What We’re Reading

Shakespeare, Hamlet. “To be, or not to be, that is the question…” Shakespeare’s Hamlet is widely considered his greatest dramatic work, a play dealing with tensions running replete through the human heart, mind, and inner world (and outer world too). What do we make of Hamlet when teaching it? There is the challenge of highlighting how a dramatic play can include so many themes: the cycle of violence, the identify of the self in relationship to others, love, revenge, justice, fatalism, life, death, power politics, irony, the truth of art, and the necessity of lies when scheming politically. While all of the above is important, perhaps the hardest task of reading and teaching Hamlet is actually the most important and common sensical: To think alongside the Bard with the dramatic characters who, despite their names, share the same human nature and reality as you and me.

~ Paul Krause

Russell Kirk, Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning. This month, ahead of my dissertation defense, I spent some time rereading an insightful yet unfortunately out-of-print book, Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning. Published by Russell Kirk in 1978, this book was an episodic history of American universities and colleges from 1953 to the present day. This book is Kirk’s most comprehensive treatment of education, presenting his broader vision for the revitalization of liberal learning. The purpose of education, Kirk taught, is wisdom and virtue. At its best, education fosters order in the soul and order in society—all while passing down a patrimony of culture. Among his contemporaries, Kirk’s educational philosophy bears a resemblance to that of Christopher Dawson and T.S. Eliot. Within this book, Kirk presents concrete proposals for the renewal of American schools and higher education. If the ideas put forward in this book were taken more seriously, then perhaps our institutions of learning in America would be in a healthier state.

~ Darrell Falconburg

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