Don't teach students to *appreciate* literature

C.S. Lewis on literary education

“There is a good deal to be said for excluding literature from school curricula altogether. I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be to forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to disobey you.”

C.S. Lewis claims there are two forms of education when it comes to teaching literature: the Parthenon and the Optative. The Parthenon focuses on “hard, dry things like grammar, and dates, and prosody.” The Optative “begins in ‘Appreciation’ and ends in gush.” Lewis bluntly asserts that when the Parthenon method fails, it has, “at the very least, taught the boy what knowledge is like.” But when the Optative method fails, it “fails most disastrously when it most succeeds. It teaches a man to feel vaguely cultured while he is in fact a dunce.