Jonathan Who?

It been a while since I posted. My excuse: I have been both busy and lazy. I was shook out of my inattention during a trip to Borders last Friday night. I was in the literature section immediately adjacent to the religion section. There was a high school girl and her mother standing at the divider between the two sections. The mother asked "Now who is this man we’re looking for?" The girl responds, "Jonathan Edwards." The mother is unfamiliar with the name and asks, "Who is he and what’s so special about him?" The girl responds, "In the colonial days he was a preacher who used guilt manipulation and terror to try to force people to convert to Christianity. He would tell stories that were like horror movies about what will happen to you if you didn’t join his church." She said a good bit more along the same lines but those words are lost in the fog of my memory.

I was a bit shocked and, although I was tempted to step around the divider and engage them in conversation, I remained frozen in place trying to figure out where this young girl got those ideas. It was clear from listening how quick and sure her answer was that she had heard this from someone. A few days later I shared this incident with a friend. He explained that many schools today have so "dumbed-down" the study of literature that almost all they read are excerpts. He further explained that there are curriculum in use in some public schools that contain a portion of Edward’s sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (the most graphic portions). The curriculum gives little context for the sermon as a whole or the portions read. It is very likely that a teacher who is no friend to Christianity could color his introduction to convey to the class what the girl repeated.

What a tragedy that so many young people can come away from high school with such a false opinion of one of our Nation’s greatest minds. But maybe the bigger tragedy is the way literature is being taught. It seems the curriculum writers have taken as gospel the notion that all teenagers have short attention spans and cannot listen (or read) for periods longer than a few minutes at a time. Computer games, music videos, text messages all train the recipient to "get it and go." A couple of movies I have watched (Example: Bourne Ultimatum ) change scenes so rapidly that it gives me a headache. This is what the kids get on video games. I’m sure somewhere the argument is used that if we try to teach literature the "old" way we will lose the kids and they won’t read at all. I just can’t believe that a good story has lost all its magic.