Reading through The Guardian online last week I came across the news that UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, an atheist (and also one of the directors of The Poetry Archive), has “called for an overhaul of the school curriculum to reverse the ‘depressing’ trend which threatened to leave future generations unable to fully understand the works of Milton and Shakespeare or even more recent writers such as TS Eliot”:
Mr Motion, who holds a chair in creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, said that he had struggled to teach Milton’s Paradise Lost to undergraduates because they had no concept of the fall of man.
“These were all bright students, very hard-working, all with good A-levels, but their knowledge of the great ancient stories was very sketchy,” he said in an interview.
“So when the time came to talk about Milton, I found very few knew there had been a civil war. As for the Bible, forget it, they just about knew who Adam and Eve were.”
He insisted that while secularist ideas had put many people off studying the Bible, parents who do not believe in God should have nothing to fear from their children learning about the Bible.
“If people say this is about ramming religion down people’s throats, they aren’t thinking about it hard enough,” he said.
“It is more about the power of these words to connect with deep, recurring human truths, and also the story of the influence of that language and those stories.”
And he warned that growing ignorance of the great stories of the Bible as well as classical mythology was becoming an increasingly serious handicap for those studying literature.
“Many of my students stumble into vaguely mythological stories in their writing,” he said.
Read the rest of the article here.
Here’s the perfect example of what you can do with a little book learning, not to mention a great deal of craft and patience: retired farmer Alec Garrard’s 12′ by 20′ model of Herod’s Temple; as Mr. Garrard notes, “I have an interest in buildings and religion so I thought maybe I could combine the two and I came up with the idea of doing the temple”. A detailed slide show of the model is here.
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Polymath Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: A Historical Look at the Old and New Testaments
The Bible: A Biography, Islam: A Short History, and A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam by Karen Armstrong
Biblical Literacy: The Most Important People, Events, and Ideas of the Hebrew Bible by Joseph Telushkin
Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — And Doesn’t by Stephen Prothero
World Religions: The Great Faiths Explored & Explained by John Bowker (DK Publishing)
Filed under: Books, Classics, Great Books, Ideas, Literature, Reading, Religion
Hey! I’m finishing up a kids’ activity book on myths and legends and found “Don’t Know Much About Mythology” by Kenneth Davis, to be very interesting. Your post has reminded me to request “Don’t Know Much About the Bible,” which the author mentions as an inspiration for the second book.
(Note: There’s a lot in the “grownup” version of myths and legends that you may not want to share with your kids just yet. That said, this book certainly filled in a lot of the gaps in the kids’ versions I’ve read over the years!)
Kathy, what a nifty sounding new project!
Too late as far as not sharing with the kids — ha! I have a fairly sizeable collection of Greek mythology books (and some Roman and Norse too), along with Bulfinch’s, and there all on shelves where the kids can, and do, help themselves. In fact, my daughter’s 4H speech this year was on Greek mythology.
And if you think mythology is eye/hair-raising, wait til you get to the Bible!
This is slightly OT, but my dh came home the other night and reported that, at university level, someone doing a non-English lit. degree is no longer required to read texts in the original language: they can do it up to the MA level in translation. Call me overly curmudgeonly, but I was shocked. And appalled. Isn’t that dumbing things down TOO much?
off to grumble in my corner…
Call me kooky, but I think that most of the work for a non-English lit degree should be in non-English.
Ha! You know, I just read what I wrote. And even I didn’t understand myself. I guess that’s what I get for trying to think so early in the morning.
I think you did, though. For anyone who is wondering what a “non-English lit degree” could possibly be, I meant a literature degree NOT in English.
I’m off to think in non-English now…(I feel like I’m in a skit with Catherine Tate and David Tennant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxB1gB6K-2A)