Read Two Sonnets and Call Me In the Morning

By Jerry Jesness

The in-service training session began like so many others. The consultant sang a cute song and then chastised a group of schoolteachers for putting too much emphasis on thinking and not enough on emotions. "Schools don't need more worksheets," he said. "First you must help your students get in touch with their feelings."

If students are in touch with their feelings, he implied, they can understand works like Les Misérables. If they can feel love, hate, anger, and pity, somehow it will not so much matter if they know nothing of French history, or if they have tiny vocabularies, read with their fingers, or lack the self-discipline necessary to read more than 10 pages at a sitting. Great works of literature were, to him, not lessons from great minds, nor vessels that transport culture from one generation to another, but rather mirrors to reflect the reader's inner feelings.

He spoke as if American education emulated Thomas Gradgrind's model school of Charles Dickens' Hard Times: "Now, what I want is Facts," said Gradgrind. "Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals on Facts: nothing else will ever be...