Peter Wood is president of the invaluable National Association of Scholars, a former professor of anthropology and college provost, and the author of compelling books including 1620, Wrath, A Bee in the Mouth, and (my favorite) Diversity: The Invention of a Concept. He writes with lucidity and grace on questions of history and public policy both in his books and his articles, as in the current Spectator World essay “The dangerous rise of ‘Chinese Bezique.’” A few weeks ago I invited him to write something for Power Line to introduce him to readers unfamiliar with his work and his organization. He has forwarded us this characteristically thoughtful column on reading and education:
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I’ve recently set myself the task of reading The Education of Henry Adams. I haven’t reached the chapter where President Trump issues 43 Executive Orders requiring colleges to give up racial preferences, quit threatening to immolate Jewish faculty, and assign The Art of the Deal to incoming freshmen. But Henry makes it clear that “education” is all-encompassing. Baby Henry enters the picture in 1838 “distinctly branded” and enrolled in what amounts to his home school on Beacon Hill.
The generation of young people about to make the fatal error of enrolling in American colleges and universities could perhaps learn a lot from the Adams family. Gomez, Morticia, and Uncle Fester—that’s Addams with two Ds—don’t count. I am referring to the second and sixth U.S. presidents, John and John Quincy, Henry’s great-grandfather and grandfather. Neither stands out as an especially colorful figure in American history. John’s cousin Samuel at least has a beer named after him.
When The Education of Henry Adams was published posthumously in 1918, it was a runaway success. It took the Pulitzer Prize and was selected by Modern Library as one of the best books of the young century. This was partly because the book offered a compelling interpretation of the age his readers had lived through, and partly because Americans in that time still knew American history well enough to recognize Henry’s antecedents. Today some reminders are in order.
John Adams, our second president, drafted the Massachusetts Constitution, negotiated sole foreign alliances, and pushed for an independent judiciary. He was a patriot and all, and floated the U.S. Navy, but a dull dog between the titanic George Washington and flamboyant Tom Jefferson.
John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, came into office in 1825 with a host of bright ideas for a national marketplace to knit the nation together and plans for roads, canals, and a national university, but very little came of it. It was a bit like the first Trump administration, which also featured great plans frustrated by his opponents. Adams lost control in the midterms and was succeeded as president by the rambunctious Andrew Jackson. The parallel breaks down. The guy who replaced John Quincy had no use for an autopen.
In any case, growing on a vine that had yielded two presidents, young Henry Adams seemed destined for a political career. But he turned off that road almost immediately, and judging by his autobiography, he began drafting his painfully self-conscious “education” at age one. I think of him as an NPC, non-player character in a videogame such as Grand Theft Auto, or for a more elevated cultural reference, he resembles Forrest Gump, if Forrest had been a hyper-articulate, Harvard-educated esthete who was welcome in the drawing rooms of the international elite. Henry, like Forrest, was always inadvertently in the thick of things. Run, Henry, run.
I admit a certain embarrassment that at my age and after a lifetime in higher education, I have never read this book. But I have to spread that embarrassment across many other volumes that an “educated person” was once expected to read. I failed – and will continue to fail — except that early on I was infected with the idea that being an “educated person” was a goal worth pursuing. No one told me I couldn’t do it or that it was foolish to try. It was like trying to drink Lake Champlain dry.
Those infected with this idea, however, are often eager to infect others. As the new semester approaches, for both schools and colleges, I feel the stirring of that old impulse. There are a handful of books that I want everyone to read, not because they need to but because their lives will be a little lesser if they don’t. That handful doesn’t include Henry Adams’ introspective masterpiece. But it does include Don Quixote and Huckleberry Finn. I won’t mention any others because doing so turns the pleasure of discovery into the drudgery of an assignment. But I figure Cervantes and Twain are fireproof.
And what I really want is for Americans to dive into the astonishingly beautiful and deep lake of our national literature and then keep swimming further out into the ocean of civilized thought, reflection, and imagination. That we content ourselves with so little—the umpteenth remake of the same stultifying entertainments — is an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. (And shame on you if you don’t recognize that phrase. Sonnet 129.)
I do, however, keep returning to questions of what people read and why. Reading itself doesn’t make you educated, though it can point in the right direction. Or the wrong direction.
And the wrong can be very wrong indeed. A recent headline in the Epoch Times sounds that note: “When Pol Pot Read a Book on Marx.” The Education of Henry Adams may be tedious but it never inspired someone to commit mass murder.
We should pay attention to the books educators unleash on the young. I see that Valerie Stivers writing on UnHerd has published a column about the “required summer reading for rising ninth graders at my son’s public high school in Brooklyn.” She aptly summarizes the options as a “choice of ephemeral, ideological, and genre fiction.” Stivers makes some excellent points about our rapidly declining literacy. Color me unsurprised.
For seven or eight years, my colleagues and I at the National Association of Scholars ran a little enterprise in which we gathered from colleges and universities across the country the titles of the books they selected for summer reading for their incoming students. We dubbed these “beach books,” and we collected and read many of them. The idea of summer reading for freshmen was born when colleges discovered that their freshmen had read very little — sometimes nothing — in common before setting foot in college. They had at best some shared knowledge of popular music and movies, but even that was thin. No doubt it is even thinner today as digital media cloister people in their own clusters.
Students who lack common points of reference are hard to teach — so said the professors who could remember a time when they could mention To Kill a Mockingbird and students would simply know. One answer was for the class itself to supply the common points of reference, which was fine, except that those common points vanished when the students entered another classroom. Common reading has to be common to the whole school to mean much of anything.
In the days when colleges had a core curriculum that every student was required to take, the commonalities fell naturally into place. When colleges abandoned their core curricula, the fragmentation was complete, “Beach books” were the band-aid the colleges came up with.
When we did our surveys, however, year after year we found that the books selected by colleges for summer reading were overwhelmingly recent: more than 75 percent published in the preceding ten years. They were also overwhelmingly political, dealing with racism, sexism, environmental threats, disability, and oppression of all types. In 2016, the most assigned book was Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. The second most assigned book was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. And generally speaking, the beach books tended to be fairly easy to read. These warm-ups to college were dominated by books that the publishers ranked as junior high school level.
We asked the committees that picked the books why they aimed so low, and we got used to the answer: “book virgins.” The colleges recognized that many students had never previously read an entire book cover to cover. The colleges were protecting the least qualified.
We stopped doing our Beach Book reports in 2019, by which point it was clear that nothing was improving. The selection committees ignored our “Better Books for the Beach” recommendations, and the selection criteria had become ever more intensely politicized. Would things be any different in the summer of 2025?
Judging from Stivers’ essay, no, but let’s strain for the positive. The BLM follies have disappeared. COVID hysteria is gone. Climate hyperventilation has calmed.
So much for straining. Replacing one set of follies we have others. We have the dramatic rise of campus anti-Semitism, robust support for illegal immigrants, anti-ICE protests, and Trump Derangement Syndrome. It will be interesting to see how these matters are filtered into the quasi-curriculum. I note that among the most popular books with college students right now Think Like a Monk, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, and Atomic Habits. Fantasy fiction of the Hunger Games variety is holding first place, and the high school romance comedy The Perks of Being a Wallflower is doing well.
If those are accurate benchmarks, revolutionary fervor is not a best-seller this season. But I wonder. Has anyone asked Mamdani what books he might recommend to freshmen?
I try hard not to despair. Some colleges have also begun to find their way back to some traditional ideas. Some, like Columbia and Brown, are being forced to reckon with those ideas. The Association for Core Texts and Courses is thriving. And new campus “centers” devoted to something like the old liberal arts core have been founded at least thirteen public universities around the country. The General Education Act, a proposal to transform public universities by establishing a core curriculum at each that is managed by an autonomous School of General Studies, passed in Utah and Arkansas passed a weaker version.
None of this inspires me to say that we have turned a corner in American higher education and are now moving towards the restoration of a well-ordered republic or a literate civilization. But we should be grateful for whatever seedlings we can find.
All of this falls within that great expanse that Henry Adams called “education.” His own was large, complicated, and often painful. He recognized that some of it was imposed on him by circumstances he couldn’t choose but didn’t refuse. He wrote of himself, “To his life as a whole he was a consenting, contracting party and partner from the moment he was born to the moment he died.”
I can’t read The Education of Henry Adams with the gladness that I take from some other American classics. There is more to learn about America from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We have an abundance of other writers who are close to the texture and perils of our national experience. But Henry Adams shows us the education of a nation as it comes to terms with worldly realities it never expected. In 1861 when England seemed on the verge of recognizing the legitimacy of the Confederacy, Adams called it “the beginning of a new education [that] tore up by the roots nearly all that was left of Harvard College.”
President Trump has surely done something similar. Tearing up the roots of Harvard College once in a while may be a necessary form of intellectual crop rotation, for which Adams’ concept of “Education” is entirely appropriate. This kind of education is what happens when the seemingly impossible becomes real.
I will plow ahead with The Education of Henry Adams in the spirit that he has something to teach me even if the lesson is a bit unpleasant. I recommend Harvard approach Trump’s lessons in the same spirit.
