It Comes Hard

Novelist Somerset Maugham was not the first barker to cry that literature is nothing if not entertainment. Book clubs had already promised that Plato could be fun, and that classics were racy and could be read on the run. Were the Best Books as easy as all that? Not so, said a group of prominent U.S. writers, professors and college presidents, in a report out last week--by no means. The road to understanding great literature is rocky, but worth it, said the Commission on Liberal Education* of the Association of American Colleges.

Said the report: "The enjoyment of some reading (magazine fiction, popular novels) requires no study; but for the full enjoyment of the best literature, study is necessary. [This study] is a discipline. In all civilized societies it has been honored as one. Directors of our public schools show an increasing tendency to ignore this fact. . . . The sentimental idea that literature is first and last a dreamland of desire has led many school administrators, under the impression that they are being progressive, to permit the old-fashioned hard work of grammar, language, and letters to be displaced by an elaborate picnic of adolescent emotions. . . .

"Many a school board and school superintendent will agree that preparation for science means hard work in mathematics but are unwilling to admit that the comparable disciplines of literature . . . are necessary to a liberal education. Though the remark may sound austere, it is still true that the study of Greek offers the finest discipline that may be had in literature./-

"People are living and thinking in standardized fashion. Military censors observed during the war that all American soldiers wrote the same letters. . . . The effect of many well-meant reforms in education during the first half of the century has been to magnify the importance of social welfare and to minimize that of the individual.

"Much of modern entertainment is meagre, vulgar, and meretricious. Its primary effect is the debasement of taste, the creation of false standards of value, the blunting of the capacity to find strength and happiness in the ordinary course of life. Literature is public property, can become a common body of experience. . . . Modern youth are moved, not by ambition, but by anxiety. The great stories recreate powerful examples of human thought and conduct--show principles in action. . . ."

The study of literature (from Mother Goose to Sophocles and Shakespeare) was never more necessary than now.

*Among the authors of the report: Harvard's Robert S. Hillyer and Theodore Morrison, Princeton's Donald A. Stauffer, Columbia's Lionel Trilling, Yale's Dean William C. DeVane, Wesleyan's President Victor L. Butterfield, Hunter's President George N. Shuster, Kenyon's President Gordon K. Chalmers.

/-Three members of the committee disagreed about Greek.

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