There’s a simple truth about human nature that liberalism denies, that it rejects in principle. The truth is this: A person can’t believe his life in the present has very much meaning if he doesn’t believe in a meaningful past.
If there’s no plot to history, if the generations that preceded him don’t form a heritage, if time is just one thing after another, more or less random and flat, an individual’s own existence has no place beyond the moment, no relation to anything more than his immediate circumstances. A devout Christian has a history that runs from the Garden to the Second Coming; a devoted patriot serves his country; the scion of a distinguished family has his forebears behind him.
Liberalism gives him nothing like that.
Worse, liberalism erodes each one, telling young people, “It’s all about you.” The past is past; it’s irrelevant. “Build, therefore, your own world,” Ralph Waldo Emerson commanded Americans in the 1830s, and do it out of yourself, with your own desires and talents, not with the bricks of tradition and sages. It’s now the 21st century; these are revolutionary times; don’t look back; be all that you can be.
That’s the message young people hear in advertisements, movies, news, and classrooms, too. Civilization, tradition, heritage, canons, lineage ... those give way to identity, happiness, achievement, novelty, “follow your passions,” you, you, you. That’s not freedom—it’s rootlessness. It doesn’t empower the 18-year-old. It disorients him. He doesn’t need to be disengaged from a (putatively) constraining past. He needs to be grounded in a history, a nation, a family, a cosmos with a presiding divinity. Lacking such things, he’s on his own, without backing and equipment. He has no transcendent orientation, no metaphysical commitments, nothing to which he might sacrifice himself, and no valued spot in the order of things and the march of time.
In the “Reading Literature” section for 12th grade, we have a standard that covers English literature “from Medieval, Renaissance, Neoclassical, Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Post-Modern periods.” In 11th grade, a standard covers American literature “from Puritan, Colonial, American Romanticism, Transcendentalism, Realism, Naturalism, Modernist, and Contemporary periods.” There you have it: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Austen, Wordsworth, and Bronte and Franklin, Hawthorne, Douglass, Dickinson, and Twain—a virtuous chronology of the best writers of the language.
The coverage of these standards is exhaustive. They rightly ask students to acquire a sense of the whole. The things students read and study come together into a capital descent and make the centuries feel closer and dearer. The titles on the syllabus are more than a list—this novel in October; this one in November—they form a patrimony, and each student is a beneficiary.
To be sure, the 11th and 12th grade standards pose a far-reaching ambition. How many American students are really capable of fulfilling them? If we look at earlier grades as well, we see that teachers will spend years preparing students for this full assimilation of literary history. They ask students to address a specific work in one such literary period and acquire some knowledge of its context. They invoke “myths, traditional stories, and/or religious works” that are part of the tradition, for instance, the story of Adam and Eve that shows up in one form or another throughout English and American literature.
This is a six-year process. Teachers will build the knowledge slowly and in bits and pieces until, by the time of graduation, the edifice is complete. Furthermore, these sweeping chronologies don’t require detailed knowledge of hundreds of poems, plays, and novels, only general familiarity with the characteristic traits of each period, plus some literary illustrations of each one.
The important thing is to provide rising Americans with an exhilarating background to their developing lives. The same formation should take place in civics, history, art, and science. The Arkansas literary standards tell youths that the past contains a gallery of brilliant creations, that the universe offers profound experiences to be had, and that their hearts and minds can seize them as enriching property. Any state that doesn’t do the same thing that Arkansas has done is depriving its students of an inheritance they deserve.
