So I was thinking about one of the most persistent symptoms of American anti-ontellectualism, except that it isn’t specifically American. Robert wrote me at one point complaining that an Ivy League degree doesn’t guarantee that somebody is smart–fair enough.  Nothing guarantees that somebody is smart–and wanting to know how many of the people I knew with…

Yesterday,  I did something I almost never do.  I answered a negative e-mail from a reader, and I answered it in a way that left no doubt whatsoever about what I thought about it. Normally,  I don’t answer negative reader mail of any kind, even the ones that tell me that they really love my books…

I  want–I really  want–to get to Rick Shenkman’s comments about how to get my students interested in history, but before that I want to answer what I think has become confusion enough in this discussion:  knowledge for its own sake and utility. Robert complains that I can’t have it both ways–either the liberal arts comprise…

Cheryl says she could never cheat because–among other reasons–the lie would go on throughout her life.   Not only would she be claiming, now, to know something she hadn’t learned, but she would go on claiming it through the grade on her transcript, sent out ot employer after employer through the rest of her life as…

At least, that’s how I think you spell it.  I tried to look it up this morning, and either I’m a genius, or spell check hates me. At any rate, Barack Obama has been elected president, and I spent yesterday walking into walls from lack of sleep, because I still had to get up at…

I lived to see it.

I’m a little scatty today.  I got my younger son up at five in the morning so we could be ready to leave the house at six, so that I could vote before it got crazy later in the day.  We arrived at the polls at six thirty–hey, with Greg, that was some kind of…

So, Robert asked how I’m supposed to convince people to study the things I  want them to study.  I thought about that, and a few things occurred to me. First, I don’t want to force anybody (past the high school level) to study anything.  I’ve been the teacher in the room full of students forced…

Robert asked, back there somewhere, why, if we’re only worried about cultural importance, we should have to put poor John through the pain and suffering of actually reading Paradise Lost.  Wouldn’t a synopsis or an outline do as well? The answer is no, but it’s no for two reasons.   The first reason is that Paradise Lost…

I’ve thought a lot about the comments that were posted here yesterday, and  I want to address a couple of things directly, and then I want to argue against one of the most kneejerk assumptions in the evaluation (and enjoyment) or literature. First,  I don’t think Gone With The Wind was written in order to repair the…