{"id":6667,"date":"2015-08-07T21:12:58","date_gmt":"2015-08-08T04:12:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=6667"},"modified":"2015-08-14T21:17:16","modified_gmt":"2015-08-15T04:17:16","slug":"suicide-by-shakespeare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2015\/08\/07\/suicide-by-shakespeare\/","title":{"rendered":"Suicide By Shakespeare"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The Wall Street Journal<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The Suicide of the Liberal Arts<\/h1>\n

Indoctrinating students isn\u2019t the same as teaching them. Homer and Shakespeare have much to tell us about how to think and how to live.<\/em><\/p>\n

By John Agresto<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"\u2018Achilles Slays Hector,\u2019 by Peter Paul Rubens, circa 1630. Photo: Art Resource<\/em><\/p>\n

I was a few minutes early for class. Father Alexander, my high-school sophomore-homeroom teacher, was standing outside the room, cigarette in his mouth, leaning on the doorjamb. \u201cMorning, Father.\u201d<\/p>\n

His response was to put his arm across the door. \u201cAgresto,\u201d he said, \u201cI have a question I\u2019ve been thinking about and maybe you can help me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSure, what\u2019s up?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you think a person in this day and age can be called well educated who\u2019s never read the \u2018Iliad\u2019?\u201d I hadn\u2019t read the \u201cIliad,\u201d and am not even sure I had heard of it. \u201cHmmm. Maybe, I don\u2019t see why not. Maybe if he knows other really good stuff . . .\u201d His response was swift. \u201cOK, Agresto, that proves it. You\u2019re even a bigger damn fool than I thought you were.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/h4>\n

I grew up in a fairly poor Brooklyn family that didn\u2019t think that much about education. My father was a day laborer in construction\u2014pouring cement, mostly. He thought I should work on the docks. Start by running sandwiches for the guys, he told me. Join the union. Work your way up. There\u2019s good money on the docks. And you\u2019ll always have a job. He had nothing against school, except that if bad times came, working the docks was safer.<\/p>\n

I also grew up in a house almost without books. All I remember is an encyclopedia we got from coupons at the grocery store and a set of the \u201cBook of Knowledge\u201d from my cousin Judy. Once in a while I\u2019d head over to the public library and borrow something\u2014a book on tropical fish, a stamp catalog, a book by someone called Levi on pigeons. It never dawned on me to look at what else there was. Who read that stuff anyway?<\/p>\n

So now I\u2019m a professor and former university president who grew up without much real childhood reading until eighth grade, two or three years before the \u201cIliad\u201d question. Sister Mary Gerald asked me one day if I read outside of class. I told her about the pigeon book and the stamp catalog. No, she asked, had I ever read any literature?<\/p>\n

Whereupon she pulled out something called \u201cPenrod and Sam,\u201d by a guy named Booth Tarkington. She said I should read it. I did. I can\u2019t say that \u201cPenrod and Sam\u201d is great literature, but it changed a small bit of my neighborhood. Penrod had a club. So my friends and I put together a club. Penrod\u2019s club had a flag; we had a flag. Penrod would climb trees and spy on the surroundings. We had to be content with climbing on cyclone fences.<\/p>\n

Who would have thought there was a new way of having adventures, learned from a book? A book, by the way, of things that had never happened. Something had pierced the predictable regularity of everyday street life. And that something was a work of someone\u2019s imagination.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at WSJ.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Wall Street Journal The Suicide of the Liberal Arts Indoctrinating students isn\u2019t the same as teaching them. Homer and Shakespeare have much to tell us about how to think and how to live. By John Agresto \u2018Achilles Slays Hector,\u2019 by Peter Paul Rubens, circa 1630. Photo: Art Resource I was a few minutes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}