For centuries, poets and philosophers have debated who has the greater claim to certainty and truth. For the last two centuries in the United States, philosophers have gained ground on the poets. (I am looking at you, John Dewey.) As a result, language arts in American K-12 classrooms has become--in many places--a sterile and soul-crushing experience where students rarely fall in love with reading literature.
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As literature teachers, it is our job to stoke the human passion for stories. Revisiting the debate between philosophers and poets should therefore be the duty of all those teaching humane letters. We need a rallying cry, a call to engage others in a discussion about how to enkindle in the hearts of our students a frenzied ardor for our beloved Western Canon. As Shakespeare's King Henry exhorts: "the game's afoot: Follow your spirit and upon this charge / Cry 'God for England Harry, and Saint George!" (Henry V, 3.1.32-24).
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Rallying cries are useless, however, if teachers remain isolated and impotent. Currently, most teachers in K-12 education are afraid to express an opinion or speak against the prevailing ideology. Consequently, rehashing the debate over whether and what stories are central in education requires a place where teachers are able to talk freely. We therefore need to read, discuss, and demonstrate intellectually the centrality of literature in successful K-12 education through dispassionate, extended, and vigorous discussions. From college campuses to the K-12 classroom, there is an embargo on freedom of speech in the West; fear of reprisal and authoritarian repression have silenced many minds, so teachers need a forum to civilly, creatively, and safely share ideas.
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Implicit in my assertion that teachers need a dedicated and protected dialectical stomping ground is a belief that reading literature contemplatively should be the aim of K-12 education. We read "contemplatively" when reading becomes an immersive aesthetic experience. Words weave their magic around us and we find ourselves breathing the same air as the characters in the story. Readers who enter deeply into the world of a story are changed by their experience and they thereby become a living instantiation of the ideas manifested therein.
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In the illustration (shown on the right) drawn by Hugh Thomson (1860–1920) for Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Edwin Bertram and Fanny Price are involved in a deep conversation while trees gently sway overhead and a dog lazily eyes a bird nearby. If we actually read Jane Austen's novel, we can enter this scene as any one of these creatures: Edmund, Fanny, the dog, or even the bird. This is so, for our imagination is a power by means of which we can do more than merely read the words "sitting under the trees with Fanny" or view the details of Thomson's picture; rather, we can vicariously experience what the beings present in the tableaux experience when we encounter their story contemplatively.
During the act of reading Mansfiield Park, we, like Edmund, are able to sit under the trees alongside Fanny sharing in her experiences and, ideally, growing in virtue and knowledge, as Fanny does. Through such contemplation as literature occasions, we may redirect our senses to attend to musings generated via the artistry of the text before us. Such experiences form our moral imagination for good or for ill.
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Before all else, students should be encouraged to read literature as a means to identify the good, the true, and the beautiful in our world and then themselves become embodiments of those very transcendentals. An intellectual life requires time sitting under the trees with Fanny.
Sitting under Trees with Fanny
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