To produce such grandiose terms is trouble, I know; let me back away genuflecting to Barzun...It seems clear that the new school will not be converting public education wholesale anytime soon. If it takes hold at all it will be in a limited sphere—likely it will be only one schoolhouse to begin with.
Now, Barzun has reminded me in no uncertain terms that the study of literature as we have it today did not always exist, and that in a sense it is precisely the attempt to analytically study literature and art that has so eroded the scope of true cultivation in our time. Whereat I nodded, a tad shaken up, I won’t lie, but at the same time glad of his advice and glad to be back around his rich definitions, his ‘mind-and-heart’ and ‘amateur,’ his culture and his wide perspective.
How to teach a book, how to make sure kids read it and talk about it without making it impossible for them to simply enjoy it? Perhaps it will be something like they used to teach the classics, and like that early Yale course on Shakespeare: using some books which exemplify techniques of clarity and rhetoric to teach clarity and rhetoric, using others which are highly imaginative and poetic to open the awareness of this other power of words, contextualizing them all in relation to one another and to the world they came out of—or rather, first emerged into, for we will always make it clear that no deterministic theory can account for the work of art; not bogging down the work itself in these explanations, but giving it room to breathe—and looking, of course, into the language and into the history to see the abiding truths, the truths still vital for us. We can call this last by its literary appellation—theme—or we can risk some high-horsing and say what properly understood is truer, that it is philosophy, and study it as such.
This study is not analysis, unless insofar as certain streams of thought are discerned and a necessary vocabulary is built up; rather, it is a dialogue, aware of its own clumsiness in trying to bring to the broad light of shared understanding what is properly expressed only in the very way its maker expressed it and properly appreciated only in the response of the individual encountering it honestly and openly, turning it in the inner light of experience, memory, wonder, which is no one else's and never can be. And yet this dialogue tries its best all the same, it can’t help it, it is the love of wisdom. (As Barzun knows, a definition and a little knowledge of history can go a long way to deepening our appreciation of culture.)
It is a small step to propose from here not only to teach literature philosophically but to treat philosophy the same way, as having its place in humanity's life story, and not as being restricted to the attic of the abstruse and the hair-splitting. What is distinguished as philosophy is generally not taught at all in public school, skirting dangerously close to religion and proving on the whole far too confusing for students, who we'd prefer spend their mental energies on tests anyhow. But in the new school, philosophy will be essential, both in the underlying sense of love of wisdom and in the common sense of reading and discussing Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Epicureans, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and other people whose names I can’t spell. When possible we will read the sources, but I will gladly acknowledge that to a degree the key thoughts will have to be rudely plucked from their nests of logic and discussed by way of simpler examples and comparisons, one to another.
As elsewhere the time will be devoted as well to the East as the West, not only because after all a thinker like Nietzsche was influenced by (people influenced by) Eastern thought and it is all intimately connected anyhow, with classical civilization being influenced by still more ancient ones and preserved as much by the Muslim scholars as by the Christian monks, etc, but because the writings of Lao-tzu and Buddhism, Confucian and Hindu texts each possess their own intrinsic merits, and Rumi, Gilgamesh, shamanism, Anansi.
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