‘Close reading’ is a solution for students looking to live a good life
What is the purpose of education? For several decades, dating at least back to 1994 and former President Bill Clinton’s School-to-Work Opportunities Act, Democrats and Republicans agreed — the purpose of education is economic: to gain skills for jobs and to build human capital.
Both former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson were enthusiastic about the implementation of the Common Core State Standards in 2010 that reshaped K-12 public education in the U.S.
But the neoliberal consensus is dissolving. As the Trump administration largely abandons the Department of Education and abdicates leadership on education policy, a conservative movement has mobilized to institute what it calls classical education.
Hundreds of schools have opened in the last few years serving hundreds of thousands of students, in pursuit of “the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.”
Meanwhile, Republicans have supported the spread of civics centers at colleges and universities, which privilege citizenship, civic leadership, and virtue over human capital.
The left, meanwhile, has persisted with a merely economic rationale. It is a mistake to cede the argument for what we might call the good life to the right. We should pursue a progressive educational philosophy directed toward human flourishing. Here is what it might look like.
What Aristotle can teach us about achievement of character
“The good life” and “human flourishing” are code, among ethicists, that summons Aristotle. To approach the good life, according to Aristotle, we must acquire aretē, usually translated as virtue. But we need not inherit the moralistic implications virtue has acquired for us.
Acquiring aretē does not necessarily make you a good person in the Christian-inflected way we tend to think about that phrase today. Rather, aretē is an achievement of character that allows you to reach the goods intrinsic to practices: the patience required to become good at a sport; the amiability that enables you to enjoy it, win or lose, for how it’s played.
Education is currently dominated by the language of skills. As an outcome of classes, students learn skills that make them employable. Skills has become a neoliberal term.
Skills are directed toward an ultimate goal of economic growth. By speaking instead of virtues we subordinate economic growth to the good life and human flourishing. For the left, we must strive to make the good life and human flourishing achievable for everyone in society. The virtues acquired in education ought thus to keep such a just society ever in view.
What could such an educational philosophy look like practically? Schools, colleges, and universities abound in practices ripe for the cultivation of virtues, each with their own intrinsic ends: archaeological dig, chemistry lab, ethnography, mathematical proof. As an English professor, I will explain with a practice at the center of my discipline: close reading.
Close reading is a practice that turns details into evidence for arguments, beautifully made, about what a text means and how it works. I instruct students to notice a detail in a poem, play, story or novel, something that baffles, delights, startles, strikes.
The em-dash, say, near the end of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”: “I— / I took the one less traveled by.” I’m intrigued by the dash, by the little stuttering repetition of “I” it enables, a hesitation in telling the climax of the parable. Why? Why hesitate? The dash feels pregnant to me with meaning. Close reading is midwifery for such meaning. Students begin with a detail and end with an essay.
These three virtues are essential to close reading
To close read well requires extensive practice across months and years. Maybe in classrooms, maybe in bars debating movies or music. To do it well you need to cultivate at least three virtues.
I associate these with three branches of philosophy.
- Accountability is an epistemological virtue; it facilitates knowledge.
- Sensibility is an aesthetic virtue; it facilitates the appreciation of art.
- Gentleness is an ethical virtue; it facilitates right action.
By accountability, I mean the ability to give an account of oneself and others. Close reading teaches you to find language to explain why a text feels like it does, to look inward to understand the sources of that feeling, to know yourself. Sometimes we feel and think based on misunderstandings.
Close reading demands we recognize misunderstandings and correct them, because we must be accountable not only to ourselves, but to the text. In saying what it means, we must do justice to it. And close reading is always addressed to another, the person you’re telling, to whom you are accountable for making yourself clear and interesting.
Sensibility cultivates the sensitivity of your sensorium. It names your capacity to perceive with all your senses, to feel the world with your body. A good close reader attunes herself to affects and rhythms with her eyes and mind as much as her gut and nape.
I mean something specific by gentleness: the capacity to cultivate potential in others. Gentleness, as such, is a temporal virtue, requiring patience. Close reading takes time. It takes time to let the meaning of a text unfold for us. When we try too hard to find meaning, it eludes us, returning when we loosen up, on a walk, or in the shower, or when we have lain down to bed.
Each of these virtues cultivates the good life for ourselves while reminding us, insisting, that we are embedded in society and dependent on others. No doubt, close reading also teaches skills that enhance human capital. That’s not enough.
It’s easy to be rich and live poorly. We already have the practices in place for education to teach us how to live well, if we choose. Living well ought not be only for the right, or the wealthy; a left education of virtues teaches that we need to remake the world so that living well is for everyone.
Dan Sinykin is an assistant professor of English at Emory University. He is the author of “American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse” (Oxford University Press, 2020) and “Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed Book Publishing and American Literature” (Columbia University Press, 2023). He is also the co-founder and co-editor of the Post45 Data Collective, which peer reviews and houses post-1945 literary and cultural data on an open-access website.
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