Core Knowledge curriculum "significantly" boosts reading comprehension, study finds

NYT: "Nonfiction [Core Knowledge] Curriculum Enhanced Reading Skills in New York City Schools."

I have always been a fan of the Core Knowledge program, which is based on the idea that students should learn content rather than just abstract "skills - this idea might seem like common sense, but traditional content such as the names and ideas of historical figures, narratives of historical events, etc. is often dismissed by education scholars as "trivia" that can just be Googled anyway. E.D. Hirsch Jr., the creator of the Core Knowledge program, argues that the content of the traditional core subject areas serves as the building blocks of literacy.

From the NYT article: "Half of the schools adopted a curriculum designed by the education theorist E. D. Hirsch Jr.’s Core Knowledge Foundation. The other 10 used a variety of methods, but most fell under the definition of 'balanced literacy'.... The study found that second graders who were taught to read using the Core Knowledge program scored significantly higher on reading comprehension tests than did those in the comparison schools. It also tested children on their social studies and science knowledge, and again found that the Core Knowledge pupils came out ahead."

Education-related excerpts from Jacques Barzun, "From Dawn to Decadence"

(Note: I am posting additional excerpts, less related to education, from From Dawn to Decadence on my general-interest blog; you can find these here if you are interested.)

In a post I wrote a couple of years ago on Wide Awake Minds, I noted that "some books are an education in themselves" because of the breadth of topics they discuss and the seriousness of their insights about the world and about human life.  Historian Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present unquestionably meets that standard.

Barzun is one of the most erudite writers I have ever read. This New Yorker article describes Barzun's routine as he approached his 100th birthday in 2007, and comments on the range of his interests and knowledge:

"(Barzun's) idea of celebrating his centenary is to put the finishing touches on his thirty-eighth book (not counting translations). Among his areas of expertise are French and German literature, music, education, ghost stories, detective fiction, language, and etymology."

Here are a few excerpts from what I've read so far:

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Anything that can be said about the good letters implies the book, the printed book. To be sure, new ideas and discoveries did spread among the clerisy before its advent, but diffusion of manuscripts is chancy and slow. Copying by hand is the mother of error, and circulation is limited by cost. ...Speed in the propagation of ideas generates a heightened excitement. ...To the modern lover of books, the product of the press is an object that arouses deep feelings, and looking Durer's charcoal drawing of hands holding a book, one likes to think the artist felt the same attachment. The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.

...The first generation of international publishers did not merely make and sell books; they were scholars and patrons who translated the classics, nurtured their authors, and wrote original works. Their continual redesigning of letter forms gave rise to the new art of typography.

...People were now reading silently and alone. ...Books, books everywhere, like home computers today. ...Print brought a greater exactness to the scholarly exchange of ideas - all copies are alike; a page reference can kill an argument by confounding one's opponent out of his own words. A price is paid for this convenience: the book has weakened the memory, individual and collective, and divided the House of Intellect into many small flats, the multiplying specialties. In the flood of material within even one field, the scholar is overwhelmed. The time is gone when the classical scholar could be sure that he had 'covered the literature' of his subject, the sources being finite in number.

Excerpts from Jacques Barzun's "Begin Here"

From Jacques Barzun's Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, one of my favorite books on education:

From "Schooling No Mystery":

Forget EDUCATION. Education is a result, a slow growth, and hard to judge. Let us talk rather about Teaching and Learning, a joint activity that can be provided for, though as a nation we have lost the knack of it.
...
As for the means of learning and thinking, that is to say, reading and writing, the colleges are at the same point as the grade schools - helpless in the face of illiteracy. The exceptional teacher is still trying in graduate school to get decent writing and intelligent reading out of his bright students.
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Learning to read, write, and count meant equal opportunity. Lincoln, as everybody knows, had to teach himself.
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In the name of progress and method, innovation and statistical research, educationists have persuaded the world that teaching is a set of complex problems to be solved. It is no such thing. It is a series of difficulties. They recur endlessly and have to be met; there is no solution.... Teaching is an art, and an art, though it has a variety of practical devices to choose from, cannot be reduced to a science.
....
...Knowing a subject and wanting to teach it are the chief prerequisite to success in the profession....

From "Teacher in 1980 America: What He Found":

The manifest decline is heartbreakingly sad, but it is what we have chosen to make it, in higher learning as well as in our public schools. There, instead of trying to develop native intelligence and give it good techniques in the basic arts of man, we professed to make ideal citizens, supertolerant neighbors, agents of world peace, and happy family folk, at once sexually adept and flawless drivers of cars. In the upshot, a working system has been brought to a state of impotence. Good teachers are cramped or stymied in their efforts, while the public pays more and more for less and less. The failure to be sober in action and purpose, to do well what can actually be done, has turned a scene of fruitful activity into a spectacle of defeat, shame, and despair.

From "The Alphabet Equals the Wheel":

All children can learn and do learn. By the time they first go to school they have learned an enormous amount, including a foreign language, since no language is native to the womb.
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A teacher must believe in the capacity of those he is teaching; it is defeatism to start out with the opposite assumption.
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Teaching is a demanding, often back-breaking job; it should not be done with the energy left over after meetings and pointless paperwork have drained hope and faith in the enterprise. Accountability, the latest cure in vogue, is to be looked for only in results. Good teaching is usually well-known to all concerned without questionnaires or approved lesson plans.
...
When good teachers perform and pupils learn, the sense of accomplishment produces a momentum that lightens the toil for both. Discipline is easier to maintain and failures become exceptions instead of the rule.
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...Reform must bear directly on what is wanted, not try roundabout ways next door. The Army is not considered the most efficient of institutions, but when it finds a deficiency in fire power it does not launch a "Right to Shoot Program" or a "Marksmanship Recovery Project." It gets the sergeants busy and the instructors out to the rifle range.

From "The Centrality of Reading":

There is...no excuse for allowing the exercise of reading to be less certain in its results than the exercise of listening and remembering. To tolerate reading that proceeds by guesswork, as if at a later time some one would surely tighten the screws of the loose mental structure and make it solid and precise, is to commit an injury against the growing mind. To allow the written word to be indefinite is to undo the incalculable technical advance that turned sounds into signs.

On this pedagogical ground alone, it could be said that no subject of study is more important than reading. In our civilization, at any rate, all the other intellectual powers depend upon it. No one can compute very far without reading correctly; no one can write decently without reading widely and well; no one can speak or listen intelligently without the mass of workaday information that comes chiefly through reading. As for acquiring some notions of history, government, hygiene, philosophy, art, religion, love-making, or the operation of a camera, they are all equally and pitifully dependent on reading.
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Imagine the art of reading lost - and with it writing, study, and verbal recovery - and it is hard to see how civilized man could survive the shocks and anxieties of his state, let alone serve his multitudinous desires.
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The linguists who affect to scorn all utterance but the spoken word, the teachers' group in the Midwest that has discovered the uselessness of reading and asks that it no longer be taught in the schools, the zealots who sidestep the issue but sell futures in a world where only the voice and the image will have currency - all appear deficient in imagination, the imagination they would need still more under their wayward scheme. In any case, their prophecy of the end of reading leaves me unmoved, for prophecy concerns the future, and to reach any future we must somehow get from here to there, and that will require reading.
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...Reading and its necessary twin, writing, constitute not merely an ability but a power. I mean by the distinction that reading is not just a device (in jargon "a tool") by which we are reached and reach others for practical ends. It is also a mode of incarnating and shaping thought....

Evolving thoughts about technology and education

This morning, I am writing from the MACUL (Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning) education technology conference in Grand Rapids, MI.

A couple of thoughts and takeaway lessons from my experience at the conference so far:

First, the profession of education is exciting, and it is important for teachers to be able to step back from the daily grind of teaching once in a while to participate in conferences like this. Not every "professional development" experience is valuable, but academic conferences like these provide an opportunity to gain quick exposure to a wide range of new ideas that can expand teachers' visions of what is possible in the classroom and of what it means to be an educator.

Second, I have a lot to learn. I thought I knew quite a bit about technology and the Internet - but I already feel behind the curve with things like digital audio and video technologies, and new tools are springing up every day. Even those of us who are "plugged in" and who read and/or write blogs, get our news from RSS feed readers (like Google Reader), and communicate by means of email and Facebook can easily fall behind the times, because the times are rapidly changing.

Keeping up with technological innovations in a well-informed way is a very real challenge that does not happen automatically; it has to happen through self-education, on one's own initiative. This does not necessarily mean adopting every new gadget that comes along; instead, what is important is to be knowledgeable about the tools that are out there so that you can make informed decisions about which to use and which to bypass.

(A key word here is "tools" - I do not believe that technology should lead us around by the nose and cause us to drop the traditional academic curriculum and give up the aim of real literacy - the ability to read and converse with challenging, idea-rich texts - in the name of new "literacies" which may, after all, be fads. I see more value in using educational technology as a means of delivering a traditional, rigorous liberal arts education in a more exciting, individualized, and self-paced way than has been possible to this point.)

Reflections on my first three weeks of full-time teaching

I am currently in my third week of full-time preservice teaching, and I have been fully immersed in planning, designing, teaching, and grading three 10th-grade World History and Geography classes (one course or "prep," three classes of 26-34 students). I am having a blast so far - I've never enjoyed any job so much, and the experience has been very challenging, rewarding, and educational. The school day flies by, but for the first two weeks, I found myself putting in ridiculously long hours planning and grading at home. Finally, I am settling in - and today, the school is closed due to a snowstorm (I had forgotten how much anticipation and joy a snow day can create), so I am taking the opportunity to update Wide Awake Minds for the first time in a few weeks. Thank you for sticking with the blog through such periods of silence. (If you haven't done so yet, please consider joining the Wide Awake Minds Facebook page as well).

Curriculum: reading, writing, and ideas

One of my teaching goals this semester has been to push back against what I see as low expectations about the quality and quantity of reading and writing thought to be appropriate for non-honors/non-AP high school social studies classes. I am building a lot of writing into my world history curriculum, including making highly-structured extended essay prompts account for around 1/3 of each unit quiz grade and offering a lot of writing-intensive extra credit opportunities - but I'll save the details on the writing dimension for another post.

Reading tasks in my World History class take several forms. It is crucial, I have learned, to pair practically every resource (reading, video, visual image, audio, etc.) with some sort of assigned task to actively engage students and ensure that they take what you are asking them to do seriously.

First, I give 2-4 page (usually closer to two, and often including visual images with explanatory captions) take-home assigned readings, and I assess whether students have done the reading (and been paying attention in class) two school days later with a somewhat informal, generously-graded short-answer "warm-up" quiz that also offers opportunities for students to earn bonus points if they have been paying attention to current events (on some occasions, they can earn even more bonus points by drawing connections between current events and the World History curriculum).

Second, in the final days of each unit, I distribute 3-page summaries of the textbook chapter covered by the unit; these are created by the textbook company. I pair these chapter summaries with a multi-page, short-answer assignment (due roughly three school days later) I create that focuses on core concepts and is aligned with the shared, district-wide marking period final exam in World History and the Michigan state standards (HSCEs) in World History. I ask students to complete these chapter summary assignments as independent homework in order to study for their unit quizzes, and I ask them to take responsibility for themselves to ensure that they have a solid understanding of the core concepts we have covered; I do not assign the textbook itself, but I regularly suggest that students check a copy out voluntarily or access it online if they would like to deepen their understanding.

Finally, one of my goals as a high school history teacher is to bring a little bit of the intellectual excitement and engagement with the history of ideas that I have experienced into the sometimes boring and sterile world of the standard high school curriculum. I believe that this can be done within the parameters of standards-and-accountability systems such as the Michigan state standards. While not every necessary building-block of knowledge is destined to be experienced by high school students as equally exciting or relevant, none of the core academic content areas, when they are taught passionately and creatively and received by open minds, should be the least bit "boring."

I have experienced the social sciences not just as a student and teacher, but as a reader who has struggled through many challenging and provocative political and historical documents, as someone who has had many spirited discussions about politics and history with intellectually-inclined friends, as an alumnus of the University of Chicago with fond memories of discussing the Great Books in my first-year humanities and social science seminars, and as a former graduate student of international relations who has engaged in intense, high-level seminar discussions and thesis-writing with some of the greatest political thinkers in the country. In short, I have experienced the study of history (and the pursuit of knowledge, the research and writing processes, and the acts of non-fiction reading and writing) as an exciting and high-stakes activity, and I want to give my students some sense of what that experience feels like.

To that end, I am trying to sneak high-quality reading and viewing materials - the Great Books, "good books" on the outskirts of the established canon, and excellent contemporary writing and other media - into my students' hands and minds as often as possible.

In the first week of class, the take-home reading on nationalism I assigned them included excerpts from a recent debate between bloggers Jonah Goldberg (National Review Online) and Ilya Somin (The Volokh Conspiracy).

In another in-class activity, I asked students to write down examples of how they saw nationalism expressed (through flags, rallies, music/anthems, heroes, traditions, rituals, love/hate passed down across generations, "us vs. them" mentality, exclusivist behavior, love of the "homeland," etc.) in a series of YouTube clips that included a Michigan vs. Ohio State pre-game "hype video," a clip from a British documentary about Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War, a clip about Slobodan Milosevic and the Bosnian War, a news story about recent controversies surrounding the issue of nationalism in Japanese schools, a CBS feature story about ultranationalism in contemporary Russia, and a patriotic American slideshow set to the music of Lee Greenwood's post-9/11 anthem "God Bless the USA."

Last week, I had my students read and answer a four-page questionnaire about excerpts from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' The Communist Manifesto - the central ideological documents of capitalism and communism, respectively. I assigned the students into groups (I randomized this process rather than allowing students to choose in order to ensure (1) that the class activity would be the primary thing bonding each group together and (2) that the most advanced readers would be distributed around the room rather than clustered together in a single group), and each group chose to either read the readings aloud or individually and then worked together to proceed through the questions and discuss possible responses.

We are currently wrapping up our unit on the Industrial Revolution. Then, we will move on to study the late 19th-century social reforms aimed at ending the slave trade, banning child labor, promoting women's rights, and creating free, universal public education. In every case, instructional time is very limited, but I hope to be able to bring in excerpts from some of the most important documents that fueled each debate. I want to find new ways to promote student understanding of these documents (even among my struggling readers) through creative scaffolding, and I want to steer students toward high-level, idea-conscious historical thinking.

Trying new things and seeing what works

This semester is a time for experimenting with different instructional methods, and I am thoroughly enjoying the process of trying new things and seeing what works and what does not. I plan to share some of the success stories on this blog and post some of my course materials on my website for those who are interested. Many of the ideas I generated before I began full-time teaching did not pan out for one reason or another, but some ideas have seemed to work - and the act of teaching and reflecting on teaching has helped me generate many new ideas every day.

The reading habits of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Where do the allusions, ideas, images, and thought-fragments that populate the mind and the writings of a great thinker come from? We can often find out by consulting a biography:

From John Livingston Lowes' The Road to Xanadu - A Study in the Ways of the Imagination:

How did Coleridge actually read books? Few more significant questions can be asked about any man, and about Coleridge probably none. Coleridge...was reading Maurice, but he was doing more: he was also going back at first hand to the sources of Maurice's information. He made, accordingly, a memorandum of another book to read.

Coleridge (at least during the years of the Note Book) read with an eye which habitually pierced to the secret spring of poetry beneath the crust of fact. And this means that items or details the most unlikely might, through some poetic potentiality discovered or divined, find lodgement in his memory.
...
Coleridge not only read books with minute attention, but he also habitually passed from any book he read to the books to which that book referred. And that, in turn, makes it possible to follow him into the most remote and unsuspected fields. And his gleanings from these fields, transformed but recognizable, will meet us again and again as we proceed. For to follow Coleridge through his reading is to retrace the obliterated vestiges of creation.
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When Coleridge once started on a book, he was apt to devour it whole.
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We have to do, in a word, with one of the most extraordinary memoires of which there is record, stored with the spoils of an omnivorous reading, and endowed in to the bargain with an almost uncanny power of association.
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Even you and I, at vivid moments, know the sudden leap of widely sundered recollections, through some flash of association, into a new and sometimes startling unity. And that, assuredly in no less degree, is also the experience of poets.

John Livingston Lowes
--The Road to Xanadu - A Study in the Ways of the Imagination

A glimpse into a great mind: Jonathan Z. Smith

[Editor's note: One of my purposes in writing Wide Awake Minds is to publicly recognize and draw attention to intellectual and academic achievement. In the coming months, I hope to highlight the achievements of many thinkers and self-educators by sharing excerpts from their books and interviews that highlight their love of learning, their commitment to education, and their individual learning styles and research methods.]

Jonathan Z. Smith is a historian of religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

(Via his faculty website:) Smith's research has focused on such wide-ranging subjects as ritual theory, Hellenistic religions, nineteenth-century Maori cults, and the notorious events of Jonestown, Guyana. Some of his works include Map Is Not Territory; Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown; and To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual.

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From Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion:

All of these inchoate musings became clearer when I accidentally came across a copy of a journal with (Ernst) Cassirer's 1945 article, "Structuralism in Modern Linguistics," in a 10 cents barrel in a Fourth Avenue used bookstore. ...I don't think I had ever been as impressed with a mind at work as I was with Cassirer's.
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The more than thirty years I have spent teaching at the University of Chicago has defined my work. ...The University's commitment to letting a mind go where it will resulted in a diversity of appointments, until the ultimate freedom, granted in 1982, of being without departmental affiliation as the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities.
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Moving to Chicago in the late 60s was to enter into Mircea Eliade's orbit at the height of his influence. Eliade had been, for me, a model of what it might be to be a historian of religion. He seemed to have read everything to be able to place the most variegated data within coherent structures. While a graduate student, I set out to read nearly every work cited by Eliade in his extraordinary bibliographies in Patterns in Comparative Religion, hiring tutors to teach me the requisite languages. These readings constituted my education in the field.
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It was during this period of "playing in the stacks," supported by a Yale Junior Sterling Fellowship, that, having read John Livingstone Lowes's description of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's reading habits (Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination [1927; reprint, New York, 1959], 30-36), I developed a set of reading rules I have followed ever since. These include: always read the entire chapter of a book in which a reference you are looking for occurs, then read at least the first and last chapters; always skim the entire volume of a journal in which you are seeking a particular article, then read the tables of contents for the entire run of the journal; after locating a particular volume on the shelves, always skim five volumes to the left and to the right of it; always trace citations in a footnote back to their original sources. ...Later, I added: do not teach or discuss a figure unless you have read the total corpus of their work as available to you.
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The label 'historian' is the one I am most comfortable with.... Whether global in their reach or preoccupied with one limited segment of human activity, historians share an uncommon faith in the revelatory power of a telling detail, a small item that opens up a complex whole and that thereby entails a larger set of intellectual consequences.

From Smith, "The Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines":

When we conceal from our students (the hard work of academic research), that which is actually the way we earn our bread and butter, we produce a number of consequences. I remember testifying once before the California state legislature and facing a legislator who wanted to know why professors should be paid to read novels, when the legislator himself read novels on the train every day. Well, that was the price of our disguising the work that goes into things.

There are, I think, more serious educational consequences. If we present the work as perfect or as work without a revisionary history, then we present a work that no student could hope to emulate. Indeed it serves, if it serves at all, as a standard for how far below that standard the student falls. If we present the material without displaying the effort that goes with it, students tend to conclude that things are true or false, or alternatively, that it's entirely a matter of their opinion whether the object is exemplary. In that case, what we have is a contrast between his or her feelings and my feelings. Thus, in the name of simplification, what we really end up doing is mystifying the objects we teach at the introductory level.


Excerpts from an interview with Smith conducted by Chicago Maroon reporter Supriya Sinhababu on 6/2/08:

SS: How about e-mail?

JS: I've never used a computer.

SS: Never?

JS: No.

SS: So do you typewrite all your papers?

JS: Yup. Or handwrite them. ...I take Marx very seriously, I think [the computer] alienates the worker from his production.... With a typewriter, I hit a key, and it goes bam. I understand that: I made that letter happen.

SS: What got you interested in the religions that you study?

JS: Because they're funny. They're interesting in and of themselves. They relate to the world in which I live, but it's like a fun house mirror: Something's off. It's not quite the world I live in, yet it's recognizable. So that gap interested me. And so I specialized in religions that are dead, which has the great advantage that nobody talks back. No one says, "That's not what I heard last Sunday!" Everybody's dead. And I like that. Now, I sometimes have to deal with religions that keep going. And they're more problematic because then you deal with people who believe things.
...
I also think that whether you like it or you don't like it, (religion has) been a part of the world, and remains a part of the world that has a lot to do with what people do. And so I think if you think it's a worthwhile task to try to understand other people, then you probably haven't given up on trying to understand yourself. ...Whether (or not) an individual sees themselves as religious, there is still enough embedded in the culture in which they live (that), to some degree, the eyeglasses through which they look at the world are shaped by those religions.

SS: You mentioned that your teaching style is peculiar. Can you describe what you mean by that?

JS: ...I try, I suppose, very hard — someone once said religion is a topic you have to un-teach before you teach, because in some sense, everybody comes in with an idea in their head, so they're obviously sure that they know something about it. Your job is to suggest, without being incredibly in their face, that they don't. So you have to take it apart, respectfully, but nonetheless take it apart.
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For (students) the word belief means only religious. I'd never quite realized this before. They don't have beliefs about science, or beliefs about Obama or beliefs about War and Peace. They only have beliefs about religion. If you say "what do you think about..." that's not beliefs! So somehow beliefs isn't about "thinking about," first of all; that's the first thing I learned from my students.
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SS: So do you consider yourself one of those people who's in-between [in terms of religious belief]?

JS: Oh, I would hope so. In between is where you always are. If you want one word from me I'm a translator. That's what I do. I translate in both directions.
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Martin Luther says, "What think you of Jesus Christ?" is the only question! Well that's the only question, but what hundreds of questions are wrapped up in that question?
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SS: I don't know if you if you've heard of this website — probably not, but it's called Ratemyprofessors.com, and your reviews are glowing.

JS: I've never heard of such a thing. And I don't like the idea. ...

Well I think [Ratemyprofessors.com] is an awful idea. And what good does it do? I mean, I've been married for nearly 50 years, I'm not on the market. What other reason would one have for such a thing? ...

No, I've been spared much by never—I've never seen the Internet. And my son endlessly explains to me that I should say that rather than "I've never seen the Web." I haven't seen that one either! He says I sound very ignorant if I say I've never seen the Web....

One (college) major is bad enough. I would like to abolish majors altogether. So two is unbelievable. ...Majors I think are of no use to anybody.

Building the educational infrastructure

Learning experiences occur not just in schools, but everywhere - in discussions with others, on the Internet, on television, in museums, in bookstores or libraries, and in the home. And so those of us who believe in the importance of education must work not only to improve schools, but also to improve the overall educational infrastructure and intellectual climate of our communities.

This can mean deepening our connections with our neighbors by starting or participating in social organizations (learning often occurs through meaningful interaction with other people, and organizations like book clubs or religious discussion groups can create the context for high-quality conversations and activities); it can mean becoming more civically engaged by running for office, volunteering for a campaign, writing letters to the editor or op-eds, fundraising for a non-profit you support, or speaking up at school board meetings; and it can mean donating resources to schools and libraries.

Above all, everyone interested in promoting education should strive to publicly model their vision of the "educated person" or person concerned with education. They should make reading a part of their lives and get engaged with ideas, people, and community organizations; they should upgrade their choice of media from tabloid news and talk shows to high-quality local and national journalism; they should vote to fund new and existing educational resources such as libraries, schools, universities, scientific research, orchestras, theaters, museums, and parks; and they should participate as much as possible in the education of their children, attending open houses and school performances, and volunteering at school functions.

Practically everyone agrees at some level that education is important and worth investing in. But those of us who consciously believe in the importance of education must work to act on that belief in every sphere of our lives.

Compiling a list of reading suggestions for high school students

In many of the conversations I have had with educators over the past few months, a recurring theme has been the difficulty of providing challenging instruction to the most advanced students in a particular high school class. In the United States, test scores and other evidence show that the gap between the most and least academically able students in a given classroom widens as the students get older, so it is particularly difficult to design instruction for high school students. You risk teaching above the heads of the students who are behind, on one hand, or boring your advanced students with work that seems remedial or superficial, on the other. And you risk boring everyone by trying to steer a "middle course" by aiming your instruction at the average student.

I believe that one of the ways we can address this challenge is by equipping our best students to be self-educators through independent study. As a high school senior, five of my six classes were independent study. In the high school where I currently teach, one student I know studies Japanese independently in the library every morning, and another plows through massive books and watches as many classic films as he can get his hands on. We have to offer our support to these students, encourage their curiosity, and do what we can to point them toward the broader world of ideas and the academic disciplines.

To that end, I am currently in the process of compiling a list of reading suggestions - fiction and non-fiction - for high school students, and I would love to hear everyone's input. I have heard quite a few great suggestions so far.

I plan to label each book as a "circle," "square," or "diamond" - relatively easy, intermediate, or difficult - in the manner of ski slopes. If you find that helpful, please feel free to label the difficulty of the books you suggest.

Feel free to leave your suggestions as a comment to this post, share them on the Wide Awake Minds Facebook page, or send them to me via email. I'll post a draft list on this blog over the weekend.

Readings from E.D. Hirsch, Jr.'s "The Knowledge Deficit"

"One of the major contributions of psychology is the recognition [that]...much of the information needed to understand a text is not provided by the information in the text itself but must be drawn from the language user's knowledge of the person, objects, states of affairs, or events the discourse is about."

T.A. Van Dijk and W. Kintsch
--Strategies of Discourse Comprehension (quoted in E.D. Hirsch, Jr., The Knowledge Deficit.)

We can greatly accelerate the achievements of all students if we adopt knowledge-oriented modes of schooling that use school time effectively, and if we abandon process-oriented notions like "reading comprehension strategies" that waste precious school time.
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If we had a choice between offering each child a computer and imparting to each the broad knowledge that enables a person to use a computer intelligently, we should unhesitatingly choose knowledge.
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Reading ability correlates with almost everything that a democratic education aims to provide, including the ability to be an informed citizen who can actively participate in the self-government of a democracy. What gives the reading gap between demographic groups a special poignancy is the dramatic failure of our schools to live up to the basic ideal of a democratic education, which, as Thomas Jefferson conceived it, is the ideal of offering all children the opportunity to succeed, regardless of who their parents happen to be. Reading proficiency is at the very heart of the democratic educational enterprise, and is rightly called the "new civil rights frontier."
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Being trained in the history of ideas, I had become familiar with the way in which unnoticed metaphors like "growth" and "development" unconsciously govern our thought - and continue to do so, even when scientific evidence clearly shows that reading and doing math are not natural developments at all.
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Disparagement of factual knowledge as found in books has been a strong current in American thought since the time of Emerson. Henry Ford's famous "History is bunk" is a succinct example. Since the nineteenth century, such anti-intellectualism has been as American as apple pie, as the great historian Richard Hofstadter has pointed out, and it came straight out of the Romantic movement into our schools.

In our pre-romantic days, books were seen as the key to education. In a 1785 letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, aged fifteen, Jefferson recommended that he read books (in the original languages and in this order) by the following authors: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Anabasis, Arian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, and Justin. On morality, Jefferson recommended books by Epictetus, Plato, Cicero, Antonius, Seneca, and Xenophon's Memorabilia, and in Poetry Virgil, Terence, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Milton, Shakespeare, Ossian, Pope, and Swift. Jefferson's plan of book learning was modest compared to the proper Puritan education of the seventeenth century as advocated by John Milton.
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Today our schools and colleges of education...are still the nerve centers of an anti-intellectual tradition. One of their most effective rhetorical tics is to identify the acquisition of broad knowledge with "rote learning" of "mere facts" - in subtle disparagement of "merely verbal" presentation in books and through the coherent explanations of teachers. Just like Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Dewey, our schools of education hold that unless school knowledge is connected to "real life" in a "hands-on" way, it is unnatural and dead; it is "rote" and "meaningless." It consists of "mere facts." But nobody advocates rote learning of disconnected facts. Neither Milton nor Thomas Jefferson nor any of their more thoughtful contemporaries who championed book learning advocated rote learning. What they did advocate was the systematic acquisition of broad knowledge. And such knowledge is precisely what it takes to become a good reader.
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American ed school ideas march under the banner of continual reform, but the reform, given different names in different eras, is always the same one, being carried out against the same enemy. The enemy is dull, soulless drill and the stuffing of children's minds with dead, inert information. These are to be replaced by natural, engaging activities (naturalism). A lot of dead information is to be replaced by all-purpose, how-to knowledge (formalism). These are the two perennial ideas of the American educational world. These two principles together constitute a kind of theology that is drilled into prospective teachers like a catechism.
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Many specialists indicate that a child or an adult needs to understand around 90 percent of the words in a passage in order to learn to understand the other 10 percent of the words. Moreover, it's not just the words that the student has to grasp the meaning of; it's also the kind of reality that the words are referring to. When a child doesn't understand those word meanings and those referred-to realities, being good at sounding out words is a dead end.
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If we do not spend large amounts of time reading aloud and discussing challenging material with children - material that is well beyond their ability to decode with understanding - we miss a critical opportunity to increase their knowledge of language and of the world - the kind of knowledge that will prove decisive for reading in later years.
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[In a section entitled "Reading Strategies: A Path to Boredom:] I have observed that American educational theory has been transfixed by the idea of all-purpose how-to strategies, such as "critical thinking" and "inferencing," using as an example Linda Perlstein's account of a school where young students were being subjected to formal reading strategies in an unsuccessful attempt to make them proficient readers when the time would be better spent teaching useful background knowledge. Kate Walsh, in an analysis of existing reading programs, has found that they continually emphasize teaching these conscious formal processes to children from kindergarten through eighth grade, year after year for nine years, classifying, drawing conclusions, making inferences, and predicting outcomes. So much time is being wasted on these misguided activities throughout the nation that if this book manages to persuade even a few teachers and administrators, it will have justified its existence.
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There is little scientific reason to expect that expertise in reading can be more quickly and effectively learned through the explicit methods employed in these reading programs, or that the "metacognitive strategies" used by experts are abstract, transferable abilities that can be detached from substantive knowledge of the subject matter of the text.
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It is not mainly comprehension strategies that young children lack in comprehending texts but knowledge - knowledge of formal language conventions and knowledge of the world.
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We learn words up to four times faster in a familiar than in an unfamiliar context. ...An optimal early reading program will exploit this characteristic of word learning by ensuring that the topics of reading and discussion are consistent over several class periods, so that the topic becomes familiar to the students and thus accelerates word learning.
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Other things being equal, the earlier children acquire a large vocabulary, the greater their reading comprehension will be in later grades. ...The biggest contribution to the size of any person's vocabulary must come from the printed page (whether it is heard or read), because print uses a greater number of different words than everyday oral speech.
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Even when teachers spend up to thirty minutes a day in explicit word study, the maximum number of new words they can teach this way during a school year is about four hundred. Compare that to the average of two thousand to five thousand words per year that an advantage child will have learned from age two to age seventeen. It is clear from these ballpark figures that most of our word learning occurs indirectly, through hearing, reading, and understanding a lot of text and talk. The consensus of all researchers is that indirect, implicit learning is by far the main mode of increasing one's vocabulary. ..It appears that we have a remarkable innate faculty for learning word meanings in context.
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Only a person with broad general knowledge is capable of reading the New York Times and other newspapers. This fact has momentous implications for education, and for democracy as well. A universal ability of citzens to read newspapers or their equivalent with understanding is the essence of democracy. Jefferson put the issue unforgettably: "The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newespapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them."
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The second- and third-rate fictions that are too often presented to children in the early grades are far less stimulating to their imaginations than classical stories and well-presented narratives about the real world.
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Those who develop language arts programs at the school level or in publishing houses must understand that the skills they wish to impart are in fact knowledge-drenched and knowledge-constituted.
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When James Coleman, the great sociologist of education, analyzed the school characteristics that had the greatest impact on educational achievement and equity, he found that effective use of time was a chief factor. Most important was "intensity," a persistent, goal-directed focus on academics that caused classroom time to be used productively. Schools with greater academic intensity produced not only greater learning but also greater equity.
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Tests of academic progress are the only practical way to hold schools accountable for educating all children and are therefore essential to the twin aims of equality and fairness.
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A student's actual ability to find the main idea of a passage is not a formal ability to follow procedures that will elicit the main idea but the ability to understand what the text says.
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It takes the mind much longer to process meanings of a text on an unfamiliar topic.
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Some have argued that these supposedly neutral (reading) texts are culturally biased, which is certainly true. While the test-makers attempt to be fair by making the tests knowledge-neutral, they do not succeed in this aim. Language can never be knowledge-neutral. A more accurate way of perceiving the inherent unfairness of those tests is to concede that although they cannot possibly be knowledge-netural and therefore fair to students who don't have the needed knowledge, they are perfectly appropriate as tests of reading ability. That is, their unfairness resides in the pretense that formal reading skills are being tested when in fact relevant background knowledge is being tested. Ultimately, the unfairness resides in the failure of schools to impart to all chldren the background knowledge they need to understand the passages on the test and similar passages in real life.
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The state standards for reading comprehension describe empty processes. These abstract, knowledge-evasive criteria do not reflect the knowledge-based character of reading comprehension.
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If schoools wish to meet the adequate-yearly-progress requirement, they should systematically teach and then test for the general knowledge that leads to proficient reading comprehension.
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Breadth of knowledge is a far greater factor in achievement than socioeconomic status.
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The percentage of economically disadvantaged students who migrate during the school year is appallingly high, and the effects are dishearteningly severe. ...Even with other adverse influences factored out, children who changed schools often were much more likely than those who did not to exhibit behavioral problems and to fail a grade.
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According to the most recent census, every year 45 percent of Americans change their residence. Among these domestic migrants are over 20 million schoolchildren between the ages of five and fourteen. Those in the lowest income brackets move most frequently. Few caregivers are able to time their moves to coincide with the beginning and end of the school year.
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The tacit, taken-for-granted knowledge needed for general reading and writing in a speech community is by definition traditional knowledge.

E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
--The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children

In defense of generalists and polymaths

Many of the most innovative thinkers and writers in history have been polymaths, individuals who were well-versed in several fields of study rather than focused on a single one. There is a long tradition of respect for the contributions of generalists to human knowledge: generalists have been called - forgive the gendered language - "Renaissance men," "men of letters," "humanists," "philosophes," "essayists," and "public intellectuals (or simply "intellectuals")."

Individuals in this tradition have included, to list only a few, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and other leading lights of the American Revolution, philosopher Bertrand Russell, essayists Michel de Montaigne, Susan Sontag, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Thomas Mann's fictional character Settembrini. I have listed a few others on the sidebar of this blog, in the section "Self-educators, polymaths, and lovers of learning." The list is potentially endless, and it includes many religious and conservative as well as secular and liberal individuals. The work of many generalists and public intellectuals in recent centuries has been rooted in Enlightenment values of reason, inquiry, the exchange of ideas, and a belief in the power of education, communication, and the written word.

Even in an era in which scholarly labor is divided and academic and economic specialization is the norm, generalism lives on in the form of the traditions of liberal education, of opinion columnists (David Brooks, Chris Hedges, Christopher Hitchens) who draw on resources from many disciplines, of scholars like Cass Sunstein, Peter Berkowitz, and Martha Nussbaum whose work moves fluidly across disciplinary boundaries, in broad-minded publications like the Economist, the New Yorker, and the American Scholar, and in institutions like the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

There is a close relationship between generalism and self-education. Those of us who are interested in several or many subjects cannot realistically get an academic degree in each area that we want to pursue, so we have to pursue most of our learning on our own initiative, for no grade or diploma.

Personally, I am interested in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, including politics, literature, history, philosophy, religion, education, and law. I also hope to read as many "great books" (and good books, as I like to call deserving works that have not made their way into the canon) as I can manage, and I enjoy studying languages.

Is this realistic - or is having too many interests a surefire path to dilettantism and amateurism? Reasonable minds will decide differently. Certainly, you can't be an expert in everything, but is it possible to be a competent generalist? I think that the individuals and traditions I mention above suggest that it is possible for generalists to contribute effectively to the human conversation.

None of this is intended to denigrate specialists in any way. Academic specialists, regardless of their level of public engagement, are called to increase the sum of human knowledge through rigorous, methodologically-sound inquiry into their academic fields. They do the difficult, often lonely work of building the disciplines themselves through extensive research, writing, and discovery. And the disciplines they build are what we know. All I am suggesting is that specialization is not the only way to make a real and meaningful intellectual contribution to the world.

The way to pursue a variety of interests at once is as a self-educator committed to taking advantage of learning opportunities wherever they occur, reading a wide range of high-quality material in one's areas of interest, and engaging with the worlds of scholarship, journalism, and the arts.

But why bother? The self-educators I have been interviewing on this page have offered their own reasons, but speaking personally, I want to see the world through as many lenses as possible. I want to be able to draw on many diverse sources from across times, places, cultures, and disciplines in my writing and teaching. And I want to engage fully in the humanist project of "cultivating our garden" and creating a better, happier, freer world through political and social engagement and the spread of good ideas.

Readings from Robert M. Hutchins' "Education for Freedom"

The complexity of the modern world makes lifelong learning imperative. The relative leisure and opulence of the developed countries make lifelong learning possible.
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Education provides the great peaceful means of improving society.
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It is probable that the most "practical" education will prove to be a theoretical one. Habituation to routine will be valueless, or even a handicap. What is wanted is the ability to face new situations, to solve new problems, and to adjust to new complications.
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It is a basic right of the individual that his mind should be developed as far is it proves itself capable of expansion. It is also a basic necessity of the community that this should be done. The ideal is that everybody should have a basic education. Opportunities to provide this will vary with circumstances. Within the resources of the community, nobody should be excluded. It should not be assumed that anybody is incapable.
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In the advanced countries, the aim of education for all and the superficiality and mediocrity that may accompany it may produce an educational system largely devoid of content, emphasizing time spent, amounts memorized, credits acquired, and certificates, diplomas, and degrees received. Under these circumstances, education becomes a personnel system, sorting our prospective employees for employers.
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In some places the solution has been to let (students) do what interests them. Since the pursuit of their interests can only accidentally be equivalent to education, the result has been irrelevance and triviality.
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It is impossible to tell whether the attempt to educate everybody can succeed. It has never been tried. In the United States, the attempt has been, not to educate everybody, but to get everybody into school and keep him there as long as possible.
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In the last fifty years the hours of labor in the United States have been reduced by about a third, and the working life has been shortened at both ends. The time thus set free has been transferred, with almost mathematical exactitude, to commercial television programs, the quality of which is appalling. [ed.: this essay was written in 1963]
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Two things are missing in the United States, both of which are essential to education for freedom. They are liberal education and centers of independent thought and criticism. Both of them require that education should be taken seriously. It cannot be regarded as a means of accommodating the young until we are ready to have them go to work. It cannot be looked upon as a means of certifying neophytes for trades or professions. It must be thought of as the prime preoccupation of the community, the only way in which the community and the individuals who compose it can come to understand and achieve the common good.
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The liberal arts are the arts of freedom. To be free a man must understand the tradition in which he lives. A great book is one which yields up through the liberal arts a clear and important understanding of our tradition.
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We have been so preoccupied with trying to find out how to teach everybody to read anything that we have forgotten the importance of what is read. Yet is obvious that if we succeeded in teaching everybody to read, and everybody read nothing but pulp magazines, obscene literature, and Mein Kampf, the last state of the nation would be worse than the first. Literacy is not enough.
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When we remember, too, that it is only a little more than fifty years ago that the "average man" began to have the chance to get an education, we must recognize that it is too early to despair of him.
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The President of Dalhousie has correctly said, "Over most of Europe the books and monuments have been destroyed and bombed. To destroy European civilization in America you do not need to burn its records in a single fire. Leave those records unread for a few generations and the effect will be the same.
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We must, by reconstructing our own lives, begin the reconstruction of economic, social, and political life. This means that we must reconstruct education, directing it to virtue and intelligence. It means that we must look upon economic activity, not as the end of life, but as a means of sustaining life, a life directed to virtue and intelligence.
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The standard curriculum still rests on reading. It is probably fair to say that most of the pupils who have failed up to now were pupils who could not read. ...It is doubtful whether they should rush into a vocational curriculum as an alternative to one that requires reading.
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I suggest that the cultivation of the intellectual virtues can be accomplished through the communication of our intellectual tradition and through training in the intellectual disciplines. This means understanding the great thinkers of the past and present, scientific, historical, and philosophical. It means a grasp of the disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, logic, and mathematics; reading, writing, and figuring. It does not, of course, mean the exclusion of contemporary materials. They should be brought in daily to illustrate, confirm, or deny the ideas held by the writers under discussion.
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In a university we should have students interested in study and prepared for it. ...Nobody has ever complained that college students work too hard. On the contrary, it is supposed that football and fun have consumed a large proportion of their waking hours. It has even been suggested that the course of study places so slight a strain on the energies of students that they are compelled to fill up their time with diversions which, if not intellectual, have at least the merit of being strenuous.
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The proper task of education is the production of (free) minds. But we can now see that we are not likely to produce them by following the recommendations of the more extreme of those called progressives in education. Freedom from discipline, freedom to do nothing more than pursue the interests that the accident of birth or station has supplied may result in locking up the growing mind in its own whims and difficulties.
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Candid and intrepid thinking about fundamental issues - in the crisis of our time this is the central obligation of the universities. This is the standard by which they must be judged. This is the aim which will give unity, intelligibility, and meaning to their work. This is the road to wisdom.
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With the whole world in flames we must raise a standard to which all honest and right-thinking men can repair, to which embattled humanity can rally. It is the standard of freedom, truth, and reason. To the forces of brutality, chaos, and ignorance the university opposes the power of righteousness, order, and knowledge. Upon the triumph of that power the survival of Western Civilization depends.

Robert Maynard Hutchins
--Education for Freedom

Prof. Daniel Willingham: "Reading is not a skill."

Daniel Willingham is a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who is "interested in the application of what's known about the mind to K-12 teaching," as he puts it on his YouTube channel. Prof. Willingham created quite a conversation in the online education community with his most recent column in the Washington Post: "Reading is not a skill," as in, reading cannot be taught as a skill in isolation from content.
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Teaching content is teaching reading, Willingham claims:



I often share interesting perspectives from other education writers on this blog without necessarily endorsing those views. But I think I'm more or less on the same page as Willingham on this issue. Countless people complete their P-12 schooling unable to competently and confidently read a newspaper or a good book. I suspect that one reason for this is that these individuals lack the vocabulary (including specialized, disciplinary vocabulary) and the content knowledge to make sense of what they find in unfamiliar writings.

A major counterexample, however, is the case of students reading in a foreign language - including English language learners and English native speakers learning another language. I remain unable to fluently and quickly read a newspaper or novel in Japanese despite 10 years of study - but that doesn't reflect my content-area or disciplinary knowledge. It does, however, reflect my limited vocabulary in that language.

Interview: University of Chicago Professor Charles Lipson

Interviewer: Ryan McCarl
Featured self-educator: Charles Lipson
Self-educator's hometown: Chicago, IL

Date: 26 August 2009

(Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of interviews Wide Awake Minds will be conducting with educators and self-educators. If you enjoy these interviews or other material on this blog, please consider linking to us, mentioning us on Facebook and Twitter, and emailing and sharing our articles. If you would like to share your story as an educator or self-educator, please contact me. Thanks for reading!)

Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor in Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. He chairs the university’s major in political science and directs a graduate program called PIPES, the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security. Besides publishing extensively in political science, he has written several books to help students study more effectively.

WAM: What is the source of your interest in political science and international relations?

CL: I’ve been interested for a long time in the intersection of three areas: politics, economics, and history. I can remember these being my interests even when I was in the sixth or seventh grade. I lived in rural Mississippi, but I subscribed to The New Republic and lots of other magazines, not just newsweeklies but other interesting magazines as well, and I developed those interests for a long time.

I happened to grow up during an interesting period. I am a baby boomer, and I was in high school in the midst of the Civil Rights struggle and in college during the Vietnam War and the cultural revolutions of the late 1960s. All of these issues led to my ever-deeper interest in politics.

As an undergraduate, I majored in both political science and economics and then went on to graduate school in political science. Originally, I thought I would study American politics. But I kept an open mind and the most interesting questions at the time seemed to be in international politics. So I went in that direction, and I’m very happy I did.

WAM: Do you consider yourself a self-educator, a lifelong learner?

CL: Yes, absolutely. I view myself as a lifelong learner, and I think most professors do. After all, we never really left school! We think of learning and teaching as being a kind of seamless web. Also, I really enjoy learning about new fields. Almost every summer, for example, I tackle a new area that I haven’t really read a lot about, one that might not necessarily have anything to do with my primary field.

One year I read a lot of 19th-century fiction, and another I spent a lot of time reading about new developments in evolutionary biology. I continually read about the Western historical tradition. But until a few years ago, I hadn’t read so much about Ancient Greece and Rome. Now I’ve read a lot about the classical Mediterranean world.

For these projects, I simply find a subject that pricks my interest and start reading. I’ll stumble on something that interests me and follow the trail as one book or article leads to another. These days, I supplement my reading with podcasts or courses on CDs. As I explore a topic, I will often find a podcast for an introductory course and “take the course” through the podcasts.

WAM: Do you use blogs or other online resources in addition to podcasts?

CL: Sure, and I find them invaluable. The Web is a great resource. I’ll often look at course syllabi from around the world and see what books they assign in areas that interest me. I also look at blogs in whatever field I am exploring and at blogs like yours that identify resources.

A blog like Wide Awake Minds helps me in two ways. First, it identifies sources of learning in fields that interest me. Second, it discriminates among those sources, telling me which ones are best and why. When I’m looking for podcasts, for instance, I always read the analysis at Anne is a Man, which specializes in reviewing educational podcasts.

We are still at the early stages of a convergence of new media that allow people to acquire knowledge in new and different ways. Although I grew up in the age of print, I am now able to take advantage of countless electronic resources such as JSTOR, a database of academic articles, which I can access through the University library.

WAM: You devote a portion of your personal website to links and information about education, and you have written several books on higher education. What is the source of your interest in the subject?

CL: I think of myself as a teacher with an overarching goal of helping students learn. Of course, I spend a lot of time and effort studying my own subject (international politics and history), but my teaching interests range well beyond that. Some of the things I like to work with students about are not specific to my field. They are about how to study with real integrity or how to write a senior thesis. I have written books on both those topics. (Doing Honest Work in College and How to Write a BA Thesis, both from the University of Chicago Press). Many students I work with come from around the world, from China or India or Turkey or Mexico, so I wanted to write a book that addresses the specific challenges they face in studying here. I looked around and there weren’t any other books on that, and I felt I had something to say about it, so I wrote Succeeding as an International Student in the United States and Canada.

Besides teaching and writing on more specialized topics, I enjoy teaching courses on big ideas to incoming freshmen. In the morning, I might teach a course like that and, in the afternoon, teach a seminar on international politics to students at the M.A. and Ph.D. level. Ranging across these different levels is a lot of fun. It’s more interesting, at least for me, than teaching only one kind of course to one kind of student. Fortunately, I’m at a university that encourages this range of teaching and research.

WAM: Is there anything special about teaching at the University of Chicago?

CL: I think there is. One of the things I love about the University of Chicago is actually one of the things I love about your website, Wide Awake Minds. What really makes our undergraduates special is that so many of them actually love learning for its own sake. That’s what your website is all about, too.

There is certainly nothing wrong with learning something because you want to get something concrete out of it – say, studying organic chemistry because you want to be a doctor. But our university seems to have more students who love chemistry, even if they ultimately want to be a doctor, not a research chemist. Even in my own field, students might be going to law school or public policy school, but they often seem to love the ideas themselves. When I talk to professors at other selective schools, we tend to agree that our students are equally smart and hard-working, but we notice other kinds of differences. The rare thing about University of Chicago students is that they really seem to love learning for its own sake. What more could a teacher ask?

That brings me to another point - the value of self-education after you finish formal classes. I was an undergraduate at Yale, which was and still is a very fine undergraduate school, with smart, wide-ranging students. But one thing I noticed was that after graduation many of them become very focused on their own subjects – if they studied the blood system or investment banking, that’s all they thought about. They seemed to discard so many of the broad interests they once had.

By contrast, I had several other friends who went to what I would call mid-range state universities – not the top state schools like Berkeley or Michigan or Texas, but more mid-range state colleges – and some of them underwent pre-professional training to become nurses or businessmen, things like that. But after graduation, some of them persisted in educating themselves well beyond their jobs. They always had a novel on their bedside table or went to concerts, movies, and plays that were challenging. Watching them continue to learn helped me overcome some of the snobbery that comes attached to a fancy degree.

When you’re 21 and you graduate college, you’re only 3 innings into a 9-inning ball game. Maybe you think you’re done, but you won’t be able to bring a mature, adult worldview to your work unless you keep on learning. Who can really appreciate the depth and anguish of King Lear at age 19? It’s a play about old age - its fatal traps and personal betrayals.

So many of the goals of a liberal arts education ought not to be cast aside because we’ve entered a world of being a doctor or lawyer or because we have less time and more obligations to family and work. The value of reading War and Peace or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is just as great when you are 30, 50, or 70 as it is when you are 17. The greatest books always reward repeated readings.

WAM: Do you see self-education as a form of self-help?

CL: We have too narrow a view of “self-help.” We think it’s a small section of the bookstore that deals with losing weight or improving your relationships. In fact, almost the whole bookstore is a self-help section. If you walk into the classic fiction aisle and pick up something by Stendhal or Balzac or into the biography aisle and pick up something by McCulloch, you are helping yourself. Such books amply repay the effort it takes to read them.

Thank you, Professor Lipson, for your time and for the good work you do.

Please take a moment to visit Professor Lipson’s website and check out his books at Amazon.com. If you enjoyed this interview, consider posting it to your Facebook wall or emailing it to a friend.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Some books are an education in themselves

I was struck again today by the realization that some books are so good and so chock-full of ideas that reading them can be an education in itself. Two books I am currently reading meet that standard: Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (philosophy, religious studies, history of ideas) and Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (literary criticism, religion, history of ideas).

Neither of these books are easy reads. I intended to read both during my August vacation, but it looks like it could take me as much as six months to finish them, since I can only read about ten pages of each at a time before I have to turn to something else. But when you read for self-educational purposes, it is important to sometimes choose books that are slightly above your comfort level in terms of their difficulty. Even the most advanced readers can easily find books that are "above their heads" - books written in distant places and times, books written in difficult English or in another language, books in a field that you have little background in. If you choose such books wisely and then rise to the challenge and struggle through them, you can have an immensely rewarding and educative experience.

On page after page of Taylor's book, for example, the reader is bombarded with references to ideas, religious practices, sects, and thinkers familiar and obscure. The trick as a reader is to remember to be curious about these allusions: don't be so concerned with making your way through the book that you forget to ask, for example, who Gregory of Nyssa was, what beliefs characterized the school of Arminianism, or what the word neuralgic means. (And that's where a quick Google search can come in handy).

I recently posted excerpts from both books on my general-interest blog if you are interested in a sample.

Other books which have struck me as providing an "education in themselves" in the hands of advanced, curious, self-educating readers and with the assistance of good secondary literature or teachers include:

-Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (history, international relations theory, psychology, narrative, military strategy, literature, etc.)
-The Bible (Biblical Hebrew, Koine Greek, literature, poetry, narrative, history, religious studies, mythology)
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (religion, psychology, literature)
-The plays of William Shakespeare (psychology, history, religion, drama, language, literature)

...and many anthologies, including:

-William Theodore de Bary, Sources of Chinese (also Japanese and Korean) Tradition (literature, history, art)
-The Norton Anthology of Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry

I'd like to hear your ideas about books that fit this description, and why you feel they do - please share in the comment section if you are interested.

The case for reading good books

A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
--Arthur Schopenhauer

Regular encounters with great thinkers and great ideas can give us perspective. They can remind us that our personal experiences, unique though they may be in the particulars, have much in common with the experience of other human beings throughout the world and across the centuries.

By reading, we can expand our understanding and our empathy, and we can begin to see that some experiences – the joy of love and sex, the fear of death, the struggle with belief – are universal. This realization helps to alleviate our loneliness and increase our sense of empathy and solidarity with distant individuals and communities.

Reading widely can also help us to distinguish between what is trivial and what matters. For instance, the descriptions of society gossip in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the description of the glamorous parties of the aristocracy in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and the descriptions of the emptiness of a wealth-obsessed life in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt or Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman all serve to educate our sense of what is important.

If you are serious about self-education, reading should become a regular, major part of your life. There are alternative ways of learning, and some would-be self-educators may find reading – especially reading difficult material – to be a frustrating experience. Others will simply prefer other methods. But America’s most highly-regarded schools, the best college-prep high schools and elite universities, usually place a premium on broad, deep, challenging reading. In addition, the vast majority of the great thinkers of history have shared a passion for and dedication to reading and writing. By reading the works of important writers past and present, anyone can take part in a conversation about human existence that has gone on for over two millenia.

But this often requires walking past the tables of flashy, attractive, hardcover, fresh-off-the-press bestsellers and into the more forbidding and intimidating sections of literature and philosophy. It requires the reading of the "Great Books" (or "classics") that have stood the test of decades and centuries. The authors of these books dealt with the very same problems and questions that the men and women of today face, and they brought a level of profound understanding to their subjects that most of the popular writers of our day can only hope to approximate.

What's more, the language, vocabulary, and concepts writers like Plato and Shakespeare used to discuss ideas profoundly shaped our understanding of those ideas; they shaped the way we think and talk about human life. When we think through an idea or express our feelings, we are usually acting within the parameters set by the imaginations of our greatest writers: we think in their terms without being aware of it, because in many cases they are what we know - their work changed the history of ideas and thereby changed the conceptual, cultural, and political world we inhabit.

Our media is filled with references to our “21st-century” society and its unique challenges: globalization, technology, progress, the Internet, nuclear arms, genetic manipulation - all of these, we are told, signify that we are part of a world fundamentally different than that of our ancestors.

But it turns out that people in every age have felt their generation to be different from all who came before. In War and Peace, Tolstoy addresses this view. People of “limited intelligence,” Tolstoy writes, “imagine that human characteristics change with the times.” But War and Peace, like Hamlet, Paradise Lost, the Iliad, and the Bible (among many others), continues to speak to modern readers precisely because the differences and changes in human life across societies, cultures, and generations are outweighed by the continuities, the common human experience.

Birth and death, fear and hope, friendship and loneliness, belief and mythmaking - these are present everywhere and at all times. It would be intellectually crippling, therefore, for someone who hopes to be learned or well-read to ignore the classics because they are “old.” Their themes are timeless. If a book is still being read twenty, fifty, five-hundred, or two thousand years after it first appeared, all of those generations of readers who kept it alive must have found some value in it.

I am a firm believer in the value of putting the classics at the core of an education, but I also think it would be a mistake to stop there. More and more diverse writers are putting their thoughts on paper than ever before, and a few of them are producing some excellent literature. I try to keep up with Poetry magazine, for example, and I thoroughly enjoy the contemporary poetry I find there. Last year, I was blown away by Per Petterson’s novel Out Stealing Horses, which I picked up after reading a glowing review of it in the New York Times. Contemporary novelist Jim Harrison, a native of my home state of Michigan, is able to speak to me more immediately and directly than Plato or Shakespeare can because he is writing about places that are very meaningful to me. Resources such as the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and The Second Pass are great places to find reviews of contemporary literature. At the end of the year, these and other reviewers often create lists of the “Books of the Year,” and these are worth reading.

In short, if it is wrong to advocate doing away with the traditional canon of Western literature for whatever reason - because it is underinclusive and "politically incorrect," or because contemporary students supposedly cannot connect with it - it is equally hubristic to argue or imply, as do some of the most fervent advocates of the "Great Books" (Mortimer J. Adler, Harold Bloom, etc.), that little of value has been written since the mid-20th century. We live in unusually fertile intellectual and artistic times. Again, it bears repeating: more people from more places and backgrounds are writing and publishing than ever before, and we have more access to their work than ever before.

Setting literature aside for a moment, it is clear that natural science and the social sciences require that we give a great deal of weight to contemporary materials. The discipline of international relations, despite its roots in the ancient writings of Thucydides, has only existed in its current form for less than a century. In the realms of math and science, it seems reasonable to learn about biology and mathematics from the most comprehensive and up-to-date textbooks rather than directly from Darwin and Newton. And, in my view, no one should consider himself or herself educated who is fully ignorant of contemporary history and the basic conditions of the modern world, and these are things that can only be learned by becoming a regular reader of or listener to high-quality news sources.

The bottom line, however, is that no matter what your interest, becoming a serious and disciplined reader is the surest path to educational growth. Your local library should have a copy of Mortimer J. Adler’s classic How to Read a Book and Clifton Fadiman’s The Lifetime Reading Plan, both of which contain detailed lists of “the classics” and make a strong case for focusing your reading on them. A website run by Robert Teeter at http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/greatbks.html is a fantastic resource: it contains the Adler and Fadiman lists along with many others, including non-Western canons.

Internet tools such as LibraryThing, Facebook (each profile has a "favorite books" section), and Amazon.com are good sources of recommendations, and countless syllabi from university courses covering every subject under the sun can be found by searching Google and various online syllabi databases. Subscribing to newspapers and journals in your areas of interest will give you access to current book reviews and advertisements.

And, finally, you should not be shy about soliciting book recommendations directly from readers you admire, as well as those who work with books and ideas for a living: journalists, librarians, booksellers, graduate students, professors, lawyers, teachers. The book that turns one person’s worldview upside down may hold little interest for the next person, but whatever your interests, by doing a bit of research you can easily find books from which you can learn a great deal.