Orality Literacy, And the Tradition‪.‬

I WANT TO DISCUSS what I take to be the basic, or the deep, justification of the traditional curriculum. By "the traditional curriculum," I mean the Greek and Roman classics, the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and items from modern and national literatures. I would be perfectly happy to endorse the list in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon (1997). But I also mean by "the traditional curriculum" the basic training in literacy that comes before any acquaintance with the classics, or with a literature of any kind. It is worth remembering that alphabetic literacy, the precondition of literacy in the larger sense, constitutes a very recent development in the half million years or so of incontestable human presence. The literary tradition is the cumulus of a particular type of intellectual activity that first became possible less than three thousand years ago in Syria and the Levant and, a bit later, in the Greek cities from Ionia to Magna Graecia. Just how much this activity differed from anything else that human beings had ever done I shall try to indicate in what follows. That the alphabet itself might be, in its way, the first great work of literature in the Western tradition, is not a thought that most of us are used to thinking. (On the contrary, we take the alphabet for granted.) Yet there could well be a pay-off in contemplating the ABC's anew.