me, I'd have also echoed the best thing the late Prof. Kirkpatrick said in his 172 class at UNC: "read your Bible." He is a good student; I'm sad to see him go.
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2 comments:
Wow. That's like something you'd read about in a book or see in a movie -- The Soybean Society. :)
You know, it's probably not too late to give him that advice; you could email him and tell him in thinking over the situation, you had a couple more things to add to his reading list, and why.
I had a professor at Auburn who said the same thing about the Bible as Kirkpatrick. Even if it's not the reference point it once was for our culture, the Bible's still embedded in so many ways that students don't recognize, and if he wants to understand the essentials of Western lit, it's necessary. I know you know all this; it just seems strange to me -- the idea of coming to school and not knowing the Bible, though that was clearly the situation when I was teaching at UNC.
But because that wasn't my situation, I was able to move fluidly to studying it as a literary document and its use in literature. That wasn't what freaked my parents out so much.
What about you?
Well, I'm so Bible-steeped that it affects everything about the way I think. Lucky for me that I teach a period in which that was the case for just about everyone. But yeah, I do think it would be just about the linchpin of a truly "liberal" education (in the old "liberal arts" sense).
Most of my students, as churched as they are, are extremely biblically illiterate--or they only know a small portion of morally/ politically 'useful' passages, if you catch my drift.
I find myself feeling really old-fashioned, telling students to read the Bible, Plato, Homer. Imagine what I'll be like in twenty years!
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