On Literature and Teaching

  (the first part of this post is here ) Q. 4: Is reading educational in and of itself? That one is easy: of course it isn’t. Wait, what? No, it is, of course it is: didn’t you learn while reading? So what do you mean then: which texts? You mean text-books, or novels? You mean entertainment, or serious literary stuff? More to the point: are you being educated just by being exposed to a text? Is it enough to be given an extract from, I don’t know, Shakespeare, for Understanding, Illumination, Depth, to suddenly come down to you? Baudelaire, the French 19 th -century poet, thought it the greatest error possible to confuse Beauty and Morals – more exactly, the confusion between the Beautiful (‘ le Beau ’) and the Good (‘ le Bien ’): ‘ Morality seeks the Good; Science seeks the Truth; poetry – and sometimes the novel – only seek the Beautiful’ . This idea that literature is an immediate path to Morals (i.e. to Thinking, Reflecting, Understand, all those big words), which we could