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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29574 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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If you haven't read it already you might like Tanner Greer's "How I Taught the Iliad to Chinese Teenagers". It's long but I think a cool example of introducing an ancient epic to a culture where it's not part of their own canon:

Over the last few years a debate has been raging among both educators and classicists regarding what place, if any, the “classics” should have in modern education, for what purpose they should be taught, and how best to teach them. I come to this debate from an unusual perspective: someone tasked with getting zonked-out Chinese teenagers to care about a book most of them assume they could never possibly finish.

Chinese students live in a social world that is quite alien to the culture wars that divide the Anglosphere and which underlay many of the debates we have about how to teach the classics. They don’t have a dog in that fight. Because of this I found teaching them to be a clarifying experience. Those who defend and those who attack the classics tend to focus their fire on the role the classics play, for good or ill, as the foundation stone of Western high culture. This context is entirely irrelevant to the Chinese teenager. The Western tradition is not their tradition. They have no special reason to adore or revile it. They must approach a work like the Iliad on its own terms and for its own sake. If it means anything to them, it is as a human story, not a Western one.

Why, my Chinese students asked, will we read this? Because you need to prepare for American university classes, I replied. But more importantly: because this book might just change your life! I said this without apology or awkwardness. I believed it! Ultimately, if a great work of history and literature does not have the potential to change a student’s life, to shape their character or transform their worldview, there is no point in teaching it! Most students believe this themselves. They can tell whether you believe the books you are assigning are that important. If you do not believe the works you are assigning matter, students will not think they matter either. I presented the Iliad as a meditation on universal problems of the human condition. My students read it as such.

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