The Well Educated Mind

In a perfect world all children would be taught to read literature in chronological order, beginning with the first stories and poems and fables of the ancient peoples and moving through all ages and genres to the present, in which disparate voices are given the stage and once prohibited materials and authors are explored. If we could only realize that in order to understand where we are, we must study where we have come from and, in spite of the unpleasantness of the past with its slavery and misogyny and general mistreatment of those without power, the voices of those who were published during those times must be listened to, so that we might not fall under the sway of such tyranny in the future. Unfortunately that is not what is happening. In fact, it would seem that the very opposite is occurring, and has been occurring for decades.
School, that institution that we rely upon to teach our children how to live in a world that is rapidly de-centralizing in this digital age, are not covering the literature of the past because of the fear of offending the student body. While that is a valiant attempt at ameliorating past injustices, past experience shows that it will not have that effect. In fact, if we do not face who we have been, we run the risk of becoming that once again. Refuse to read Mein Kampf and even ban it from the school room, and see how another fascistic ruler rises with little notice because the students who were denied access to the book can't recognize a new Hitler in their midst.
In The Well Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer lays out the reasons for reading what was once referred to as "the classics" and "canon" and exactly how to approach the process. She gives the reader a plan for you and a partner to discover challenging novels poems, autobiography and memoir, history and drama, that may have escaped your notice or been neglected in your education. By keeping a journal, as she suggests and shows how to do, you can begin to understand historical patterns and how new inventions and changes in societies affected the population and the literature that resulted from that.
The book is 407 pages long with appendices and permissions and covers the how of beginning to read what might be considered tough material, the why we should read it and then the what.  I recommend this book for anyone who is feeling that they don't have a good historical background or didn't read what is considered to be classical literature or is just interested in shoring up some gaps in their reading education.



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