In 1963, Flannery O’Connor addressed the claim that “students do not like to read the fusty works of the nineteenth century, that their attention can best be held by novels dealing with there realities of our own time.”

“English teachers come in Good, Bad, and Indifferent, but too frequently in high schools anyone who can speak English is allowed to teach it. Since several novels can’t easily be gathered into one textbook, the fiction that students are assigned depends upon their teacher’s knowledge, ability, and taste: variable factors at best. More often than not, the teacher assigns what he thinks will hold the attention and interest of the students. Modern fiction will certainly hold it.

“Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning, but that is a part of the problem with which I am not equipped to deal. The devil of Educationism that possesses us is the kind that can be ‘cast out only by prayer and fasting.’ No one has yet come along strong enough to do it. In other ages the attention of children was held by Homer and Virgil, among others, but, by the reverse evolutionary process, that is no longer possible; our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. No one asks the student if algebra pleases him or if he finds it satisfactory that some French verbs are irregular but if he prefers [John] Hersey to Hawthorne, his taste must prevail.

“I would like to put forward the proposition, repugnant to most English teachers, that fiction, if it is going to be taught in high schools, should be taught as a subject and as a subject with a history. The total effect of a novel depends not only on its innate impact, but upon the experience, literary and otherwise, with which it is approached. No child needs to be assigned Hersey or Steinbeck until he is familiar with a certain amount of the best work of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, the early James, and Crane, and he does not need to be assigned these until he has been introduced to some of the better English novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

“The fact that these works do not present him with the realities of his own time is all to the good. He is surrounded by the realities of his own time, and he has no perspective whatever from which to view them. Like the college student who wrote in her paper on Lincoln that he went to the movies and got shot, many students go to college unaware that the world was not made yesterday; their studies began with the present and dipped backward occasionally when it seemed necessary or unavoidable. . . . ”

“The high school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.

“And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.”

— from Flannery O’Connor’s “Total Effect and the Eighth Grade,” published in The Georgia Bulletin in 1963, reprinted in Mystery and Manners (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1961)

Related reading and listening

  • What higher education forgot —
    FROM VOL. 84
    Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
  • The formation of affections —
    FROM VOL. 101
    James K. A. Smith explains how education always involves the formation of affections and how the form of Christian education should imitate patterns of formation evident in historic Christian liturgy. (15 minutes)
  • A Christian philosophy of integrated education —
    FROM VOL. 61
    Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 minutes)
  • Education for human flourishing — Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
  • The social irrelevance of secular higher education —
    FROM VOL. 85
    Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)
  • The history of Christianity and higher education —
    FROM VOL. 50
    In tracing Christianity’s relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God’s ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)
  • In praise of a hierarchy of taste — In a lecture at a CiRCE Institute conference, Ken Myers presented a rebuttal to the notion that encouraging the aesthetic appreciation of “higher things” is elitist and undemocratic. (58 minutes)
  • Prudence in politics —
    FROM VOL. 146
    Henry T. Edmondson, III talks about Flannery O’Connor’s understanding of political life, which was influenced by a range of thinkers including Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Eric Voegelin, and Russell Kirk. (19 minutes)
  • Flannery O’Connor and Robert Giroux —
    FROM VOL. 147
    Biographer and priest Patrick Samway talks about the relationship between fiction writer Flannery O’Connor and the legendary editor Robert Giroux. (21 minutes)
  • The dangers of the life of the mind — Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., on why Flannery O’Connor encouraged the cultivation of “Christian skepticism”
  • Remembering Miss O’Connor — Literary critic Richard Gilman shares impressions of his relationship with Flannery O’Connor
  • God is in the details — Flannery O’Connor on why stories rely on the particularities of reality
  • The artist’s commitment to truth — Fr. Damian Ference, author of Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist, explores the depths to which Flannery O’Connor was steeped in Thomistic philosophy. (18 minutes)
  • Flannery O’Connor and Thomistic philosophy — Fr. Damian Ference explores the depths to which Flannery O’Connor was steeped in Thomistic philosophy, as evidenced by her reading habits, letters, prayer journal, and, of course, essays and fiction. (48 minutes)
  • How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
  • On wonder, wisdom, worship, and work — Classical educator Ravi Jain dives deeply into the nature, purpose, and interconnectedness of the liberal, common, and fine arts. (43 minutes)
  • Orienting reason and passions — In an essay titled “The Abolition of Mania” (Modern Age, Spring 2022), Michael Ward applies C. S. Lewis’s insights to the polarization that afflicts modern societies. (16 minutes)
  • At the trailhead of a long trek — Jessica Hooten Wilson on the discovery of a literary remnant
  • Christian education and pagan literature — Kyle Hughes on learning from Basil of Caesarea about the curricular choices for Christian educators
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 160 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jessica Hooten Wilson, Kyle Hughes, Gil Bailie, D. C. Schindler, Paul Tyson, and Holly Ordway
  • Teaching for wonderfulness — Stratford Caldecott on why education is about how we become more human, and therefore more free
  • Education and human be-ing in the world — In championing a classical approach to teaching, Stratford Caldecott was an advocate for a musical education, affirming the harmonious unity in Creation. (26 minutes)
  • Maintaining a connected grasp of things — Ian Ker summarizes the central concern of John Henry Newman’s educational philosophy as developed in The Idea of a University
  • The university and the unity of knowledge — Biographer Ian Ker discusses John Henry Newman’s understanding the goal of “mental cultivation.” (17 minutes)
  • The future of Christian learning — Historian Mark Noll insists that for Christian intellectual life to flourish, a vision for comprehensive and universal social and cultural consequences of the Gospel has to be assumed. (18 minutes)
  • Earthly things in relation to heavenly realities — In this lecture, Ken Myers argues that the end of education is to train students to recognize what is really real. The things of this earth are only intelligible in light of heavenly realities. (59 minutes)
  • Sustaining a heritage of wisdom — Louise Cowan (1916–2015) explains how the classics reach the deep core of our imagination and teach us to order our loves according to the wholeness of reality. (16 minutes)
  • Parsing the intellectual vocation — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose. (39 minutes)
  • Teachers and Learners — Ian Ker shares John Henry Newman’s ideals of learning, and Mark Schwehn discusses the virtues of good teachers. (27 minutes)
  • Art and the truth of things — Joseph Nicolello explains the origins and themes of his imaginary dialogue between Jacques Maritain and Flannery O’Connor. (28 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
  • Visionary education — Josef Pieper on the mistake of confusing education with mere training
  • On the re-enchantment of education — Stratford Caldecott on teaching in light of cosmic harmony
  • Healthy habits of mind — Scott Newstok describes how many efforts at educational reform have become obstacles to thinking well, and he offers a rich and evocative witness to a better way of understanding what thinking is. (20 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 151 — FEATURED GUESTS: Richard Stivers, Holly Ordway, Robin Phillips, Scott Newstok, Junius Johnson, and Peter Mercer-Taylor
  • The dismissal of standards as cultural imperialism — Rochelle Gurstein on the loss of “principled debate about the quality and character of our common world”
  • Wise use of educational technologies — David I. Smith articulates the difficulties Christian schools face as they seek to use technology in a faithful way. (24 minutes)
  • Educational provocations — Steve Talbott on establishing ends for education before selecting means
  • The flickering of the American mind — Diana Senechal on problems of distraction in education
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 150 — FEATURED GUESTS: David I. Smith, Eric O. Jacobsen, Matthew Crawford, Andrew Davison, Joseph E. Davis, and Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
  • From enthusiasm to discernment — Hans Urs von Balthasar on how the assumption that taste is entirely subjective is a function of immaturity
  • How should we then teach? — Following three years of research, David I. Smith discusses what he and his colleagues learned about how educational technologies can be profitable servants and not tyrannical masters. (56 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 147 — FEATURED GUESTS: R. Jared Staudt, Jason Peters, D. C. Schindler, Craig Gay, Mary Hirschfeld, and Patrick Samway
  • The Liberal Arts tradition, II — context and extension — Kevin Clark explains how the book he co-authored defines a framework in which the Trivium and the Quadrivium are the core of a curriculum that includes piety, gymnastics, music, philosophy, and theology. (20 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 146 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Mitchell, Hans Boersma, Henry T. Edmondson, III, Brian Clayton, Douglas Kries, Conor Sweeney, and Carole Vanderhoof
  • Freedom and equality according to Flannery O’Connor — Three guests discuss Flannery O’Connor’s ideas: Henry T. Edmondson, III, on O’Connor’s understanding of political life; Ralph C. Wood, on O’Connor as a “hillbilly Thomist”; and Susan Srigley, on O’Connor’s sacramental and incarnational fiction. (18 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 145 — FEATURED GUESTS: David I. Smith, Bruce Hindmarsh, Jason Baxter, John Fea, Laurie Gagne, and Matthew O’Donovan 
  • On Christian teaching and forming Christian minds — David I. Smith argues that teaching methods are as important as educational content in forming Christian minds. (9 minutes)
  • The Practice of Christian Pedagogy, Volume II — David I. Smith argues that more attention needs to be given to the meaning conveyed in teaching methods and assumptions about teaching.(63 minutes)
  • Thoughts about higher education — Four thoughtful academics discuss how the fact of the Incarnation should inform the ends of higher education. (16 minutes)
Tags: