The Importance of Reading Original Texts
Posted on 09/23/2024
At MacLaren, a hallmark of our K-12 curriculum is an emphasis on reading original texts. By original texts, we mean original works of literature, not summaries, abridged versions, or versions that have been altered in order to be easier to read. We also mean primary source documents from history. Reading original texts is indeed the central focus of our Humane Letters courses, but students in every grade are introduced to original texts. From kindergarten to senior year, our students are exposed to rich works of literature and history.
We think that this is a foundational part of a liberal arts education for many reasons. We want our students to understand language and communication in a precise way; we teach them that it really matters whether a poem uses one word and not another, that punctuation can deeply impact meaning, and that complex ideas must be communicated using complex sentence structures. Therefore, to truly experience the thoughts of another person, you need to read their exact words as closely and carefully as possible. Mortimer Adler, the American philosopher and central figure in the Great Books movement that began in the 1950s, says, “How do you make contact with the mind of another person?… [F]or the most part it is by the use of language—by writing and speaking, on the one hand, and by reading and listening, on the other.” Through the study of original texts, and then conversation with their teachers and classmates in which they have to articulate and deepen their own understanding, our students both engage directly with the ideas of great thinkers and artists and also come to understand the importance of communicating their own ideas clearly and well.
St. John’s College, a liberal arts college with a curriculum focused on reading classic texts, has a statement of their program that offers an additional insight into why we must read texts in their original forms: “These books are the most important teachers. They illuminate the persisting questions of human existence and they bear directly on the problems we face today. They express most originally, and often most perfectly, the ideas by which contemporary life is knowingly or unknowingly governed. Their authors can speak to us almost as freshly as when they spoke for the first time, for what they have to tell us is not of merely academic concern, nor is it remote from our true interests. They change our minds, move our hearts, and touch our spirits.”
When we read summaries or edited versions of texts, we are always subject to someone else’s interpretation of an author’s words. As much as possible, we want to put our students into direct conversation with these texts. We see daily how true it is that these encounters do “change our minds, move our hearts, and touch our spirits.”