Christopher Nadon
The worst place in America to study the liberal arts is at elite, highly ranked liberal arts colleges. I spent thirty years working in them. I left because they no longer offer the kind of education that makes us worthy of our freedoms.
I also thought the political and intellectual homogeneity of the academy makes internal reform impossible. “Abandon all hope, you who enter here” are the only words that could be posted on their gates were the FTC to enforce truth in advertising laws on prestigious institutions of higher education.
I now think that I missed the deepest cause of elite campus rot: most of the students entering are functionally illiterate. By functionally illiterate, I do not mean that they cannot read. They do fine with texts messages, tweets, TikTok subtitles, even short extracts from literature (though these need to be “curated” as the publishers of bowdlerized books now call it) to remove difficult syntax or vocabulary. They can extract information from groups of written words. But they cannot and therefore do not read books.
An article in the Atlantic, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” documents the situation from sources within the establishment. Victoria Kahn at Berkeley no longer assigns the whole of the Iliad. Andrew Delbanco at Columbia removed Moby Dick to accommodate his students’ disabilities. He claims to have made his peace with capitulation. Really? As if there were no connection at Columbia between this new illiteracy and students’ admiration for Bin Laden and Hamas. Worse, some professors find unlettered students to their liking. Variants of what we today call “Wokeness” have been the predominant ideology among faculty since the 1990’s. But only when students started arriving on campus unable to read did most of them swallow it. Those who cannot read or think on their own end up not wanting to do so. And few have the foresight to protest against being deprived of something they do not want.
Golden View Classical Academy, a Hillsdale affiliated public charter school, takes first-comers without benefit of an admissions test. There, Principal Robert Garrow has his entire 9th grade class read the whole of Homer’s Iliad. Then the Aeneid. By 11th grade, Moby Dick in its entirety. He does what can’t be done at Columbia or Berkeley and for pennies on the dollar. Classical academies stress grammar, logic, rhetoric, and Latin. They place the written word where it belongs, at the center of education. They teach kids to read. Books. The books then provoke them to think.
Schools like Garrow’s are where the future of the liberal arts lies. Based on that premise, I left Claremont McKenna College to teach 9th grade at Emet Classical Academy in Manhattan, the first Jewish version of such a school and where the study of Hebrew proudly takes its place alongside Latin [ed. note - RACHMANA LITZLAN!!!]. People of the Book understand what’s at stake. Two months in, I can report the premise is sound.
We go through the texts at a slower pace and often in greater depth since we have more time together in the classroom. The discussion can surpass what I had become habituated to at the college level. Of course, not all the students immediately adapt to the rigorous curriculum. Some come from fancy schools that protected them from books. They have the same deficits as the Ivy Leaguers. But with a 9th grader there is no need to follow Delbanco and abandon either hope or standards. He who enters a classical academy will not leave without being able and required to read difficult books. In their entirety. How novel.
If you love your children, or even if you just want them to run laps around the competition when they do get to college, read to them when small. Start them in a classical academy as soon as possible. If you have middle or high school students, enroll them now. Before it’s too late.
