A jungle of books good for soul

There are few better times for children than when they have their noses in a book, especially one that expands their horizons and establishes a sense of wonder at the way the world, or worlds, can work. As Simon Haines explains in Inquirer, the “alternative reality of reading” is a foundation of education. The “capacity for attending to human complexity that such reading uniquely develops is actually a moral capacity, an enlargement of moral vision in both individuals and their society”, he writes.

But there is way more to his argument that kids should learn the joys of reading and examples of books he loved as a boy. Rather, it is a profoundly subversive argument against the humanities establishment in universities that judges literature according to doctrinal conformity to a list of required positions on political issues of race and class, gender and disadvantage.

On the basis of an indisputable argument that a childhood spent reading is the foundation for a life of practical wisdom, Professor Haines builds a defence of the Western canon in literature and music, art and philosophy. It is an argument that he knows from experience needs making. As founding chief executive of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, he had to work hard to give millions of dollars to create degrees and fund scholarships at Australian universities. There are now Ramsay programs at the Australian Catholic University and the universities of Queensland and Wollongong, but it was a challenge. Staff at the University of Sydney refused to accept the program, with critics calling it “a triumphalist and selective vision of European and Anglo-American history and culture”.

And now Professor Haines is making the case for reading and the Western canon for beginning readers. On the basis of race and gender oppression in their content, few if any of the childhood books that he cites as laying the foundations of his life of the mind will be on any teacher education reading list or, increasingly, library shelves.

The Edwardian classics Professor Haines loved, including Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, will fail on several grounds of sexism, speciesism and imperialism – the pirates in Peter Pan, plus Toad of Toad Hall, would be utterly unacceptable. The same surely applies to what once were our own children’s classics – there is racism aplenty in Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong series, and Ethel M. Turner’s still much-loved Seven Little Australians can offend anybody who thinks characters from the 1890s should be judged by values now.

But Professor Haines ignores such ideological imprimaturs, warning against identity politics, “that lazy and dangerous tendency we are now seeing everywhere: to categorise all human beings by just one or two of their views or attributes, their class or gender or race or tribe, or just a handful of their opinions”. Rather, his test of worth is the capacity of a book to enrich and enliven young readers’ thinking lives to establish practices and patterns that will serve them all their days.

This also will alarm critics who consider the book an antique artefact – be it printed on paper or delivered by digital facsimile – and no more worthwhile than any other text that conveys a message, be it a T-shirt or ephemera on a screen. But Professor Haines credits books with powers beyond their pages, calling them “permanent structures of thought … becoming more, not less, real as the centuries pass, because their reality has become visible to, more inhabited by, more people”. While standing firm against the wide world of woke, Professor Haines also addresses a far bigger risk to the Western canon, created in and still dependent on book-based scholarship – the assumption that it is irrelevant to the modern economy.

It is a point worth making – according to federal Department of Education statistics, the number of undergraduate students starting “studies in human society” degrees fell 35 per cent across 2013 to 2023. And so Professor Haines mounts a superior version of the “arts teach critical thinking” argument, suggesting long and close study of great books rewires readers’ brains, lifting them out of the “trivial world of TikTok” to a “higher level of thought … where they will be better at reading complex situations and institutions than their artificial-intelligence-driven, short-attention-span colleagues”.

Perhaps the world is not that much worse for Charles Dickens and George Eliot disappearing from HSC syllabuses but overall Professor Haines makes a powerful case for the book and the Western culture it created and on which our society depends. The way to ensure they prosper is to start children reading – once they start they won’t stop.