Q: What do you feel the benefits of being well read are? Why should students take the time to read classics that may seem irrelevant to our current society?

A: Yes, a question that’s important and tough to answer. The benefits of being well read are endless, but you don’t know that up front. It’s not like a retail transaction where you can see the obvious value of something you want to purchase. Nor does it obviously affect status like training to be a pilot with the payoff being perceived before you begin. The payoff for being well read will never be apparent until after you are well through it. So why do it? I would say the short answer is satisfaction. You get a sense of satisfaction from having mastered anything difficult and worthwhile like playing an instrument or speaking a new language. It’s the same with reading classics. Also, it gives one that all important sense of getting the big picture about what is best among the great minds of our culture. You don’t know who you are or what your culture is worth until you compare who you are presently to the past.

Q: Who is most likely to spend a lifetime teaching the classics?

A: To those who have a sense that we can recover greatness, transmitting the value of the classics is the whole point. We believe in the value of passing on the great treasures of thought in the past and that it’s the whole point of college education. Those of us who teach classics don’t care how it gets done, only that it happens. Those who oppose us, I will call them “moderns” here for ease of use, don’t think like this at all. They believe in reinforcing the attachment to the institution first and making the students feel good so that they won’t run away [laughs]. The moderns believe that history and classical literature only obfuscate the roles they want to reflect as egalitarians. On the other hand, they want to make it clear that they are quite hip when it comes to what’s in vogue, and that that’s reason enough to be on their side. They come up with assignments they know students can accomplish without any risk. (Math and science people aren’t included here because the value and relevance of what they do for society is obvious.) This is what we traditionalist classicists regard as mind-numbing paper shuffling, which the moderns legitimate by calling it “assessment” or “critical thinking.” I always want to say as a rebuttal, well, how did Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard universities get on for centuries without assessment for crying out loud? Of course, they were transmitting culture, content they thought was vitally important that all students know. We traditionalists think great content should be the only focus. How we do it is up to the trust between teacher and student. The moderns are usually administrators with all the power, though, since this paper shuffling is the easiest and direct route to convincing others you’ve been doing something worthwhile [laughs].

Q: What do you think is the main reason people don’t like to read?

A: It requires patience and a long learning curve. This has gone out of fashion in our technology drenched climate. But to be fair, even in the old days before we had modern communications, few people pursued it. Perhaps, it’s something God gives you, like a talent for singing. I’ve always wondered about it myself.

Q: What are the consequences that we may face in our lifetimes, of having a culture that does not read or write on a relatively regular basis?

A: Well, we will descend into intellectual laziness and general disconnectedness. I think the main risk is that everyone will be the same. True individualism has nothing to do with body piercing [laughs] but with how you think. Culture is an achievement to those of us who are classicists, an attainment. We don’t define it like anthropologists who think it’s just whatever you happen to be doing. If it’s not taught, it will die, as it is doing, and pretty soon there will be no reason for anything but training manuals for new technologies. If you want to see the perils of being without culture, watch reality TV. Those people scare me because they are nothing more than the sum of their appetites. Mindlessness is the cost of giving up the struggle.

Q: For the average college student, what is the best way of finding a book and staying with it?

A: Well, rarely does anything good come by chance and isolation One can’t simply pick up a classic in history and literature and understand it, just like you wouldn’t pick up a French horn and expect to play it without training, without an introduction. Introductory courses in humanities and literature—we academics call them “surveys” because they are a carefully chosen representation of a period of time—are best because you get the context of everything else that was happening in the period. My advice would be to pick a favorite period in history, and then read as many classics on the reading list as you can take. Then, when inspiration strikes, start another list. Pretty soon you will take up a new work because it’s naturally interesting. Having a friend tell you about it is very important too. I didn’t know anything about classical music, not really, until I was over 30. I was fortunate to meet someone who valued it and I took my cue from these tastes and now I can’t imagine life without it. I think college students have plenty of time to get acquainted with all this. It’s a myth that it must be done before one leaves college. It’s a life-long adventure, as they say.

Dr. Christopher Coulter is an associate professor of English with a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.