‘Abook is a mirror,” an 18th-century aphorist wrote. “If an ass looks into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.” Quote this line with approval to college students now and you’ll court cancellation. Yet the arrow hits the mark cleanly. Much of formal education over the past 50 years or so, especially in the humanities, has become a delusive exercise in mass evasion of this discomfiting truth. At one time the purpose of education was to enhance and even transform the essence of the human being peering back at us in the mirror; now its purpose is to show us the “awesome” selves we have all become pretty much without effort.
The faith invested in education has always overshot its capacity to deliver, which is one reason schools disappoint no matter how well some perform. Students emerge with a few skills if they’re lucky, but the hoped-for transformations of mind and spirit, the ones celebrated in commencement addresses, are relatively rare. Still, that faith gets renewed every year as we try to show each legion of neophytes how books can improve their lives.
But can reading be stunted by the often desiccating nature of the academic enterprise itself? Depends on who’s doing the teaching. The ablest instructors must constantly remind their students that works assigned in humanities courses — poems, plays, short stories, novels — were not produced for classroom dissection. They were composed to entertain and enlighten. Emily Dickinson did not write poetry to make grist for term papers. Willa Cather refused permission to one publisher to release a school edition of one of her novels because she didn’t wish to see her work imposed on the recalcitrant: Her novels should be experienced by the imagination, she thought, not provide fodder for exams. And yet if their works were to be removed from classrooms, would we not risk consigning them to oblivion? Such is the fragile thread on which culture can hang.
With this brief expedition into serious reading and thinking, Alan Jacobs, a professor of humanities at Baylor, takes us into his seminars to impart “much of what I have learned over the years by taking my students’ questions and boredom seriously,” and he does so without recourse to grating jargon. This is a work of advocacy. “To read old books,” he writes, “is to get an education in possibility for next to nothing” — a sparkling truism certainly, but one that might eventually undercut the entire college imperative if enough folks realize that they can do the reading on their own without professorial midwifery. Nonetheless, Jacobs reminds us just how humane a university classroom can still be in an uneasy and politically charged time when the teacher has been humbly and thoroughly formed by the best — and sometimes most provocative — that’s been thought and said and wishes to open treasures of the past for the young.
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