Response to Timothy Burke

As it so happens, my own fantasy novel’s heroine is in some ways an Eilonwy, and consciously so; I was tipping my hat to Alexander’s writings in my own. But that is precisely why I was able to write a female character sufficiently engaging to get my book published—I had read Alexander. My own creativity was not based upon a naïve rendition of reality, or some sort of native artistry—it was based upon knowing how a female fantasy character has been written, and invention based upon Eilonwy. Nor had I just read Alexander—I had read in the young adult/fantasy tradition, so I could draw on (and sometimes react against) Anne of Green Gables, the Darkness Rising series, X-men comic books, the Railway Children, Edward Eager, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, etc., etc.—and not just random authors, but authors aware of one another in a constantly augmented tradition. Eager not only introduced me to Nesbit, but taught me how one could incorporate Nesbit into one’s own writing. Alexander led me to the Welsh mythos, with a similar lesson of incorporation—how their richness depended upon tradition, and how any hope of richness of my part would depended upon tradition. What I have been able to do as a writer indeed depended upon immersion in a coherent tradition—conscious on my part, conscious on the part of the authors whom I have read.

Furthermore, I have drawn on more than just young-adult fantasy—on the wider tradition of Western history and literature, of which young-adult fantasy is just a very late offshoot. Now, Lord knows I’m patchily enough read—but it’s been an inestimable advantage, compared to all the other fan-boys and fan-girls trying their hand at writing, that I have read the Bible, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Austen, etc. It’s not just pretentious name-dropping—the insights into the world and human character of the mainroot of Western tradition are infinitely greater than in just the young-adult fantasy branch. My conscious invention on that tradition gives my writing more depth than if I just depended on Alexander and Eager. (Who, I fancy, had read more than the young-adult tradition themselves.) This doesn’t make me a Great Writer—it makes me a marginally publishable writer. But that’s what tradition is for: to give us enough of a leg up, in terms of insight and technique, to make something marginally worth reading. And what I write, I write in hopes that I will somehow lead my readers toward the tradition I’ve read—to be able to access that wealth.

This process is behind the prescription of tradition in educational canons. You have the peculiar notion that it’s just the arbitrary choice of random books—that every twenty years somebody chooses a completely different set of Great Books, and bloviates with complete hypocrisy about timeless tradition. It’s nothing of the sort. These are the recommendations of generations of readers—thousands of years of them—of the richest resources for readers, the works that provide the greatest wealth for individual invention. Scholars, writers, artists, religious men, have found a wealth in Virgil and in Shakespeare—the prescription of these works is not arbitrary, but the collective recommendation of thousands of grateful men, over centuries. Furthermore, Virgil and Shakespeare are integral parts of the Western tradition—so influential, that you cannot properly understand what comes later without reference to them, and so embedded in that tradition, that you cannot understand them without a proper understanding of that tradition. Set people loose on world literature without grounding them in the tradition, and all you give them is a kaleidoscope—random pieces of colored glass. Instruct them in the tradition, and you give them the explaining pattern—and your kaleidoscope becomes a stained glass window. (Just to pursue the metaphor: look at a cathedral window without knowing the Bible, and you might as well be looking at a kaleidoscope—Purty Cullers, no meaning.) Not to provide a canon for students, not to provide the tradition, is sheer, impoverishing cruelty.

Modern education, modern attitudes, of course reject this notion. (The battle has been going on at least since Swift.) The modern attitude takes the most recent to be the best, or at any rate sufficient, and devil take the tradition it came from. Read the Declaration of Independence; forget Aristotle. Read Thomas Pynchon; forget Shakespeare. Read Freud; forget Augustine. Or think of them as inessential—somehow think that the more recent is a sufficient basis upon which to invent—to the extent that the cult of Inner, Natural Genius allows for any sense of dependence on what came before. I am not sure the battle of the Ancients and the Moderns, any more than in Swift’s time, is amenable to easy persuasion. Either you see tradition as a great wealth, and the modern world as a thin and tiny portion of that wealth, or you see tradition as some sort of tiny, cramping imposition on the wealth of modernity. It’s like the attitude toward religion—it’s either infinitely greater than the secular world, or infinitely smaller. I don’t suppose you’re going to be convinced of the traditionalist attitude, but I do wish you would acknowledge that the impulse that drives the prescription of tradition is a generous one—to open the mind to the wealth of the past.

(Incidentally, Newman said the purpose of liberal education was to provide a sense of proportion. If your attitude, like mine, is that the present is always too full of itself, then one also wants to teach tradition so as to provide a sense of proportion to the present-minded—to introduce them to the novel concept of their relative unimportance. Tradition, properly taught, is a great promulgator of humility, a prerequisite, perhaps, both to proportion and to a willingness to learn.)

Now, tradition is not closed. It is open to the new. In a pinch, after the lapse of several centuries, we can acknowledge the worth of vernacular literature, and say that it ought to be added to the canon of rich tradition.—but, of course, simultaneously realizing that it has been a cuckoo’s egg, which has displaced the older, and richer, tradition of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The “English tradition” of Chaucer and Shakespeare, however superior it may be to a diet of literature that begins with Ernest Hemingway, is itself impoverished in comparison to the wider culture of the West; the shift it has promoted toward monolingual specialization in English a great pauperization. Every addition to the tradition has a great potential to metastasize beyond its true value—to be puffed up for convenience’s sake (it’s easier to read Shakespeare than Virgil; easier to read Hemingway than Shakespeare.) Therefore, tradition ought to be wary about adding works too quickly to the canon. It’s not just that it takes several centuries before one can have a sense of enduring value and influence, but also that the new, once canonized, can too easily displace the old. If letting Shakespeare into the educational canon led inevitably to the disappearance of all literature from before 1900 from the tradition, then one would be quite justified in saying that Shakespeare should not have been let in—at least not for another few centuries!

(Note, incidentally, that you claim there has been a constantly shifting tradition, but that the education of the English public school and the German gymnasium remained classical up until 1914, with remnants through the post-World War II era. The shift to modern languages had barely begun by 1900—as I recollect, Tolkien’s concenctration in modern languages (Anglo-Saxon!) was still unusual as of 1916. You are correct that the English canon is of dubious antiquity—but that is simply because it is essentially a product of the twentieth-century dissolution of tradition. The real tradition, of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, with the vernacular as a minor adjunct, held steady for two millennia. To attack the English canon does not, to my mind, affect the arguments of enduring tradition, since it is only a product of that tradition’s dissolution.)

But tradition is not simply a question of “education,” pure and simple. Or rather, education has quite broad ramifications. Education is also moral education; education makes us members of communities; we become moral individuals, citizens, and Americans (Canadians, Chinese, Zimbabweans) by our immersion in traditions. Our moral behavior is also an imitation upon tradition—the imitatio Christi, the reflection upon the examples of a Socrates or a Luther, to guide us and inspire us. It is also, of course, our community’s education of its young into their values—the choice of whether to provide a Lincoln or a Hitler as the object of praise and emulation—or of indifference. (The indifference is as much a moral lesson as the explicit precept.) This applies with equal force to politics—and the intersection of politics and morality—whereby we teach the traditions and aspirations of the polity, the duties of the citizen, all with an eye to what has been done and what should be praised—the American tradition, of Washington and King, and its roots back, yes, to the Greek citizens defeating the despotism of Persia. And we teach the tradition of American culture, to provide some minimal unity of temperament to inspire mutual affection among 300 million human beings—the pride in Ringling Brothers hucksterism, the enduring disdain for European moral complaisance, the sheer, unabashed enjoyment of demotic culture. (To name some aspects I particularly prize.) We provide the wealth of tradition to support our young as they try to become moral American citizens—out of self-interest in preserving an ethical polity that is recognizably ours, and because it is infinitely more difficult to learn to be moral, civic, and American, as it is infinitely more difficult to learn anything, without tradition. The polity retains an overriding interest in shaping education to form moral, civic, Americans.

It is worth emphasizing here that the great Western tradition (as the great Chinese tradition, and so on, although with different values as the result of their separate meditations) is centrally concerned with these moral and political questions. The canonical texts of the West are also the canonical texts for invention on the themes of virtue, republicanism, and liberty, and their tense relation with one another. America was founded as the end result of nearly two millennia of self-aware meditation on this tradition, and self-conscious invention on these topics. Indeed, republican liberty (Arendtian, active freedom; not passive liberty) requires the continuous invention of free action and thought; the continuous sustenance of liberty requires the continuous support of the tradition of liberty—Greek, Roman, Renaissance, English, Western. Perhaps American freedom can be sustained without constant reference to that taproot, but it is likely to be a thin, impoverished version of liberty, and, one fears, a fatally sick version of it. But the support of the canon is inextricably intertwined with a passionate desire to preserve American freedom.

Now, I think your particular pronouncements on education conflate a number of topics. The liberal aspect of the Western tradition emphasizes individual volition on a number of topics as the best means of achieving virtue—part of the problem of modernism, and characteristic of the trouble with not attending to tradition, is that it remembers “individual volition” and forgets “on a number of topics as the best means of achieving virtue.” Save for the libertarian fringe (“yes, private TV stations should be allowed to broadcast hardcore anime on Saturday morning for the kiddies”), the overwhelming majority of the Western (liberal) tradition advocates some mixture of standards, moral guidelines, and free choice, and quarrels about where to draw the line. I sincerely doubt that you are alien to this compromising tradition. But one can maintain, centrally within this tradition, that at eighteen you have the right to vote, the right to bear arms, and the right to marry, but that when you enter an educational institution, the collective wisdom, not only of your fifty-year old professors, but also of two thousand years, matters more than what impulses have floated into your head on course registration day. One might even think that two thousand years of professors have some idea about what will attract and interest students, and lend some credence to their curricular precepts. The constitution guarantees a number of essential liberties; the right to choose your college courses isn’t one of them.

But some of your objection rests, pragmatically, upon the disinterest that rises from compulsion. Fundamentally, we are as a species disinterested in toilet-training and anger-management; nevertheless, we compel our two year olds into a minimal approach to manners and morality. We provide a sliding scale based upon age as to how much compulsion is appropriate. Now, I am dubious that eighteen-year olds are really mature, whatever the credit our laws give them—but your objections to imposition of a core curriculum miss the point: the basic acquaintance with tradition ought to come in elementary and high school, not in college. Western education was built upon inculcating the Bible, Aristotle, Cicero, etc. to the malleable and easily compellable young—they were supposed to be grounded in that by the time they hit their late teens and early twenties!—and therefore free to begin the voluntary specializations that you favor. Therefore, when I favor a traditional canon, it should be for eighth graders, not college freshmen. The debate about compelling the education of eighteen years olds follows from the horrifying double-failure of modern times—that the elites are educated haphazardly and without tradition before college, and that the masses are barely educated to literacy, much less able to act as active citizens. What should one favor for college education given this horrendous double failure? One has a choice of insufficiencies. “The maximum practical amount of the Western tradition” has to be the answer—yes, with an eye to the unpleasant fact that eighteen-year olds don’t like to be forced to study a particular subject, and that, therefore, they may already be doomed to lifelong ignorance of the tradition; but without preemptive surrender to their mulish independence. What history to teach? The sketchy history of the West and of America should have priority over China, India, Latin America, Africa, and the Muslim world—some sort of meditation on the birth of Western liberty is the most important thing to learn from a history class. There will have to be unpleasant compromises one way or the other, but get as much of the core in as possible; better a fraction of the wealth of tradition than none at all. Try harder for the elite institutions—our leaders and opinion makers can do great good, benefited by tradition, and may do great harm without it.

I think the question of standards and compulsion in education is informed—as in a previous discussion—by varying professional standards. Most professions compel very large amounts of education in their programs, without apology—the law, engineering, medicine, the military—and so, as a matter of course, do most trades—plumbing, carpentery, etc. None of these assume the loss of essential freedom by a rather tight core of instruction. Modern academia, however, is far more loose-jointed, and the profession far more individualistic in its mores. A basic instruction of core competence may indeed be less suited to it. But this, I think, leads you to read back the individualist assumptions of graduate academia into undergraduate education, when there is no reason to think that academia provides a better model than the law or engineering or plumbing for undergraduate education. And if the basic purpose of undergraduate education is to prepare you for the profession of moral citizenry, perhaps these models are superior—for the basic habits of moral citizenry are simple enough, and the complexity of application should be learned in life, not in college.

So, ACTA—I assume they have all these ideas, or something much like them, lurking behind their prescriptions. Certainly, as I said before, the Shakespeare requirement strikes me as a reasonable shorthand. I don’t suppose that, at every moment, they express themselves perfectly—but neither do I think that you express your educational philosophy perfectly at every moment—particularly when your irritation at ACTA leads you to a tone of uncharitable irascibility, which, to my mind, rather weaken than strengthen your arguments. Surely we should try to seek out the best of our opponents’ arguments?

Then politics—where, in a perfect metaphor, you implied that the spinelessness of liberal inclinations in education implies a similar spinelessness in politics. (You used some contrary metaphor about rigidity, but I trust you will take this rendition as a reasonable invention on your original topic.) Now, I am torn about this thesis. On the one hand, I do rather think the deformations of minds shorn of tradition does lead to various suicidal political behaviors. On the other hand, the tie is inexact—and I am deeply allergic to claiming that any particular sort of education ought to lead to a particular political result. Indeed, the fact that modern liberalism emerged as one invention upon Western tradition indicates that liberalism, both educational and political, ought to be compatible with knowledge of the tradition. (And certainly tradition is poorer if it fails to meditate upon liberalism.) Indeed, I would proffer tradition to liberals as a way for them to improve their arguments, by offering them access to tradition’s rich storehouse of thought. Tradition, and the core curriculum, ought to be compatible with any political stance vis-à-vis the Iraq War. I take tradition to offer strong arguments in favor of a hawkish stance—and I am pleased that you think tradition and hawkishness go together—but I would not presume tradition to speak with one voice on every passing political issue. (And contrariwise, I trust that modern liberal education, if it has any claims to be more than political agitprop, does not claim to speak with one voice on the Iraq War either.)

This, incidentally, is the true weakness of Victor Davis Hanson’s take on tradition, as a political journalist. He’s essentially correct, but he’s a Johnny One-Note—he draws only one lesson, again and again. He is impoverished drawing from the tradition; he provides an impoverishment of topics for further invention. His work on Greek warfare, to the contrary, was an extraordinarily rich meditation on a variety of sources, not least the textural tradition and political philosophy, and equally rich as a source for others. I understand the choice he has made, but he has sacrificed a great deal in the process.

Getting back to Lloyd Alexander—you have the peculiar idea that Taran Wanderer somehow dismisses the memorization of “moral rulebooks.” Now, reader reception is everything, but I drew rather different lessons from that book. Taran is trained in a variety of different disciplines—potter, shepherd, etc., and in none of them does he simply choose how to be a craftsman. He is taught his craft skills, and, morally, he learns what to imitate and what to avoid from the character of his elders. Memorization—here as everywhere—is the essential beginning of education, not its end. (Cf. the memorization of names in A Wizard of Earthsea, the memorization of books in Fahrenheit 451, the memorization of lineage in “Enemy Mine”; and, not irrelevant to the question of tradition, the learning of Elvish language and literature in LOTR as the first and best sign of proper learning and character, the forcible imitatio of V by Evey, as a ground for the invention of her own character, in V for Vendetta; and the mystical incantation of names in the Wrinkle of Time series—the yelling out of the names of Good Men and Women to ward away evil, the recitation of St. Patrick’s Breastplate.) Taran invents his own ethical character upon the topics of traditional craft skill and the auctoritas of his elders—all this a highly traditional moral lesson, highly compatible (if we are to draw such lessons, as you seem to desire) with the establishment, or maintenance, of a core curriculum and tradition in American education.