In 1975, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe stood before an audience at the University of Massachusetts and took aim at one of the established masterpieces of English literature. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, he argued, had made Africa into little more than a backdrop: a place of darkness and voicelessness against which the European could stage his own moral drama. The accusation was severe. Conrad was not some forgotten colonial pamphleteer. He belonged to the canon … or, dare I say, Canon.
Achebe’s challenge has echoed through classrooms ever since, in part because it touches a question much larger than Conrad: Who decides what deserves to be read?
The question has become almost unavoidable. For generations, the Western canon was presented with a certain confidence: Homer, Plato, Virgil, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton. These were books thought capable of forming the imagination and furnishing the mind with its fundamental questions. Yet the confidence with which such lists were once handed down has weakened. Whose canon? Whose voices have been excluded? Why should a young Nigerian read Conrad’s Africa rather than Achebe’s? Why these books and not others? Why Cicero and not Confucius?
These are serious questions. But there is a peculiar temptation hidden inside them: because selection can be imperfect, perhaps we ought not select at all. Education makes that impossible.
Every curriculum is a canon, whether it admits that or not. The moment a teacher places one book on a syllabus rather than another, gives three weeks to Shakespeare and none to a contemporary novelist, or asks a child to memorize one poem while leaving ten thousand others unread, a judgment has been made. Time itself forces the issue. A human life is finite; childhood is shorter still. There are more books in a modest library than any one of us could read attentively in a lifetime.
The educational question, therefore, is never whether we shall choose. It is how we shall choose well.
The Catholic tradition has occasionally confronted this problem in a particularly dramatic form. Consider the Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Index of Forbidden Books. To modern ears the very name can sound sinister, summoning an image of ecclesiastical authorities combating intellectual freedom and thought; that is the image the Enlightenment promoted. Yet whatever judgments one makes about the Index—and some of its particular judgments certainly invite criticism—the principle underlying it deserves more serious consideration.
The Church took books seriously because she took formation seriously.
The arrival of the printing press had transformed the ecology of ideas. What once moved laboriously through manuscripts could suddenly travel across countries in hundreds or thousands of copies. Leo XIII would later praise printing as an art “born to spread Christian civilization among peoples,” while warning that the same technology could become “a powerful instrument of destruction” (Officiorum ac munerum, Introduction). Technology had multiplied not only truth but error, not only beauty but ugliness, not only wisdom but temptation.
The Church therefore asked a question that sounds surprisingly contemporary: What happens to human formation when words and images can be multiplied faster than our capacity to judge them?
The first Roman Index intended for general use appeared under Paul IV in 1559; after the Council of Trent, Pius IV promulgated the Tridentine Index in 1564, accompanied by general rules governing Catholic engagement with books (Catholic Encyclopedia, “Censorship of Books”). The concern was principally the protection of faith and morals. Leo XIII expressed it with characteristic force: “Nothing could be more harmful to people’s minds than contempt for religion and the many enticements to sin” (Officiorum ac munerum, Introduction).
The Index eventually disappeared as a juridical instrument. In 1965, Paul VI reorganized the Holy Office through Integrae servandae, and in 1966 the Index ceased to possess the force of ecclesiastical law, although the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith maintained that its underlying moral warning retained significance (To Promote and Safeguard the Faith, p. 1).
The history is interesting. The educational principle beneath it is more interesting still.
What we read does something to us and with us.
This is a surprisingly difficult proposition for modern education to articulate. We often speak as though reading were fundamentally the acquisition of information and therefore as though more access were always preferable to less. Certainly, access is a great good. But books do considerably more than communicate propositions. They populate the imagination. They teach us what kinds of people are admirable and contemptible, what love looks like, what courage sounds like, what sort of world we inhabit. Long before a child can formulate a philosophy of man, stories have begun furnishing one for him.
The question of the canon therefore reaches considerably deeper than cultural literacy. We do not give children Homer merely so that they will recognize an allusion to Achilles later in life. We place great books before them because education necessarily involves directing attention, and attention is one of the great formative powers of the soul.
What deserves to be looked at?
What deserves to be remembered?
What deserves to occupy the imagination?
Here the old idea of a canon begins to recover its meaning. The word itself comes to us from the Greek kanōn: a rule or measuring rod. A canon is consequently not merely a collection. It implies judgment. Some works have been measured and found worthy of being returned to, copied, taught, argued over, loved. Their canonical status does not render them infallible. Homer is not Scripture; neither is Shakespeare. Greatness is not the same thing as moral perfection. The great books frequently disturb us precisely because they contain tensions that cannot be reduced to lessons.
And this returns us to Achebe and Conrad.
One response to Achebe would be simply to remove Heart of Darkness. But something intellectually richer becomes possible when Conrad remains on the table and Achebe is invited to sit beside him. Things Fall Apart does not make Heart of Darkness unnecessary. It enriches the conversation. Africa acquires voices, families, customs, rivalries, loves, sins, and tragedies of its own. Conrad can then be read again—more critically, perhaps more truthfully—because another great writer has forced us to see what his imaginative world obscures. Scholarship on the canon has repeatedly returned to precisely this pedagogical problem, including the possibility that apparently antagonistic works may become more illuminating when taught alongside one another rather than in isolation (Williams, “Voices of the establishment or of cultural subversion? The Western canon in the curriculum,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2021; Carey-Webb, “‘Heart of Darkness, Tarzan,’ and the ‘Third World’: Canons and Encounters in World Literature,” College Literature, 1992).
Here, perhaps, lies a better answer to the “canon wars.” The correction of a canon need not mean the destruction of a canon. It can mean the enlargement of the conversation.
A living canon has always worked this way. Virgil inherits Homer. Dante inherits Virgil and places him inside a Christian cosmos Virgil himself could never have imagined. Augustine receives Plato and the Platonists, criticizes them, and carries what he finds true into another intellectual world. Aquinas encounters Aristotle through a complicated history of Greek, Arabic, Jewish, and Christian interpretation and makes him an interlocutor in medieval theology. T. S. Eliot reads Dante; C. S. Lewis reads nearly everyone.
Tradition, properly understood, has never meant intellectual taxidermy; it is a handing-on, and everything genuinely handed on must be received anew.
This also gives us a more subtle way of thinking about educational protection. A child does not require immediate exposure to every idea in order eventually to become capable of judging ideas freely. Quite the contrary. Judgment itself must first be formed. We do not ordinarily begin music education with noise and ask the student to invent harmony. We give him Bach. We do not teach painting by placing every image ever produced before the student with equal indifference. We train the eye.
This is particularly important for classical education. Its purpose cannot be merely to preserve a list of titles because our predecessors preserved them. If the Great Books are truly great, they must withstand questioning. Indeed, they should generate it. Nor should classical education imagine that loving Western civilization requires pretending that every work it produced was equally wise, just, or complete. A civilization capable of Socratic examination should be capable of examining itself.
Yet neither should we surrender the conviction that some things are better worth knowing than others. Education without such judgments does not become neutral; it merely allows its judgments to become unconscious. Algorithms will select. Fashion will select. Publishers, markets, politics, and appetites will select. Someone will always decide what occupies our attention.
The real question is whether that selection will be governed by wisdom.
The Church’s Index was one historical attempt—sometimes prudent, sometimes undoubtedly limited or hijacked—to take seriously the formative power of words. The Great Books curriculum represents another and considerably more positive expression of the same fundamental recognition: the things we place before the mind matter because the mind gradually takes their shape. The mature student should eventually be able to encounter dangerous books, deficient books, unsettling books, even wicked books. But he should encounter them as someone who has already learned the taste of intellectual nourishment. Discernment presupposes formation.
Perhaps, then, the deepest question concerning the canon is neither “Who is included?” nor “Who is excluded?” important as both questions remain. The deeper educational question comes before them: What kind of human being are we hoping these books will help to form? Only after answering that question can we know what deserves a place at the table.
