Heritage Lost II

I may have misstated things in my last blog. We aren’t losing our literary and cultural heritage; in many cases it is long gone. I substituted again today—this time in an English class. They were all diligently reading Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”.
Let’s pass over the fact that they were being assigned a single twenty-eight page chapter for a weekend’s work—which the teacher called a “very long” assignment. (My high school English teachers would probably have given us the whole 105 page book for a single weekend.)
Out of curiosity, I asked each class if they had any idea where Steinbeck got the title from. Tilt. So I told them about Bobby Burn’s poem, “To a Mouse”. I quoted the relevant line, “The best laid plans o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.”
One young man, very sarcastically, observed, “We’re all much smarter now.” I plowed on. None had any idea that “East of Eden” is a Biblical reference or that “The Grapes of Wrath” comes from the Bible through “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.
Since none of them knew, I doubt very, very much that the teacher had any idea (she could easily be my daughter). No one in any room I’ve ever subbed in knew that “Lord of the Flies” comes from an old Biblical reference (albeit satirical) to the devil.
Authors rarely use references like these for titles without making a point. You can miss part of what the whole book or story is about if the title means nothing to you. Neither this teacher nor her students knew or cared.
But how could you fully understand Hemingway’s intent in “The Sun Also Rises” if you didn’t understand the reference to the life-weary writer of the Biblical book, Ecclesiastes, who uses the endless, mindless rising and setting of the sun as a metaphor for the pointlessness of life.
If you don’t know there is a background—or a metaphor—why bother to read this or any book at all? (I remember how excited I was, back in elementary school, when I suddenly realized that Jack London was doing more than tell a story in his “Sea Wolf”.
He was telling me—he was trying to proselytize—his moral view of the universe in the words of his main character. But without the background I already had in literature and the Bible, I doubt if I would have gotten it.) If Steinbeck has something to say beyond the immediate tragedy of Lennie getting shot, these kids are unlikely to notice.
The kids I saw today—bright, decently affluent, many college bound—have no cultural foundation that can help them see beyond the story at hand. Allusion, reference, metaphor are lost on them. This is what was so upsetting to the college teacher I wrote of last time—who found that her students had no knowledge of the most common Biblical/cultural figures and stories.
How would you teach about computers to a primitive tribesman who’s never seen written language or symbols, never seen an electronic device, never even seen a metal box or a glass screen? That’s pretty much the predicament we’ve placed ourselves in--for history and literature.
To have a frame of reference or a context requires having some basic background information. We’re raising a generation that has largely been deprived of just the raw information needed to understand the stories—in newspapers or in books—going on around them.
We expect these virginally ignorant youngsters to maintain a functioning democracy, to hold a society together, to pass on a culture and way of life to future generations.
Just how likely? More on this later.