I Can't Stand That Attitude

LET'S face it: these days William Bennett is a pop culture hero. He's the drug czar when warring on drugs is cool; he's a family man when the American family is cool; and what's more, his youthful face recently graced USA Today's weekend magazine--and even if USA Today isn't cool, it's undeniably popular.

The clincher, of course, is that Bill once had a blind date with Janis Joplin. He's the man of the hour: a father figure, a sex symbol, and he's fighting for what's right.

A little ironic, isn't it, that popular culture has so suddenly elevated the former Secretary of Education who advocated the tried and true classics? The same one who once berated Harvard for letting trendy Core courses displace Aristotle, has suddenly become a trend of his own.

THIS twist of fate is worth savoring, in part, because it happened to William Bennett. But, beyond personalities, Bennett's fate seems so quirky simply because of the way it juxtaposes elite culture with popular culture. That incongruity itself is funny, the same way the very existence of A. Bartlett Giamatti--a scholarly baseball commissioner--struck us as funny.

The fact is that the cultural world of the 1980s is split so deeply into two unequal realms--those who read the classics and those who don't--that the New York Times is assured of a chuckle by headlining an opinion piece "Aristotle, Tolstoy, Donald Duck, Beast Literature," even if the reader doesn't know that the last item is an allusion to Harvard's Literature and Arts A-31.

THERE are universities where the Great Books are openly and officially declared to be synonymous with a liberal arts education; Harvard doesn't leave itself quite so easily open for attack. Here there is a growing awareness that works by minorities and women deserve their places on course syllabi.

Popular works are also receiving attention. This spring, in the same week that The Times printed a Yale student's defense of her senior thesis under the headline "Donald Duck, in Fact, Can Teach Students a Lot," Stephen King spoke at Harvard and was compared by Richard C. Marius, director of the Expository Writing program, to Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe.

That same week, a History and Literature senior turned in a thesis on "Batman and Changes in Comic-Book Storytelling"; and I read Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers for tutorial.

EVEN if a Harvard education is not based on the Great Books themselves, a Harvard education is far too often based on what might be called "Great Books attitudes." Even if Harvard itself is not quite part of the Real World, the students here do all come from there, and it would be unreasonable to expect us not to come here with some of the attitudes of Bennett and Allen Bloom.

When so much of the national debate over higher education concerns which books we should read, it's hard not to think of this question as a crucial one. In our minds, the key issue becomes the assigned book--as if it were a selfsufficient entity--and not the way we read and think about it.

It has often been said that reading the Great Ones can degenerate into idolizing them; it is just as true that assigned reading of all sorts too often degenerates into merely idolizing the reading.

But no one would claim that Harvard students idolize all assigned reading indiscriminately. We have a tendency to treat Poe more seriously than Stephen King, even if we like King better. A strangely convoluted snob appeal here permits us to submerge our own tastes, at least in class, so that what we like and what we don't like become hopelessly confused. When that happens it's hard for education to be very meaningful.

A final "Great Books attitude" we retain too often is the assumption that whatever the rest of the world is thinking and doing is irrelevant: as long as we've read our book, thought about it and found our own piece of truth, who cares what the rest of humanity is up to? Of course, it is perfectly possible to read any book from Plato to Joseph Campbell with the rest of humanity in mind; it's just that it's a lot easier to read it with only the book itself in mind.

PEOPLE are talking about curricular reform quite a bit these days. There's nothing wrong with that, but we should be talking about educational reform in a broader sense too. The real issue is not the Great Books but rather the left-over attitudes.

The Harvard Core Curriculum is entering its second decade this fall. Nothing will magically make its work in the way its planners envisioned. However, it could at least make itself more popular by bridging the gulf between academia and the rest of the world--not just in content but also by changing the "approaches to thinking" it purports to be all about.

It's not that being popular is the most important thing when it comes to a "Core" program of learning; but then again, Bill Bennett seems to be smiling a lot more now that he's 'chic'.