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Lead 'horses' to classics river Date published: 10/4/2003
The Sept. 27 letter by Mary Washington College professor Wendy Atwell-Vasey, "Literature isn't a serum you can inject into the young," envisages an independently motivated group of students resenting the requirements of "cultural literacy" and shunning classics, while avidly reading "authors from their own generation, class, ethnic group, or gender who could help them just as the classics do." Yet, in fact, (even if this type of student were anything more than a fantasy), such a narrowly focused selection would not fill the educational place of classics. To live as a nation, we need solid cultural common ground. We do not teach just to get kids interested or inspired, leaving the rest to their own devices. (That would mean a short-change in general education.) We must communicate the sense of tradition built by the great minds and selected over the centuries precisely for its character-building, problem-focusing value. Surely, modern writers deserve reading, and some may in time become classics. But ideas should travel longer distances in time, space, and social climates. Classics is the ultimate means not only to help us solve our problems, but also to expand our lives. If classics becomes irrelevant, then literature as a human phenomenon also loses its sense. Olga Arans Stafford Olga Arans is adjunct professor of classics at George Mason University.
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