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Two prominent book lists seem to be making the rounds on my vaguely conservative substack feed. The MENSA reading list for high school students, and St. John's Great Books curriculum. While these two lists are pretty different from each other, and I generally find the St. John's list to be more broad, I find both to be vaguely unsatisfying and narrow in a way that I can't really put my finger on.
I'm reminded of Sam Kriss's critique of a similar kind of list on the /lit channel on 4chan. There's a certain kind of anglo-centrism to this list, an anglo-centrism that is focused on a specific type of worldview. I can't quite put the feeling I have into words here, but if I were to try, I would describe this list as emphasizing a modern (in reference to the modern era of history), Western, progressive (as in history as progress, not woke), Liberal, and individualist perspective of the world. A few big gaps I see below
-No Eastern Bloc/communist authors. Communism might be bad, but it is an ideology that determined the course of the 20th century. Why not add some Soviet Science fiction, or one of the works of Stanislaw Lem.
-No East Asian literature. Journey to the West is something that sticks out, but if you wanted to be more "edgy" you could add some Yukio Mishima, who certainly is quite different from the general theme of this list.
-No post-modernism. Yea, yea insert comment about degenerates, drugs, and nihilism, but this should be something that the youth should decide for themselves. Camus is on here which is borderline, but I would recommend some DFW (Infinite Jest is the best), Italo Calvino, Michel Houellebecq, or David Mitchell.
-No Latin American literature (on the MENSA list, St. John's seems to have Borges and Gabo) The fact that Gabo isn't on here is a crime. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a great, short one that could easily be added to this list, but Ficciones (Borges), The Invention of Morel (Bioy Casares), or The House of the Spirits (Allende).
-No environmentalist literature. Lord of the Rings sort of counts, but I would add Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, or some Wendell Berry.
-Very little history. One of the big problems I see on both the left and the right is a complete ignorance of who we are and how we got here. The Oxford History of the US (although incomplete) would be great to ad to this list, but I'm not sure what else to add that would give more than a basic survey of history which I don't think is useful.
At the end of the day I think lists like these are counter-productive. Rather than encouraging independent thinking, I think they just create another shibboleth on the right to stand opposed to the shibboleth on left: post-modernism and marxism are evil and wrong, the answers to all our problems can be found in the past, and the Western, Modern, Liberal worldview is probably correct. Rather I would suggest reading widely, and with things you disagree with. As Haruki Murakami once said, if you only read what everyone is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. This is just as true for this MENSA list as it might be for the slop that we've normalized.
Now that being said, if you want to build a university degree/program of study, you need to have some kind of reading list. In that sense St. John's list isn't too bad. But to really develop as an independent humanistic thinker, reading the books on their list is not enough. You need to cultivate independent seeking out of literature beyond the "lists" and beyond the slop that is peddled to us by popular culture. You also need to kill the anglocentrism, preferably by learning to read in one or more languages outside of English. If I were in charge of St. John's curriculum, I would cut back these reading lists by about 50%, add in a language requirement, and some kind of independent reading requirement. We had something like the later in my Global Voices (world literature) class in high school, where you had to pick a non-Anglo author and write an essay/give a presentation on its plot/themes/character.
Man I should have gone into the humanities instead of into the sciences. I am so much more passionate about this stuff than STEM.
The purpose of such lists is to give students a grounding in the literature and philosophical traditions of their own culture, not an understanding of the whole world; the Western/Anglo centrism is the point. They should not be taken (as some intend) as a substitute in and of themselves for a complete education, which would naturally include world history, foreign languages and cultures, science and math, etc.
Moreover I think the focus on independent thinking, or as it was always put by my teachers, "we don't do rote memorization here" misses a key point, which is that without a core knowledge of facts, dates, and historical figures, or the web of references and cross-talk that define a particular literary tradition, a student has no framework in which to integrate new information and it will tend to slip away. You need to speak one language fluently before you can learn another. We don't need to go full Asian cram school, but teachers these days would probably better serve their students by adhering more strictly to a shared curriculum, not less.
We know from studies of memory formation that interleaving (i.e. mixing your study sessions for two subjects) improves retention and cross pollination of different subject matters. Studying multiple strands of literary culture I think would same to have the same effect. Same with languages. High-school and university students are plenty fluent in English to start an L2 (if not L3), without having to worry about mixing up the two languages which often occurs when one is at low levels in multiple languages.Since I started studying Spanish seriously I know my own knowledge of English has grown immensely.
I don't doubt that intelligent and capable students could benefit from such an education, but your average child today would be lucky to get through a single YA chapter book without scrolling TikTok for 5 hours after every page, so I think the baseline curriculum should focus on providing them with the rudiments of a shared literary culture. With proper tracking of students, the higher levels can study foreign languages, among other things, but for most people it's a waste of time (and I say that as an aspiring polyglot).
This is a good point. Things have fallen further than I might like to think.
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This is profoundly not true. Young children easily learn multiple languages at once, and adults typically struggle to learn a second language to native-like proficiency.
Continuing the metaphor you've created here: I think it's very likely that a young person raised in a "multicultural" environment where they consume the full Western/Eastern canons simultaneously is likely to have a much better proficiency of both than someone who fully studies either canon before moving onto the other.
You're right, that was a poor way to phrase what I meant, which was "you can't learn a language properly as an adult if you never acquired one as a child."
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