The Dispatch: How to Teach a Great Tradition, by Jessica Hooten Wilson (Pepperdine):
Both worshipping and villainizing the West does our students—and our societies—a disservice.
On the issue of “Western civilization,” I would like to, in pursuit of fairness and truth, say something that offends everyone. As the American writer Walker Percy once joked, “What else can you do when some of your allies give you as big a pain as your opponents?”
I should have credence in this arena. I’ve been a student or professor of great books for more than two decades. I’ve taught in classical Christian schools. And I have investigated the history of ideas and the sources of a great tradition for just as long. With passion and conviction, I can say that the great books are among the best resources for virtue formation in education.
Yet as much as I support the great books, I do not support the partisan game between conservatives and liberals, elitists and popularizers, those who believe the Western canon should be lionized and those who believe it should be destroyed.
On one side, American defenders of “Western civilization” want to pass down the heritage that influenced the founders of the nation and that is part of a contemporary student’s cultural legacy. C.S. Lewis offers this analogy: “If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said.” Students who don’t learn the foundations of the Western world—from Homer to Herodotus—are liable to be unmoored from the ideals that form that world today.
On the other side, Western civilization is stoned by some academics as racist and sexist, and thus much of the best of our shared tradition is thrown out, to our very great detriment. The American academic Michael Poliakoff recalls how the Rev. Jesse Jackson led a protest at Stanford University—“Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go!”—because of a misunderstanding that Western civilization was nothing more than “Western supremacy, colonialism, and racism to its opponents, rather than the academic study of the nations, cultures, and peoples that contributed so heavily to the world we live in.”
When considering the founding of the country, it may be just as true to say that the Gospels and Socrates influenced Benjamin Franklin as it is to say he was influenced by the Iroquois Confederacy, as Ken Burns did in a recent documentary. The question is, which texts are we choosing to pass on to the next generation—and why?
To preserve our Western Civilization courses, we need to be aware of the authors that have been left out of most curriculum lists but deserve a seat at the table, while also being ready for the dynamic and global world of the 21st century. …
Does it not seem that the most fruitful way forward is to come together as a society and admit that we have a shared tradition full of conflict and confluence? That education demands that we choose from the best that has been thought and said across the world and enter into a larger conversation, in which we see ourselves humbly as participants in carrying forth an old, old story? Inclusion does not mean watering down—nor should it mean tokenizing or head-counting. And compromise should not necessitate sidelining the Western writers of the past and their massive contribution.
Could we instead try a Great Tradition approach, one of inquiry and belonging, where the past is a necessary preamble, but where we admit the future is unfinished? In practice, this means that Western civilization educators examine their syllabi to ensure that they are telling a true story of the history of ideas.
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