eorizing metacritical, philosophical, and at times of a stupefying verbt ity it has provided a buttress for the academii gents. We are living at a time when all the regnant world systems that have sustained distorted) Western intellectual life, from theolc ideologies, are taken to be in severe collaps leads to a mood of skepticism, an agnosticism ( ment, sometimes a world-weary nihilism in whit the most conventional minds begin to questio distinctions of value and the value of distinct you can find projections of racial, class, and bias in both a Western bv Louis L Amour and ; cal Greek play, and if you have decided to rej  elitism  said to be at the core of literary distil then you might as well teach the Western as th< play. You can make the same political poin more easily, in  studying" the Western. And happen not to be well informed about Greek   it certainly makes things still easier.
I grew up with the conviction that what Ge kacs calls  the classical heritage of mankir precious legaev. It came out of historical stances often appalling, filled with injusti outrage. It was often, in consequence, alloy* prejudice and flawed svmpathies. Still, it was a 1 that had been salvaged from the nightmares, o< ally the glories, of historv. and now we would  ours,  we who came from poor and worki families. This  heritage of mankind (which eludes, of course. Romantic and modernist < had been denied to the masses of ordinary trained into the stupefaction of accepting, ev brating, their cultural deprivations. One task c cal consciousness was therefore to enable the n share in what had been salvaged from the p  literature, art. music, thought and thereby t an active relation with these. That is whv many
236
not just socialists but liberals, democrats, and those without political tags, kept struggling for universal education. It was not a given; it had to be won. Often, wnning proved to be vety hard.	 
Knowledge of the past, we felt, could humanize by promoting distance from ourselves and our narrow habits, and this could promote critical thought. Even partly to grasp a significant experience or literary work of the past would require historical imagination, a sense of othei times, which entailed moral imagination, a sense of other wavs. It would create a kinship with those who had come before us, hoping and suffering as we have, seeking through language, sound, and color to leave behind something of enduring value.
By now we can recognize that there was a certain naivete in this outlook. The assumption of progress m education turned out to be as problematic as similar assumptions elsewhere in tfe. There was an underestimation of human recalcitrance and sloth. 1 here was a failure to recognize what 1 v1UIT l'as taught us: that aesthetic sen-si t ity by no means assures ethical value. There was itte anticipation of the profitable industry of  mass cuture, with its shallow kitsch and custom-made reck. Nevertheless, insofar as we retain an attachment t0 t e democratic idea, we must hold fast to an educational vision somewhat like the one I ve sketched. Per-aps it is more an ideal to be approached than a goal 0 e achieved; no matter. I like the epigrammatic exaggeration, if it is an exaggeration, of John Dewey s remark that  the aim of education is to enable individ-UaJ cont'nue their education. 
his vision of culture and education started, I supPose, at some point in the late eighteenth century or e early nineteenth century. It was part of a great ^veep of human aspiration drawing upon Western tra-'tions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. It spoke in behalf of such liberal values as the autonomy the self, tolerance for a plurality of opinions, the 'ghts of oppressed national and racial groups, and so n, the claims of the women s movements. To be vUre  these values were frequently violated that has een true for every society in every phase of world '^toi-y. But the criticism of such violations largely in-the declared values themselves, and this remains rue h>r all our contemporary insurgencies. Some may sneer at  Western hegemony,  but knowingly or not, ey do so in the vocabulary of Western values.
fo invoking the  classical heritage of mankind  I on t propose anything fixed and unalterable. Not at ?   There are, say, seven or eight writers and a simi-ar number of social thinkers who are of such pre-entinence that they must be placed at the very center 0 this heritage; but beyond that, plenty of room rebins for disagreement. All traditions change, simply through survival. Some classics die. Who now reads ^ ostor A loss, but losses form part of tradition too. "hid new arrivals keep being added to the roster of c assies it is not handed down from Mt. Sinai or the
51. Value of tl
University of Chicago. It is composed and fot by cultivated men and women. In a course r students a mere sample of literature, there si included some black and women writers who, of inherited bias, have been omitted in the p; think we must give a central position to what I John Searle in a recent New York Review of Boot specifies as  a certain Western intellectual t that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein ii ophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in litera It is essential to the liberal education of you and women in the United States that they shi ceive some exposure to at least some of th works of this intellectual tradition. 
Nor is it true that most of the great works of the bleakly retrograde in outlook-to suppose that is a cultural illiteracy. Bring together in a course or thought selections from Plato and Aristotle, Mac and Rousseau, Hobbes and Locke, Nietzsche and Marx and Mill, Jefferson and Dewey, and you have variety of opinions, often clashing with one another, times elusive and surprising, always richly complex, are some of the thinkers with whom to begin, if on] to deviate from. At least as critical in outlook are n the great poets and novelists. Is there a more pene historian of selfhood than Wordsworth? A more st critic of society than the late Dickens? A mind devoted to ethical seriousness than George Eliot? A si critic of the corrupting effects of money than Bal Melville?
These writers don t necessarily endorse our ci opinions and pieties why should they? We read for what Robert Frost calls  counterspeech,  the er and brilliance of other minds, and if we can gc yond  them, it is only because they are behind What is being invoked here is not a stuffy obei before dead texts from a dead past, but rather a cal engagement with living texts from powerful r still very much  active  in the present. And we si want our students to read Shakespeare and To Jane Austen and Kafka, Emily Dickinson and Lee Senghor, not because they  support  one or am view of social revolution, feminism, and black esteem. They don t, in man}  instances; and we < read them for the sake of enlisting them in a cau our own. We should want students to read such w so that they may learn to enjoy the activity of mine pleasure of forms, the beaut}  of language in s the arts in their own right.
By contrast, there is a recurrent clamor in the versity for  relevance,  a notion hard to resist wishes to be known as irrelevant?) but procee from an impoverished view of political life, anc often ephemeral in its excitements and transient impact. I recall seeing in the late 1960s large stac Eldridge Cleaver s Soul on Ice in the Stanford Univ, bookstore. Hailed as supremely  relevant  and w described as a work of genius, this book has fallen disuse in a mere two decades. Cleaver himself drifte into some sort of spiritualism, ceasing thereby t
9. UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL PLURALISM
 relevant.  Where, then, is Soul on Ice today? What lasting value did it impart?
American culture is notorious for its indifference to the past. It suffers from the provincialism of the contemporary, veering wildly from fashion to fashion, each touted by the media and then quickly dismissed. But the past is the substance out of which the present has been formed, and to let it slip away from us is to acquiesce in the thinness that characterizes so much of our culture. Serious education must assume, in part, an adversarial stance toward the very society that sustains it a democratic society makes the wager that it s worth supporting a culture of criticism. But if that criticism loses touch with the heritage of the past, it becomes weightless, a mere compendium of momentary complaints.
Several decades ago, when I began teaching, it could be assumed that entering freshmen had read in high school at least one play by Shakespeare and one novel by Dickens. That wasn t much, but it was something. These days, with the disintegration of the high schools, such an assumption can seldom be made. The really dedicated college teachers of literature feel that, given the bazaar of elective courses an entering student encounters and the propaganda in behalf of  relevance,  there is likely to be only one opportunity to acquaint students with a smattering indeed, the merest fragment of the great works from the past. Such teachers take pleasure in watching the minds and sensibilities of young people opening up to a poem by Wordsworth, a story by Chekhov, a novel by Ellison. They feel they have planted a seed of responsiveness that, with time and luck, might continue to grow. And if this is said to be a missionary attitude, why should anyone quarrel with it?
II.
et me now mention some of the objections one hears in academic circles to the views I have put down here, and then provide brief replies.
By requiring students to read what you call  clas
sics  in introductory courses, you impose upon them a certain worldview and that is an elitist act.
In some rudimentary but not very consequential sense, all education entails the  imposing  of values. There are people who say this is true even when children are taught to read and write, since it assumes that reading and writing are  good. 
In its extreme version, this idea is not very interesting, since it is not clear how the human race could survive if there were not some  imposition  from one generation to the next. But in a more moderate version, it is an idea that touches upon genuine problems
Much depends on the character of the individual teacher, the spirit in which he or she approaches a dialogue of Plato, an essay by Mill, a novel by D. H Lawrence. These can be, and have been, used to pummel an ideological line into the heads of students
(who often show a notable capacity for emptying out again). Such pummeling is possible for all of view but seems most likely in behalf of total: politics and authoritarian theologies, which d their adherents to fanaticism. On the other han texts I ve mentioned, as well as many others, c taught in a spirit of openness, so that studen trained to read carefully, think independently, a: questions. Nor does this imply that the teacher his or her opinions. Being a teacher means ha certain authority, but the student should be a confront that authority freely an