One answer is that the very idea of being up to date is a mistake because readings oriented explicitly to the present are everywhere in education and the point of a core curriculum is to stand a little bit apart, to connect you to the riches of the past — riches that have been sifted in a way that just isn’t possible with the publications and arguments of the past few generations.
I have some sympathy with this idea: if I were designing a core humanities programme for high school students (not that I’ve ever thought about this or anything), my strong impulse would be to just hit “stop” at World War II or 1965 and decline to make any judgement on what will be remembered as the great books of the recent past and present.
Columbia University in the US, which is now eddying with student protests over the Israel-Palestine conflict, has carried in its core curriculum since inception a mandate to address “the insistent problems of the present”. So one can criticise the ideological narrowness of the contemporary readings while still recognising that the syllabus is trying to fulfil its academic mandate, not betray it.
Here, then, are four attempts (see boxes) at fulfilling that mandate but with a wider lens. I’m presenting these as potential modules, packaged similarly to the
way the current Columbia curriculum packages its modern readings under “anticolonialism”, “race, gender and sexuality” and “climate and futures”.
I think if you’re trying to grasp the world through a few key texts, it’s better to come at political ideas a bit more from the side, via figures who are less associated with a specific ideology or team. Fukuyama, for example, isn’t exactly an ideologist of neoliberalism, but if you read The End of History (just the original essay, not necessarily the book), you’ll have a pretty good grasp of what the neoliberal era meant.
Finally, I am under no illusions that the Columbia core curriculum or any other attempt at a collegiate canon is actually the place where progressive orthodoxy is forged or soon-to-be protesters discover their ideological beliefs. The Columbia syllabus is interesting as a manifestation of a worldview, not as its origination; the point of origination is much more likely to be what future Ivy Leaguers are assigned in high school and what they’re given by the ambient culture, which could mean anything from social justice extracurriculars to TikTok discourse to young adult fiction.
So if you asked me what I would assign to readers in their late teenage years, generally, to challenge (or at least complicate) progressive groupthink, I might not even start with any of the texts listed above. Instead, I might try to assemble a list of narrative works, mostly novels and some nonfiction, not all of which would be aesthetically notable enough to fit into Columbia’s “literature humanities” syllabus but all of which would help broaden a too-narrow ideological picture of the world.
Here’s one such list, suitable for an enterprising high school senior or college freshman:
n Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
n That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis
n Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album by Joan Didion
n Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
n A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
n Radical Chic and The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
n American Pastoral by Philip Roth
n The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq
n The Children of Men by P.D. James.
NYTNS
