Dead White Men

"undergraduates often arrive unprepared from high school and seeking courses “in what we might have thought of as the old-fashioned approach” — broad surveys. But many young professors aren’t interested in teaching outside their narrow specialties, nor are they generally prepared to do so. And colleges are loath to reinstate the core curriculums they abandoned in the ’60s. “Because we lack cultural self-confidence, we’ve lacked the ability to say, ‘This is a good book and should be taught, this isn’t and shouldn’t,’ ” said Judt, who was dean of the humanities at N.Y.U. in the early ’90s."

Very, very interesting article in the Times Book section. I've been thinking about this a lot, especially in the context of arts education and what it really means to “expose kids to the arts.” That phrase, thrown around a lot, is so loaded. It can be paternalistic, almost colonial (i.e. how do we “civilize” poor minority kids by exposing them to "great high artworks” and) or it can be empowering, helping kids find what’s beautiful and profound everywhere, even in their own experiences (which is my thing with 7ARTS).

But you don’t want the pendulum to swing to far in either extreme, how do you strike the balance between pushing someone outside of their comfort zones by providing "historical context" and reaching deep into the traditional "canon", but also exposing kids to works by people that are culturally relevant to them? As much as I believe in the opening of what we consider "the canon" (though I think the concept of one common canon a is long dead concept") I have begun to feel huge gaps in my own knowledge of Western culture, especially because I went to an art school focusing on studio art, my liberal arts education was much less broad than it could have been. I completely identified with this:

"As Alan Wolfe puts it, “Everyone’s read ‘Things Fall Apart’ ” — Chinua Achebe’s novel about postcolonial Nigeria — “but few people have read the Yeats poem that the title comes from.”

I never thought I’d reach an age where I actually began to see some merit in where E.D. Hirsch was coming from with his concept of “Cultural Literacy.” Maybe I’m just getting older and more Republican.

Bring on the dead white men, stat!