February 19, 2009
No, “Lot” was not the place you played stickball
Andrew Motion, poet laureate, thinks the Bible and other religious texts should be taught in public (or “private,” depending on your side of the pond) schools:
The poet, who describes himself as an atheist, called for an overhaul of the school curriculum to reverse the “depressing” trend which threatened to leave future generations unable to fully understand the works of Milton and Shakespeare or even more recent writers such as TS Eliot.
The solution, he said, could be to include study of the Bible and other religious stories into a new wider general studies curriculum as well as working it into everyday lessons.
Mr Motion, who holds a chair in creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, said that he had struggled to teach Milton’s Paradise Lost to undergraduates because they had no concept of the fall of man.
Daryl, do you have anything to say about this? You teach literature, don’t you?
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link?
links are for pussies.
Part of my 9th-grade English class in high school was a literary study of selected texts of the bible. All I remember was arguing about which day celphalopods were created: not all cephalopods are land animals, nor are they obviously related to one another.
Still, knowing the basics of where Christianity comes from was an interesting experience at the very least.
Andrew: It makes me tired to think about this–perhaps because I have been teaching all day without getting the sense that any literature is likely to suddenly pull students away from their phones. I’m personally happy to have a knowledge of Bible stories, and I think that much of the language of the King James Bible is beautiful and has seeped into many wonderful works. But the whole idea of calling for the broader reading of the Bible and for the offering of academic courses in it leaves me feeling queasy. Such a call fits in well with the avid purposes of many people I despise–people who don’t really want students to read Milton anyway (Lucifer being such a compelling figure as to perhaps overshadow other important figures). And– what’s really keeping the few people who want to read such authors from also tracking down the allusions? Can we ask for the Bible to be known as a matter of cultural literacy without therefore, in effect, advocating something of the full range of its glories and absurdities? I think it’s helpful for people with a literary bent to know the Bible, but I wouldn’t want children reading it. I think it’s better to keep kids away from it for long enough that, when they do encounter it, they can see it as a dusty thing, and wonder at the bizarre hoopla surrounding it.
Sorry–but you asked.
No need to apologized.
I dig your attitude to this topic, Daryl. I would also like to add that exposure to the bible isn’t always on a fundamentalist, absolutist level. Cultures vary. My early education was at a reasonably moderate convent school in Ireland, and religion teaching was an essential part of life up to probably around 14, for me. I agree that religion tends to bring out the fundamentalism in people, and Motion’s notions would best be enacted in a fully secular society, or at least one with some humour and variety, but I was told a lot of bible stories, sang hymns and got jiggy with liturgy as a kid, and you know, deeply dug it on occasion. It was not, of course, forced down my throat along with capital punishment.
If anything, though, the weird thing about this is that, according to the segmented section above (meow, andrew) he’s only calling for this education in public schools. I would be surprised if he was publicly expressing such an elistist attitude. Is this so?
Ok, I just got hip to the link now, and there’s no two-tier approach to his ideas for an overhaul of the school cultural curriculum. He’s just defending the need for a resounding mythological education in the culture, and the bible is a huge repository of that. I completely agree with his ideas to have classes in the Koran, Greek texts and the bible for university students who are studying anything in the arts, basically. It’s a hugely essential piece of kit. I got my English and philosophy degree without knowing fuckall about Sophocles. Then afterwards, I fell into a passionate love affair with him and Aeschylus and Aristophanes. Phwoar.
I guess what I find myself thinking is: who is it, exactly, who has not read the Bible but is now planning to read Paradise Lost? Are there really that many people who find themselves on the verge of reading Milton without having read the Bible? Doesn’t it seem a little lame to suggest that everybody needs to read the Bible because some small fraction of that number might someday take a course that requires them to read Milton? Students may be forced to read all kinds of things, but those who don’t need to be forced are not likely to be the ones who have not read the Bible. I generally agree with Henry James’s advice to “try to be a person on whom nothing is lost.” But if that aim doesn’t appeal to a person, then it seems to me that it might be better to spend the time on learning how to balance a checkbook.
Yes. But there seem to be two angles: to educate university students more widely in these classic texts, when they would not be normally considered part of a literature curriculum; and then the idea of educating school kids in the bible, which I agree is more contentious.
Actually in a country like Britain, there are plenty of people who have had no exposure to the bible AT ALL, but who go on to develop a keen enthusiasm for literature, and who are coming to literature with a weak grounding in mythological texts. Sure they can get into it at that stage, but then they’re discovering this deficiency while trying to grapple with Milton or whoever (I have never read a fucking word of Milton and I got an honours degree in English). Where I see the value of all this is actually in some mythological grounding of children, through some sound sources of these essential human archetypes. Children learn to understand the world and find their way through, with the aid of such stories. It’s like that whole movement to ban fairystories and anything dark or ghoulish from children’s literature, with the notion that children are these little balls of pure light who would just be scared/corrupted by the dark. This is such an inhumane way of educating a child, not exploring the monsters in the dark.
I mean, it’s Andrew Motion’s job to highlight something like this. The Telegraph, at least, will report it. I think it’s a good debate. And by the time it actually gets anywhere through to public policy, it is so likely to be diluted. I think his best chance is to inspire talk at the university level.
I also think it could be very interesting for this shit to be taught in the realm of literature and mythology, rather than religion and belief.
Is there room for the thought that “art” is only based on “that which has come before?” Which then begs the question, if one doesn’t know what’s come before, how can one recognize art? Might this be at the root of Motion’s jist? “These kids today, they don’t know what came before.”
It seems to me, these days, much art is made as an “overthrowing” of that which preceeded it, to the point where we can’t look at a “piece” without comparing it to “something” we’ve seen before. As we might hear a commenter say something like, “This movie is like Diehard meets How Green Was My Valley with Baz Luhrmann’s eye.”
(I still hear Lish’s voice in my head, “How will you stand the test of time? You’re up against the Bible! You’re up against Shakespeare!”)
And yet Grandma Moses painted primitive pictures folks hold out as art? And there is the me that loves seeing an artist’s singular vision. I love looking at “a piece” knowing I’ve never laid eyes or mind on “that” before. (I also always secretly get a kick, I have to confess, when I recognize something that “went before” that is referenced by an artist’s piece. It’s fun to get the joke.)
I’ve said too much. I’ve not said enough. I don’t know. I have no business saying.
Standing on the shoulders of giants.
Ok, I am now inspired to drop Greek references into my clusterflock comments.
The Bible is lovely. I mean, the homophobia, violence and absolute judgment of a petty god is troubling when taken literally, but man, to hear the preacher reach back, and connect today’s gospel to a thousand-year-old prophecy is something else. Nearly went into the clergy, based on the beauty of that clockwork mechanism.
I’m grateful for having known the Bible. Came to it on my own, as I did to mythology. What is the roll of public education, anyway? (Surely it’s not that “educated voter” saw.)
Lucy
The grenades you lobbed above didn’t seem to slow anyone down. (‘Course I’m still googling the references, I’m no man of letters in lit.)
XOR
Also please? “Phwoar?” (I’m tired of googling tonight.)
Mike
I wouldn’t trade all my growing up years in Free Will Baptist Sunday School for a PhD from Cambridge. (On second thought, let me think about that a moment more.)
You mean I’m lobbing grenades around the place without realising it? Will I now be a self-conscious clustercommenter?
Lessons in Expletives #1 in a continuing series: Phwoar
Exclamation of lust, sexual desire, appreciation of another’s secondary sexual characteristics, as in, “Phwoar, look at the tits on that”. Also, “Get a load of this bloomin’ Tintoretto. Phwoar”
I’m with Daryl on this one. But it is so exhausting–I teach 7th grade English, and just trying to get the kids interested in reading something other than Twilight is tough. Right now we’re reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and all my energy is exhausted on getting them to read specific scenes out loud and try to see the humor and mythology references in that play.
How old is 7th grade? 12 or something? And they’re doing Midsummer Night? God, that’s hard. I don’t know that Shakespeare at that age is such a good idea, but hey, I’m not a teacher. I mean, seeing a performance of it, a really good one, could be a raucous, affecting kind of experience. But reading that shit at 12? I wonder how many kids really have the capacity to dig something so sophisticated at that age, or even get into it. Good luck to you.
I had a career in public education, as many of you know, including some time teaching junior high and/or senior high English. I think we make a huge mistake focusing on literature written for adults which we think might appeal to teens. Too often it doesn’t. There are a zillion really fine books for young adults we could teach instead. But that isn’t exactly Andrew’s original questions (which wasn’t addressed to me anyway!)
I do think we ought to give the kids Bible stories, Greek myths, and at least a smattering of Hindu mythology. Not Leviticus or St Paul. Great writers do refer to doctrinal texts sometimes, but mostly they refer to stories. I do, however, think that Paradise Lost is a weird example to take to make the case, though, since there is no cogent story of Satan in the Bible. What we tend to think of as Satan’s story is as much Milton as Bible.
Lucy,
We read an easy translation of the original Shakespeare. Sparknotes publishes a neat version that has the original text on the left side of the page and the translation on the right. And no, it’s not too hard for seventh graders, but any other Shakespeare might be. Midsummer is fun and wild enough that they seem to have fun with it. Thanks for your concern, though.
Lucy
I think your grenades are perfectly formed and well tossed. Great aim and arm. Don’t you dare hold back.
“Great aim and arm”
… and you haven’t even seen my arsenal.
Phwoar!
The Bible as Literature is offered as an elective at many US universities–it was offered when I was an undergraduate in comparative literature. The problem, as I see it, is that–in the Southern US, particularly–it is very difficult to teach bible stories as myth to a room populated with fundamentalists who cannot or will not grasp the full definition of the term “myth” and will argue incessantly about it. Most people seeking a traditional liberal arts education in the US find it at Catholic universities, where a discussion of the biblical roots of classical literature is less problematic.
Also, fuck Milton.
[...] Great comments. [...]
I’m reminded of how T.S. Eliot responded when he was asked about the copious notes he provided at the end of The Waste Land. As I recall the inclusion of the notes was controversial, and Eliot was himself a little ambivalent about including them. His take was that the poem should be read first without any jumping back and forth between lines and sources–that the force of the poem would come though because the archetypes resonate in us even when we haven’t encountered such sources directly, because they are present even in areas of our culture that seem to have nothing to do with them. He suggested, though, that such notes might be useful to those who wanted to build upon an initial reading, expanding the world of the poem to sources available now and to the past that lies deep within us.
ditto Cindy about Milton, and about the different difficulties that arise when the Bible is taught in this way in Texas, as opposed to GB. Just try to imagine walking into a Baptist church in TX and offering to teach “the Bible as literature” in their Sunday school. They would Not want that, and they certainly wouldn’t want any stories from the Koran or Greek mythology to be presented. But they would be all for teaching Bible stories in any school–if they could weasel a way to have a say in what was to be taught and how it was to be presented. I mean, just look at the story of Abraham’s near murder of his own son, and see if a clear literary analysis brings you to understand that the whole thing reveals how great it is to be absolutely obedient to a God who might ask you to stab your kids, or drown them in the tub, or cut their limbs off.
And I think Coop makes a good point about the kinds of works that are most likely to do the most good for young people. Seems to me the first order of business is to not make kids hate reading. Teachers always have to be subversive, getting things in under the usual lazy aversions kids always have to anything that requires mental activity. I have only taught adults, but many of them have been much the same as the children they were, and I can remember what it was like to be a kid myself. When I teach fiction writing I assign readings one would think aspiring writers would have already read. But no, they haven’t, and they are often ready at a moment’s notice to speak of how Flannery O’Connor should have written “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” I have seriously thought of assigning kids’ books instead. That might be a better way to get the ground work done that would lead eventually to students seeing what’s good about fine writing that has lasted when so much has fallen away.
What I find interesting about the whole discussion is that both sides seem to be defined by demographics. For me, the idea seemed worthy and I didn’t even think that there would be problems. Then, again, I am a Northeasterner and a former Princetonian (townie, not student) to boot.
I did get a whiff of the ridiculousness Southern fundamentalism in seminary (tons of Southern boys there who wanted to chat with me for periods longer than I was comfortable with when I ran into them), but even then it was moderated by the sophistication (in every sense of the word) of education.
[...] “The tower of Babel was not a myth, it was a real place“. For context, see a clusterchat that has been expanding somewhere else around here. [...]
Andrew, I think much of the discussion can be viewed in terms of the different approaches people take toward something they consider to be old and dead (Greek and Roman mythologies, for instance) and something they consider to be eternal and “true” (practiced religion). Some of us can look at the creation myths of various cultures and delight in the obvious parallels, while others feel personally threatened by such information. Motion’s suggestion seems great on the face of it, but it strikes me as overly idealistic.
Dante’s the way to go, if you ask me. It holds up just fine without the back story, and with the back story, it’s sublime.