Books go in and out of print all the time. But that doesn't mean their reasons for doing so are equally valid.
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But it requires head-in-the-sand levels of obliviousness to believe that the cultural pressures moving eBay to close off its second-hand market to the books aren't *also* the driving force behind the estate wanting to bury those titles in the first place.
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There's a literary censoriousness in the air that many of us find disconcerting. I want to talk about this a bit because it flows from a posture about the past that I think will impoverish, rather than enrich, our educational culture.
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An antiracist educational reformer recently tweeted out the following.pic.twitter.com/A6TI1TYzDw
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She is suggesting we “switch it up” from “the classics” because many of them were written “before the ’50s,” the implication being that these books inevitably reflect the dominant cultural values of that pre-enlightened era. This is a really bad argument.
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The inner logic of this reasoning essentially calls for each era to be able to ward itself off from the works of prior ones. Assuming each era will look back in horror at some of the features of past eras, her argument would actually underwrite generational literary myopia.
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Another way to put it is that her approach would enact a pedagogical presentism. But this is a problem, because morality is not like empirical science in that it uncomplicatedly boasts of a linear progression.
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To the degree that we do make gains in morality over time, that is precisely *because* we are vigilantly tracking our current actions through the filter of past mistakes, rather than sending those mistakes, and the eras from which they came, down the permanent memory hole.
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*Prioritizing the new* works for subjects whose success conditions are tied to recent work supplanting older work, but it is disastrous in subjects—like literature or history—that, as a matter of inner conceptual design, don't and shouldn’t confine themselves to what's current.
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The worry is that, by keeping the classics in rotation, students will imbibe the values of past eras. But another worry is students uncritically adopting the values of our own day. We actually *shouldn't* close them off to forms of life beyond the horizons of the present.
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When the past is seen merely as a record of our pre-evolved states, as a cautionary tale about our morally primitive origins, rather than as the world our equals inhabited, we lose the ability to learn from it. Closing ourselves off blunts rather than sharpens our moral faculties
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Also, the very authors who comprise our canon often critiqued their own eras. Many of these works were rebukes to their own societies, the authors often being both products of their time and foreigners to it, standing outside their own eras in prophetic judgment over them.
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Obviously this isn't the case with the Seuss books. But I've moved past the Seuss case to discuss the underlying framework for educational reform that is inspiring a lot of upheaval.
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Outcomes like keeping older books in print and continuing to teach the classics aren't important because those books are so superior; these outcomes are important because a fundamental posture we ought to take is that that *we* are not so superior to those who came before us.
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There are some good counterpoints to my thread people might like to consider. Here's one by
@nberlat.https://twitter.com/nberlat/status/1367880325154607110?s=20 …Show this thread -
Here's a discussion
@GScottShand was having with@CathyYoung63. Check out Cathy's piece and Scott's replies. https://theweek.com/articles/969971/why-dr-seuss-cancellation-chilling …https://twitter.com/GScottShand/status/1367588927784185866?s=20 …Show this thread -
Good replies from
@punkademic,@HarrenGWarding,@Yozarian22 and many others. I often dunk on reply-people that contribute nothing, so I want to big up people like the above who give me lots to think about.Show this thread
End of conversation
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