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Disputes regarding the nature of education have existed for thousands of years, and society has always struggled over the purpose of knowledge. It is easy to forget that these disputes have always existed just as it is easy to forget where we came from.

William Hazlitt, philosopher and influential art and theater critic, was at the center of the debate over whether English literature would be proper for academic studies and if it could be considered a noble pursuit. Some of his strongest arguments regarding the purpose and necessity of literature can be found in his Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth.

In Hazlitt’s day, academia was elitist and refused to accept more modern pursuits: “One cause that might be pointed out here, as having contributed to the long-continued neglect of our earlier writers, lies in the very nature of our academic institutions, which unavoidably neutralizes a taste for the productions of native genius, estranges the mind from the history of our own literature, and makes it in each successive age like a book sealed. The Greek and Roman classics are a sort of privileged text-books, the standing order of the day, in a University education, and leave little leisure from a competent acquaintance with, or due admiration of, a whole host of able writers of our own, who are suffered to moulder in obscurity on the shelves of our libraries, with a decent reservation of one or two top-names, that are cried up for form’s sake, and to save the national character.”

There is much to be admired in a traditional education, especially with a focus on the classics, but Hazlitt despairs that they were embraced at the expense of other talented writers. However, the emphasis on contemporary ideas could go too far because modern doesn’t necessarily denote quality: “It is not possible that the learned professors and the reading public should clash in this way, or necessary for them to use any precaution against each other. But it is not the same with the living languages, where there is danger of being overwhelmed by the crowd of competition; and pedantry has combined with ignorance to cancel their unsatisfied claims.”

A balance needs to be achieved where one studies authors of high quality regardless of the source. Books of quality are important for the soul, and great books from all backgrounds can aid the reader: “They are the nearest to our thoughts: they wind into the heart; the poet’s verse slides into the current of our blood. We read them when young, we remember them when old. We read there of what has happened to others; we feel that it has happened to ourselves. That are to be had everywhere cheap and good. We breathe but the air of books: we owe everything to their authors, on this side barbarism; and we pay them easily with contempt, while living, and with an epitaph when dead!”

Literature is not of a specific topic, style, or age. Instead, its essence is to serve mankind by imparting truth in all varieties. By denying great works, we deny part of ourselves, and we are the lesser for it: “The meagreness of their literary or their bodily fare was at least relished by themselves; and this is better than a surfeit or an indigestion. It is refreshing to look out of ourselves sometimes, not to be always holding the glass to our own peerless perfections: and as there is a dead wall which always intercepts the prospect of the future from our view (all that we can see beyond it is the heavens), it is as well to direct our eyes now and then without scorn to the page of history, and repulsed in our attempts to penetrate the secrets of the next six thousand years, not to turn our backs on the old long syne!”

As people of Hazlitt’s day scoffed at great works, he worried that the art of reading would vanish: “We have lost the art of reading, or the privilege of writing, voluminously, since the days of Addison. Learning no longer weaves the interminable page with patient drudgery, nor ignorance pores over it with implicit faith. As authors multiply in number, books diminish in size; we cannot now, as formerly, swallow libraries whole in a single folio: solid quarto has given place to slender duodecimo, and the dingy letter-press contracts its dimensions, and retreats before the white, unsullied, faultless margin.”

Literacy, except for professional justifications, is dying. It has always been dying, because it is easy to avoid the effort necessary to read and understand great writing. Media has to shrink in size to cater to the tastes of the masses, and we can see the loss in journalism today with lengthy investigative reports being sidelined for short snippets barely containing more than a headline.

Hazlitt worried that the accommodation to an audience who no longer wants to read debases literature as a whole: “The staple commodity, the coarse, heavy, dirty, unwieldy bullion of books is driven out of the market of learning, and the intercourse of the literary world is carried on, and the credit of the great capitalists sustained by the flimsy circulating medium of magazines and reviews. Those who are chiefly concerned in catering for the taste of others, and serving up critical opinions in a compendious, elegant, and portable form, are not forgetful of themselves: they are not scrupulously solicitous, idly inquisitive about the real merits, the bona fide contents of the works they are deputed to appraise and value, any more than the reading public who employ them. They look no farther for the contents of the works than the title page, and pronouce a peremptory decision on its merits or defects by a glance at the name and party of the writer.”

How often do we find ourselves in that same trap? Instead of reading a book, we are quick to read a summary and opine from that. I know many who pontificated on Go Set a Watchman yet never picked up the book. What do we lose when we separate our opinions from their actual source? We are too busy taking second hand summaries, and yet we don’t spend the time to read the rich language that exists. We loose out on the art that make these books great.

Much of Hazlitt’s essay discusses Shakespeare, and in many of his works he argued the necessity of reading the plays instead of watching them. Reading, not watching, relies on the imagination and interacts with the mind more fully. It is not enough to know a plot; art must be experienced fully for its true effect.

In his essay on Othello, Hazlitt argues, “It has been said that tragedy purifies the affections by terror and pity. That is, it substitutes imaginary sympathy for mere selfishness. It gives us a high and permanent interest, beyond ourselves, in humanity as such. It raises the great, the remote, and the possible to an equality with the real, the little and the near. It makes man a partaker with his kind. It subdues and softens the stubbornness of his will. It teaches him that there are and have been others like himself, by showing him as in a glass what they have felt, thought, and done. It opens the chambers of the human heart. It leaves nothing indifferent to us that can affect our common nature. It excites our sensibility by exhibiting the passions wound up to the utmost pitch by the power of imagination or the temptation of circumstances; and corrects their fatal excesses in ourselves by pointing to the greater extent of sufferings and of crimes to which they have led others.”

This education cannot be obtained through trail and error or through worldly experience except in the most extreme and rare of circumstances. Instead, this condensed lesson on human truth can only be found in great literature. To lack literature is to lack a fundamental part of yourself: “The habitual study of poetry and works of imagination is one chief part of a well-grounded education. A taste for liberal art is necessary to complete the character of a gentleman, Science alone is hard and mechanical. It exercises the understanding upon things out of ourselves, while it leaves the affections unemployed, or engrossed with our own immediate, narrow interests.”

If we are going to be a great society, we need literature. We need to inspire reading, and we need to examine what great authors have said so we can better think for ourselves. Second hand reviews and summaries have their place, but they should never be used as an excuse to ignore our own pursuits. We need to be able to return to a time when we could sit with a newspaper for hours at length instead of quickly jumping between websites, looking for headlines that barely give us facts yet let us jump to extreme conclusions.

Academia should be focused on soul-making, not merely on political ideology of any extreme. Students need to be given the tools they need to learn and to appreciate and not given a set of information to memorize and regurgitate on command. The imagination needs to be freed, not bound in chains. Science has its place, but it needs to serve humanity, and we cannot know how to best serve humanity if we do not understand the human condition.

Only art and great literature can shine forth and guide us to truth. Baltimore, for instance, once tried to be the “City that Reads.” It could be one of the best cities if all of its citizens embraced that idea.

This essay was originally published as The Necessity of Reading on August 20, 2015.