on January 18th, 2015 by admin
That’s the question I have been trying to answer through my blog. I would like to direct your attention to a book whose title I have used for this blog post. Mark Edmundson, a professor answers this question with his book, Why Read? As a college professor, Edmundson is on the front lines of the continuing decline of the liberal arts. This book is a clarion call in why reading is so crucial to the development of the whole person.
This development of the whole person is what Edmundson calls the individuals’ Final Narrative. This narrative encompasses a person’s values, beliefs, ideas, and goals. It’s a continued quest to cultivate the good, quality life with moral clarity. This quest can only stem from a quality liberal arts education. As Edmundson explains:
A liberal education uses books to rejuvenate, reaffirm, replenish, revise, overwhelm, replace, in some cases (alas) even help begin to generate the web of words that we’re defined by. But this narrative isn’t a thing of mere words. The narrative brings with it commitments and hopes…. A new language, whether we learn it from a historian, a poet, a painter, or a composer of music, is potentially a new way to live.
Unfortunately, all is not well with the liberal arts. There is a profound disconnect that Edmundson highlights within the humanities. The way the postmodern university is educating generations of students is producing a culture devoid of any depth, and a profound lack of values. It should be obvious to anyone who cares about the future of the country that something is off with our nation, and the Western world in general. There is a mind-body dichotomy that has led to educated individuals who are supremely amoral. Those who are in authority use their role to wield power for its own sake; to diminish or undermine the individual. And most perniciously, to disparage Western civilization. We are all greatly impacted by this. As Edmundson states:
What’s missing from the current dispensation is a sense of hope when we confront major works, the hope that they will tell us something we do not know about the world, or give us an entirely fresh way to apprehend experience. We need to learn not simply to read books, but to allow ourselves to be read by them.
Now more than ever our way of life is under attack. After the Muslim terrorist attacks in Paris, an attack on the Western tradition of free expression and of life itself, Edmundson’s book is so important in protecting and promoting Western civilization. After centuries of upheaval, we cannot allow barbarism to take over our lives. As Edmundson asks, why read? The answer, because our lives depend on it.
Bookish Babe
Tags:
liberal arts,
Mark Edmundson,
Muslim terrorist attacks,
Paris,
reading,
university,
Western civilication | Posted in
Philosophy
Very interesting subject, thanks for putting up. “Education a debt due from present to future generations.” by George Peabody.
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