Bring the Great American Novel Back to Class

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Commentary

Why do solid red states have education bureaucracies that lean way left and create a public school system that pushes ideas and values contrary to the conservative outlook?

Go to schools of education websites at the flagship universities in those states and you'll find content that appears to have been compiled by diversity consultants (for instance, this at the University of Alabama).

Look at the state’s English Language Arts (ELA) standards—standards are grade-by-grade layouts of what students should know and know how to do—and you'll find the same thing, not a field and its background conserved but relativistic nostrums such as this statement of “foundational practices” on page 2 of the State of Kansas standards document: “Seek out and work to understand diverse perspectives.”

This is another case of the oft-noted cultural incompetence of Republican politicians when it comes to noneconomic, nonlegal matters. Liberals run Hollywood, the art world, Broadway, the music industry, and the academic humanities, and for good reason. They know that a hit song such as John Lennon’s “Imagine” has a bigger impact than any 100 books chosen at random that praise the free market. A 10th-grade social studies teacher committed to indoctrinating kids in the necessity of progressive social change can produce 1,000 “social change agents” during her long career, although she'll never have the celebrity of the D.C. think tank eminence.

What we’ve witnessed on college campuses since the University of Missouri episode of 2015—that is, outbursts of undergraduate social justice warriors who protest, demand, chant, stomp, march, and accuse—tells you just how wise leftist plotters and planners were to conquer the primary and secondary classroom.

“Get ’em while they’re young!” was the premise, which is to say, prevent the transmission of a noble past, make these budding Americans ashamed of their own country, highlight victimhood, and frame reality within identity politics, and those youths will end up eager to enlist in the leftist army out to create the ideal future. We shouldn’t be surprised that the youth vote recently has skewed so far to the Democrats.

There are signs, however, that Republican leaders are realizing the importance of the humanities curriculum to our national destiny. In Florida, Georgia, and Arkansas, the governors have overseen revisions of ELA standards that put the great tradition of English and American literature back into the classroom. Those projects give youths an elevated sense of the past, a past that they can claim as their proper inheritance. These governors—Ron DeSantis in Florida, Brian Kemp in Georgia, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas—recognize that education in the lineage of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Frederick Douglass, Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost insulates youths from the blandishments of identity politics.

Immersion in the essays of Emerson and Thoreau, the fiction of Mark Twain and Edith Wharton, and the plays of Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill enables them to reject the discourse of American shame pushed by The 1619 Project.

The idea that Western Civilization is a form of white imperialism doesn’t pass with a student who has been exposed to the Sistine Chapel, the Sermon on the Mount, and Beethoven’s Ninth.

A college freshman who has studied the wisdom of the Fall, the satires of Pope and Swift, and the nightmare of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” knows enough to be wary of utopian visions of a society of total equity.

In a white paper just out from the American Enterprise Institute, I make the case for precisely this recovery of tradition, and I salute the governors who have already done so. The document praises those policies that emphasize recitation of classic poems and speeches, literary periods such as American Modernism and Elizabethan drama, and Greek myths and Bible stories. They understand what the left understood 35 years ago when they made the traditional English syllabus a target of critique.

Those rabble-rousers of the ‘80s believed that the revolution would stumble as long as the young knew about and respected the past. A remembered and admired or enjoyed legacy—say, a guy who loves tales of Stonewall Jackson and of General Grant, and a gal who loves Jane Austen’s young ladies—interfered with the vision of a glorious time to come (if only we shake off all those old beliefs). A kid caught up in tradition of any kind isn’t so politically pliable.

Republicans at the time didn’t get it. The business community that gave them campaign dollars assumed no connection between Romantic poetry and PowerPoint presentations. The politicians they supported focused on taxes and regulations, not high school readings. The ELA standards they produced stuck to verbal skills and dropped literary history. We got an English class that cared nothing for the literary formation of the young, only their capacity to write decent sentences and coherent paragraphs—not a false ambition, but a culpably negligent one if it formed the whole of instruction. The absence of tradition didn’t bother them at all, but it certainly opened up a space for progressives to insert their politics.

As I said, Republican leaders are acknowledging their old mistake, at least implicitly. Tradition is the core of conservatism. The humanities in a conservative state must be just that, traditionalist. Critical thinking and writing skills are secondary goals. The first aim of the English instructor is immersion in Shakespeare and Melville. To familiarize American youth with the fates of Hester Prynne and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is a first duty. Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Kemp, and Ms. Sanders get this. Every red state governor should follow their example.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.