The crisis in American elementary-school literacy has been apparent for decades. Thankfully, E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum, developed by the distinguished educator in the 1990s, has given us an excellent response and antidote.¹ By providing a carefully sequenced K–6 curriculum with an emphasis on phonics, arithmetic, and challenging history and science components, Hirsch and his associates have restored serious content and common sense to early schooling, giving at least a fighting chance of mitigating the century-long dumbing-down initiated by John Dewey and the “progressives.” If only our teachers’ colleges and schools of education (and philanthropists) would attend to Hirsch’s magnificent, public-spirited body of work and the achievements of schools that have adopted his curriculum!

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), the crisis in literacy and literary studies in high school and college has moved from the chronic to the acute stage, as thoughtful observers and teachers have begun to recognize.² AI radically changes the nature and reliability of out-of-class, unsupervised written assignments. The ease with which students can splice together AI written responses to prompts presents teachers with potentially insurmountable problems of invigilation and evaluation.

An equally grave problem concerns the content of the Western literary studies curriculum, whose long history requires some review as our current practices have clearly lost credibility and effectiveness. The idealistic over-valuation of “imagination” and “aesthetic experience” has led to their decline into a kind of mystifying, inert residue that has become unintelligible to a large majority of K–12 students and even to many of their teachers.

Since the time of classical rhetoricians such as Plato, Aristotle, Horace, and Quintilian, Western ideas of “liberal education,” and especially of oratory and writing, have contained an important component of ethical instruction. Thinkers such as St. Augustine, Dante, and Sir Philip Sidney gave more explicit Christian form to this tradition but expanded on it, often conceiving their classical predecessors as intuitively preparing the way for the fuller literary-ethical truth of the Christian “Word” and world. These three stood in direct succession to Plato both rhetorically (Plato himself a great literary fabulist) and philosophically (also a great metaphysician, theologian, and moralist). Augustine first found the theological “beauty ever ancient, ever new” (pulchritudo tam antiqua tam nova) that brought him to the Christian faith in the writings of the Neoplatonists.

English-language neoclassical rhetoricians such as Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Samuel Johnson—all Christians—built on this great traditional inheritance in both theoretical and literary works. Among them Johnson (1709–1784) produced perhaps the most impressive and rationally authoritative body of “logocentric,” classical-Christian literature and commentary ever created, encompassing biography, lexicography, and literary criticism. Johnson’s articulation of the chief features of ontology, epistemology, ethics, rhetoric, and literary theory remains judicious and influential. He makes a profound, moving, and ultimately egalitarian appeal to the common reader, eschewing both specialist discourse and extravagant, inflated claims for academic education. His perennially valuable achievement is one of the greatest educational assets of Western civilization.

Johnson was sure that memory was the very essence and basis of human sanity, wisdom, and civilization itself. He was also keenly, almost clairvoyantly, attuned to the ambiguity of imagination—a  concept destined for a central place in our modern understanding of the human psyche and cultural life.³ While Sidney, Donne, and Shakespeare appreciated the power and exuberance of human imagination, fantasy, and fancy—“the zodiac of each poet’s wit” (Sidney)—they were still vividly rooted in a classical-Christian tradition that prized memory, imitation, and belief over novelty.

The concept of the “moral imagination” was implicit in the long classical-Christian tradition outlined here, but it was Johnson’s friend Edmund Burke (1729–1797) who gave to it a powerful, eloquent formulation that has had historical and political implications among conservative thinkers and traditionalist educators down to our own time. At its best, this concept of moral imagination entails the obligation to project one’s thinking and feeling sympathetically into the lives of others in such a way as to increase both accuracy of conceptualization about them and actual justice in human affairs, from manners to politics.

But the transition of aesthetic thinking from memory, tradition, and theology to imagination, individuality, and “Nature” as the touchstones of creativity was the creation of what came to be called the Romantic movement—particularly of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Dickens, with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle very much influenced by German philosophy.⁴ The key concept thus came to be imagination, with the ambiguities Johnson knew and feared, as opposed to memory, although Blake and Coleridge still wrote within the Platonist–Christian tradition.

Percy Shelley published his militantly secular and “progressive” Defense of Poetry in 1821, and the new manifesto made vast claims for the importance of poets and other writers, now seen as free from trammeling traditions and sobering memories. “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration [sic]; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present [sic]. . . . Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Johnson himself had gently satirized such aesthetic-prophetic extravagance sixty years before in his novel Rasselas (1759).

But a great shift had begun to take place, though later in the English-speaking world than the French. The earlier radicalism of French thinkers and writers such as Diderot, Rousseau, and the Marquis de Sade had already displaced God and theology with “Nature” and secular anthropology, with large-scale political and educational consequences throughout the West that are still with us.⁵ Shelley was a portent of things to come in the Anglophone world, paving the way for agile nihilists such as Oscar Wilde and Lytton Strachey and later a veritable luxury liner full of self-assertive modern American and European artists and writers.⁶

By contrast, in the nineteenth-century novels of Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Alessandro Manzoni, the older theological-moral tradition of literary inspiration reached great heights of achievement, with strong elements of historical allusion and contemporary relevance. In nineteenth-century France, however, and later throughout the West, the ascendant inspirational forces for fiction were concepts of “Nature,” imagination, and self-expression. The aestheticism that emerged has been with us ever since and is now our main model of literary achievement. The central belief in “moral imagination” that inspired Burke, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, and Anglo-American humanistic educators such as Irving Babbitt, John Erskine (“the moral obligation to be intelligent”), F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling, and Northrop Frye is now only a memory.

The consequences for high school and college literary studies are massive. Modernist literary classics are no longer “ethical” or “humanistic,” the words themselves sounding nostalgic and ironic; they are about self-expression as the summum bonum—“songs of myself” everywhere. Radically relativistic and skeptical French Nietzscheanism swept the academic and “high-cultural” West from the 1960s on; and, despite the fall of European communism in 1990, various highly moralistic forms of Marxist analysis have also sifted down to the masses of university students, augmented by militant ideological teaching, faculty conformity, and subsidized university-press publishing. Of course, Marx and Nietzsche are utterly contradictory and antagonistic to one another, but several generations of their disciples have shown that they can live together in the minds of their partisans (an astonishing feat).

Now, one hundred thirty-five years after the onset of Nietzsche’s terminal madness in Turin, his histrionic literary hysteria, with its moralistic Marxist supplement, has become endemic. Radical subjectivism about knowledge and ethics nevertheless resorts habitually to outraged moral judgments, a paradox that Michael Polanyi called “moral inversion.” Our “high” academic and literary culture once thought of itself as “humanistic,” but that old literary humanism is now so remote from us as to remain only an archaeological phenomenon, what a contemporary Cambridge intellectual historian contemptuously calls “the nostalgic imagination.”⁷

If the preceding analysis is accurate—or at least plausible—the rapid decline in student interest in “humanities” and literature courses is made more explicable. A likely aspect of this decline is that students no longer see “pure fiction”—modernist, self-expressive, and aesthetic-imaginative—as particularly relevant, necessary, or credible. It is, after all, fiction. Add to this the emergence of AI, which is making the invigilation and evaluation of out-of-class writing assignments for their “originality” impossible. The central, “canonical,” “civilizing” role of high-school and college literary studies is increasingly only a memory of older generations. Twentieth-century critics as different as C. S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain, Philip Rieff, Russell Kirk, and Jacques Barzun all saw this coming and wrote illuminatingly about it.

One potentially viable solution is to ally high school literary studies more frequently and explicitly with history. Dickens’s novel about the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), is arguably the most popular novel in the English language. Tolstoy’s novel of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, War and Peace  (1869), may be the greatest novel ever written. Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed (1827), set in Lombardy during a great plague, retains incalculable culture-forming authority in Italy and beyond it. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1975) describes the Soviet Communist world of slave labor camps in what is perhaps the most important literary work of the last hundred years. Contemporary novelists such as the Englishman Piers Paul Read and the Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo (1923–1996) have written excellent historical novels.⁸

In his great short poem “Jordan (1),” George Herbert asks,

Who says that fictions only and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?

Herbert’s rhetorical-philosophical question has both lapidary force and contemporary significance. “Pure” fiction has manifestly failed to provide any stable center for the educational curriculum in Western high schools and colleges. History itself is now thoroughly contested and resented by epistemological skeptics and educational “progressives.” But mature, undeformed persons in all walks of life who have not been “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” know that major historical events have objectively taken place and identifiable historical individuals have actually existed.

Thus historical fiction, grounded in real events and persons, holds a different kind of credibility and authority from “pure” fiction, and it also counteracts speculative skepticism about the grounds of knowledge. As a civilizing antidote to contemporary confusion, it offers a saving hope of renewal, not least in a return to the common sense that was the bread and wine of thoughtful individuals from Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, and the American founders to Dickens, Lincoln, George Orwell, Martin Luther King Jr., and Solzhenitsyn.

1. See, e.g., one of my recent essays on Hirsch, “Spare the Truth, Spoil the Child,” First Things, September 6, 2022; and E. D. Hirsch, Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories (Harvard Education Press, 2016). ↩︎
2. A very good recent essay is Thomas P. Balazs, “AI and the Death of Literary Criticism,” Quillette Daily, May 25, 2025; and see my own review-essay “The Way We Teach Today,” National Review, July 6, 2015. ↩︎
3. See the index under “Imagination” in W. J. Bate, ed., Johnson: Essays from the “Rambler,”  “Adventurer,” and “Idler” (Yale University Press, 1968). Especially relevant are Johnson’s essays on memory: “The Rambler” no. 41 (August 7, 1750), and “The Idler” no. 44 (February 17, 1759), reprinted on pp. 86–92 and 304–07. ↩︎
4. For an important recent discussion by perhaps the finest living educational theorist, see Hirsch, Why Knowledge Matters(note 1 supra), appendix 1, “The Origins of Natural Development Theories of Education,” pp.193–208. ↩︎
5. See my essay “De Sade and His Progeny,” Crisis Magazine, December 1993, reprinted in French in my La restauration de l’homme (Téqui, 2021); Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (Harcourt, Brace, 1996), and Hirsch, Why Knowledge Matters (note 1 supra). ↩︎
6. Philip Rieff’s profound 1983 exposure of the aesthetic nihilism of Oscar Wilde, “The Impossible Culture: Wilde as Modern Prophet,” has been reprinted in Rieff, The Feeling Intellect: Selected Writings, ed. J. B. Imber (University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 273–90. ↩︎
7. Stefan Collini, The Nostalgic Imagination: History in English Criticism (Oxford, 2019). ↩︎
8. See my “Piers Paul Read and the Moral Imagination,” National Review Online, December 12, 2015, and my “Sachiko; Shusaku Endo’s World-Historical Novel,” National Review Online, September 12, 2021. ↩︎