ARISTOTLE?! This one word, spoken with an air of incredulity, is often the response I get when I tell people which authors we cover in my Greek literature class.
This is frequently followed up with, “How old are these students again?”
While the first question is one that I have come to expect, Aristotle, after all, is not often included in high school level courses, it is the second question that chafes.
The first reason for my bristling is very simple. How can you reasonably do a Greek literature survey and leave out Aristotle? The short answer is you can’t, no matter how difficult the content may be.
The suggestion of leaving out Aristotle because he is difficult reading, however, points to a deeper and more problematic trend in modern education: pigeon-holing students and shielding them from challenges.
My first real encounter with this mentality was when my older son was in public kindergarten. The principal of that school only allowed children his age to check out picture books from the school library. He dutifully brought them home, but they seldom got looked out. When I confronted the principal with the fact that he was already reading chapter books, she claimed that these were the books for his age level and that a person can always get something out of what they read. Luckily, we had an ally in the school librarian, beloved Becky who smuggled my son wonderful, challenging reading on the sly. The words of that principal have always stuck with me, though. She was right that someone can always get something out of what they read, but why can’t this go the other direction?
The truth is it can.
In all the years I have been having high school students read Aristotle, I have never had a student not get something out of the reading. What students get tends to be widely varied and is reliant upon many factors. Interestingly enough, age isn’t one of them. Experience is probably the largest factor. Experience with philosophy certainly helps, as does experience with reading other complicated material. Sometimes this experience comes with age, sometimes it does not. But everyone must start somewhere, and for many students, this is their first encounter with truly challenging reading. Yes, some will complain; others will thrill to the challenge, but all come out proud of what they have accomplished. A few even become philosophy majors in college.
Learning to master difficult reading is a skill and one that takes practice. Every text is different, and mastery won’t necessarily come the first time something is read. I describe the process to my students with the analogy of painting walls in a house. Sometimes you will cover the wall with one coat of paint. Sometimes it will take a few coats for it to be fully covered. But some paint will always stick to that wall and that is just fine. Nobody should expect you to paint the Sistine Chapel the first time you pick up a brush.
In her book, Walking on Water, acclaimed author Madeleine L ’Engle recalls the benefits she gained from reading her parents books as a child. Some things went over her head the first time she read them because they were completely outside of her frame of reference, but many things stuck. Among these were concrete things like new topics, ideas, and vocabulary, but some things were more esoteric and potentially more important. Access to challenging reading gave her freedom, fostered creativity, and what may seem counter-intuitive, instilled in her an underlying confidence in her own abilities.
In keeping students from challenging reading, we run the risk of underestimating their abilities or worse, causing them to underestimate their own. If we can abandon the idea that students must understand something perfectly the first time they are exposed, we do them the greatest service. People are like goldfish, they will grow to the size of the tank you put them in. Let’s give them an aquarium, not a fishbowl.
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