Yes! We just wrote about the historical books that are quietly disappearing. https://restorechildhood.substack.com/p/they-quietly-let-the-best-childrens It is important for students to read historical texts that instill pride in Western history and Western values. Our kids are not reading the same books we gre up reading so they will not have the same values.
Absolutely true but unfortunately in most public schools after a steady diet of junk books, by the time a student is looking at high school, most great books are frighteningly beyond their intellectual grasp
I am old. My six children had access to the entire library of both my wife and myself and so do all my grandchildren. Family discussions include references to sources ancient and modern, fictional and factual and technical and specialist adult sources and children's favourites, fables and "fairy tales" and science fiction across genres of 70 years.
Exposure began well before school age by reading to them, all my children learned to read by looking over my shoulder during story time.
The cited books by Kendi and Hannah-Jones are opinions influenced by shallow history and mischaracterization of present situations and conditions. It is doubtful that they will withstand the test of time. As another commentator to this post rightly observed, they are propaganda for causes that are not entirely clear. An non-exhaustive canon of books would include the surviving plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; Plato's dialogues; selected works of Aristotle, Shakespeare, John Locke, Adam Smith, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky; the Federalist Papers (especially No. 10), Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Faulkner. Would also include the King James Bible with the Apocrypha.
This is so true. Imagine! 1619 as a foundational text. or anything by these America hating people. Such propaganda - and a prime example of 'if a new gen doesn't know what the civilization was based on it's doomed.' You can't give ex-slaves weapons (as the Romans found out via Spartacus) and in this case: influencing our young is tantamount to that. They have a vested interest in bringing down the status quo that earlier had enslaved them. (not that they are capable of contributing something better - just nihilism).
So C.S. Lewis makes so many good pts. (Here's the irony: when I was a young traveler ('vagabond') in Bangkok various books would show up on the trail and I found Perelandra by C.S. Lewis. And I was not impressed. Esp by his sense of the absolute evil of the malevolent creatures. But I also came across 'Beautiful Losers' by Leonard Cohen and had recently shared a stage with him in a Tel Aviv concert he had given. (played the tambourine cuz i had just ended up on stage with the group). But anyway, it was really well written and in a way very relevant to the ideas of the day: how politicians worked etc. But I still maintain that Lewis' essays are worth reading despite his limited gifts as a novelist. Read great books FIRST!
I knew a film director Ulu Grossbard (Straight Time w/ Dustin hoffman, True Confesssions et al, who was a refugee from Cuba and in order to get a degree I believe he studied a series of books that included all the great tracts and was considered like getting a Harvard education. (Rose Gregorio who I had the pleasure of doing several productions with) mentioned this and also how thorough the series was. Now IMHO that's a foundational list of texts. Just sayin'. Compare to that we have succumbed to propagandizing our youth. Don't be surprised that they grow up hating America.
Certainly agree, but the world seemingly universally agrees all old books are bad books. There is a whole subreddit (r/BookShelvesDetective) dedicated to book sleuthing where mostly women post their mostly male partner’s book shelves and ask the internet to spot any red flags. Lewis and Tolkien are perhaps the only two that show up and do not get “red flagged”. But that is because those are limited to their fiction. Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man would be grounds for recommending a break up. The only tolerated old books are those of the Atheist Philosophers. One of these days I’ll post my book shelves and report back how quickly I get banned.
When downsizing my home library, used book stores and libraries didn’t want anything hardcover or published before the 1970s!! I have reread Two Years Before the Mast, Ivanhoe, and various Christian martyrs’ or missionaries’ bios. Newer books I recommend include The Prize by Yeargin and The Closed Circle by Pryce-Jones. The all time best seller, the Bible, needs to be read in entirety over and over to have the full sense of it. In Hebrew it’s earthier and piercing.
How about an alternative list? I’m struggling because many excellent books of earlier eras contain ideas, language and assumptions that would get a school-aged reader in trouble in today’s schools.
I really like C.S. Lewis's notion of one modern book and then one classic. I also think it is important to make sure that the list of classic work is also representative of different viewpoints and cultures of the authors' respective eras. After all, the views and experiences of Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Cady Stanton would differ significantly from modern female author. Particularly for older grades, this provides a great opportunity for delving into comparing and contrasting while also seeing how our modern world connects to our past.
Following up on my previous comment, I would recommend E. D. Hirsch's https://www.coreknowledge.org/. Hirsch has works about what he terms "Cultural Literacy" and has published a book of that name and a dictionary of cultural literacy.
Unfortunately, by the time they reach an age that they can comprehend the great books. They have already been indoctrinated in leftist emotionalization, hatred of productive economics, and feminized beyond salvation.
I just took my students to the Rare and Manuscript Collection at Cornell University. We saw the manuscript of Charlotte's Web in E. B. White's handwriting and a presentation copy of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens to Thackary (as well as Newton's Opticks, Lavoisier's own copy of his Elements of Chemistry and the etched copper plates used for the illustrations made my Madam Lavoisier, Hooke's Micrographia, etc.). The students had no idea what a library had to offer. It was like entering a whole new and beautiful world. I was suprised to find out that except for one of my my students, their teachers never read to them in primary school. I hope that most primary school teachers read to their students. But if not, this is quick, inexpensive, easy, and meaningful fix.
Yes! We just wrote about the historical books that are quietly disappearing. https://restorechildhood.substack.com/p/they-quietly-let-the-best-childrens It is important for students to read historical texts that instill pride in Western history and Western values. Our kids are not reading the same books we gre up reading so they will not have the same values.
Absolutely true but unfortunately in most public schools after a steady diet of junk books, by the time a student is looking at high school, most great books are frighteningly beyond their intellectual grasp
I am old. My six children had access to the entire library of both my wife and myself and so do all my grandchildren. Family discussions include references to sources ancient and modern, fictional and factual and technical and specialist adult sources and children's favourites, fables and "fairy tales" and science fiction across genres of 70 years.
Exposure began well before school age by reading to them, all my children learned to read by looking over my shoulder during story time.
The cited books by Kendi and Hannah-Jones are opinions influenced by shallow history and mischaracterization of present situations and conditions. It is doubtful that they will withstand the test of time. As another commentator to this post rightly observed, they are propaganda for causes that are not entirely clear. An non-exhaustive canon of books would include the surviving plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; Plato's dialogues; selected works of Aristotle, Shakespeare, John Locke, Adam Smith, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky; the Federalist Papers (especially No. 10), Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Faulkner. Would also include the King James Bible with the Apocrypha.
Brilliant. Sadly I doubt it will be followed
This is so true. Imagine! 1619 as a foundational text. or anything by these America hating people. Such propaganda - and a prime example of 'if a new gen doesn't know what the civilization was based on it's doomed.' You can't give ex-slaves weapons (as the Romans found out via Spartacus) and in this case: influencing our young is tantamount to that. They have a vested interest in bringing down the status quo that earlier had enslaved them. (not that they are capable of contributing something better - just nihilism).
So C.S. Lewis makes so many good pts. (Here's the irony: when I was a young traveler ('vagabond') in Bangkok various books would show up on the trail and I found Perelandra by C.S. Lewis. And I was not impressed. Esp by his sense of the absolute evil of the malevolent creatures. But I also came across 'Beautiful Losers' by Leonard Cohen and had recently shared a stage with him in a Tel Aviv concert he had given. (played the tambourine cuz i had just ended up on stage with the group). But anyway, it was really well written and in a way very relevant to the ideas of the day: how politicians worked etc. But I still maintain that Lewis' essays are worth reading despite his limited gifts as a novelist. Read great books FIRST!
Stephan Morrow
Artistic Director
The Great American Play Series
I knew a film director Ulu Grossbard (Straight Time w/ Dustin hoffman, True Confesssions et al, who was a refugee from Cuba and in order to get a degree I believe he studied a series of books that included all the great tracts and was considered like getting a Harvard education. (Rose Gregorio who I had the pleasure of doing several productions with) mentioned this and also how thorough the series was. Now IMHO that's a foundational list of texts. Just sayin'. Compare to that we have succumbed to propagandizing our youth. Don't be surprised that they grow up hating America.
Certainly agree, but the world seemingly universally agrees all old books are bad books. There is a whole subreddit (r/BookShelvesDetective) dedicated to book sleuthing where mostly women post their mostly male partner’s book shelves and ask the internet to spot any red flags. Lewis and Tolkien are perhaps the only two that show up and do not get “red flagged”. But that is because those are limited to their fiction. Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man would be grounds for recommending a break up. The only tolerated old books are those of the Atheist Philosophers. One of these days I’ll post my book shelves and report back how quickly I get banned.
When downsizing my home library, used book stores and libraries didn’t want anything hardcover or published before the 1970s!! I have reread Two Years Before the Mast, Ivanhoe, and various Christian martyrs’ or missionaries’ bios. Newer books I recommend include The Prize by Yeargin and The Closed Circle by Pryce-Jones. The all time best seller, the Bible, needs to be read in entirety over and over to have the full sense of it. In Hebrew it’s earthier and piercing.
How about an alternative list? I’m struggling because many excellent books of earlier eras contain ideas, language and assumptions that would get a school-aged reader in trouble in today’s schools.
that is precisely the point. Be subversive before you put your kids into the hands of propagandists.
I really like C.S. Lewis's notion of one modern book and then one classic. I also think it is important to make sure that the list of classic work is also representative of different viewpoints and cultures of the authors' respective eras. After all, the views and experiences of Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Cady Stanton would differ significantly from modern female author. Particularly for older grades, this provides a great opportunity for delving into comparing and contrasting while also seeing how our modern world connects to our past.
Following up on my previous comment, I would recommend E. D. Hirsch's https://www.coreknowledge.org/. Hirsch has works about what he terms "Cultural Literacy" and has published a book of that name and a dictionary of cultural literacy.
Unfortunately, by the time they reach an age that they can comprehend the great books. They have already been indoctrinated in leftist emotionalization, hatred of productive economics, and feminized beyond salvation.
I still have my copy of The Great Books published in 1952 by University of Chicago Press, edited by Mortimer Adler.
Starts with Homer and ends with Freud
Sooo true. Instead they get LGBTQ grooming stories.
Dear Jenna,
I just took my students to the Rare and Manuscript Collection at Cornell University. We saw the manuscript of Charlotte's Web in E. B. White's handwriting and a presentation copy of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens to Thackary (as well as Newton's Opticks, Lavoisier's own copy of his Elements of Chemistry and the etched copper plates used for the illustrations made my Madam Lavoisier, Hooke's Micrographia, etc.). The students had no idea what a library had to offer. It was like entering a whole new and beautiful world. I was suprised to find out that except for one of my my students, their teachers never read to them in primary school. I hope that most primary school teachers read to their students. But if not, this is quick, inexpensive, easy, and meaningful fix.
Thanks,
randy
It would be even better if younger people actually read at all.