Reading the classics is part of "cultural literacy"

The argument

The word literacy goes beyond just being able to read and write. In today's technological world, literacy is about being able to communicate in a variety of ways. A high percentage of middle and high school students have cell phones in their pockets or in their backpacks at all times, which means that they are constantly connected to the world beyond their school, street, town, or city. One way to teach adolescents how to interact with such a vast and diverse world is through classic literature. For example, the plot of Romeo and Juliet (a very popular text in many English classrooms) revolves around a complex political system that the titular characters rebel against. Through reading and discussion of the story in class, students begin to understand the difficult situation that these characters find themselves in and begin to make connections between the political, social, and economic systems in the book to current systems that exist in various parts of the world today. This connection building between literature and the current world they live in is part of what makes them into competent global citizens.

Context

In the 1980s scholarship moved towards an understanding of literature that believed the purpose of reading went far beyond that of understanding the text. Rather, it should be for a grander goal: educating the masses in basic philosophical, political, social and economic principles. The key figure in this movement was the University of Virginia Professor E.D. Hirsch

Premises

Counter-arguments

The mechanism the argument describes is not a property of classic literature. Reading a text, discussing its political and social systems, and connecting them to the world students live in is what literary study does with any text — and contemporary and non-Western fiction does it about the present world directly, without an intervening layer of historical reconstruction. That is exactly the rival positions' case, and this argument does not engage it: everything asserted here about global citizenship would be satisfied, and arguably better satisfied, by a modern novel. The title and the body are also arguing different things. 'Cultural literacy,' in the sense the term was coined, means shared background knowledge of a particular canon — a claim about common reference points, which has been criticised precisely for treating one tradition's stock of allusions as the neutral common ground. The body abandons that and argues instead for engagement with a 'vast and diverse world.' Those are different justifications, and the second does not obviously favour a canon assembled from one culture's past. The example undercuts the case rather than illustrating it. The politics of Romeo and Juliet is a feud between two households in a Renaissance Italian city-state, and reaching any modern parallel requires substantial historical scaffolding first — teaching time the argument's own reasoning counts as a cost when it is spent on anything other than connection-building. Finally, nothing here supports the exclusivity the position claims. Every benefit named is delivered by the third position in this debate, which teaches classic and contemporary work together; an argument for the value of classics is not an argument for reading only classics.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Contemporary literature provides examples of political, economic, and social structures while using language that modern students understand and can relate too. [Rejecting P2] It is not only students who read the classics who have the ability to understand the world around them. Contemporary literature that is set in the modern world teaches students about the world they live in now.