Dear Teacher,

This package and its sequenced readings are the product of thirty years’ experience teaching an articulated and aligned curriculum in high performance public schools. Its contents have been tested with over 5000 students, each of whom has come to delight in coursework that is rooted in essential concepts to which they return again and again as they journey forward to acquire new skills and apply new learning.

This is a truly articulated curriculum. Each learning activity builds upon the one that preceded it, and prepares the way for the next that is to come.

The familiar neighborhood of inquiry established by this approach answers two challenging questions that can often trouble students. The first is: “why are we doing this?” The second is: “what does this have to do with me, and/or with our class activities”?

A thematic curriculum that centers upon universally important human and cultural questions—rather than one organized by chronology or by nationality of author—is best positioned to answer questions like these.

What is more interesting to each of our students than the narrative of his/her own personal history and challenges? Individual lives share fundamental similarities: each person begins as an infant, and as adolescence approaches, temporarily separates from parents (as did Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz) to explore the world and find his/her own true path. No one is exempt: each of us journeys from childhood to adulthood, and each of us experiences the trade-offs, the advantages and the nostalgic regrets, that such a transition invokes. This is called ontogeny.

But the ontogenetic journey is a microcosm of a much larger, historical transformation: As a species, we all share the mixed blessings of the neolithic revolution effected some fifteen thousand years ago. This was the time when our nomadic, wild-game following ancestors discovered agriculture and learned the secrets of animal domestication. No more following herds: now it was more profitable to plant a food crop and stay in one place. As a result, our forebears were forced into a steep learning curve of technological and social advancement: they invented architecture for dwellings and food storage, they invented cuneiform writing as a means of recording trade transactions, and they created all the familiar structures of the modern world: cities, armies and written laws to protect property and manage relations between larger groups of human beings who, having given up the hunt, now lived in one permanent location at close proximity--but who were no longer related to each other as in the old tribal or kinship days.

New York, Cairo, Sao Paolo, Beijing, traffic congestion, multi-nationals, war: these are all products of--and footnotes to--what anthropologists call phylogeny.

These journeys--both ontogenetic and phylogenetic--concern human beings immediately and directly. They are central to our questioning of ourselves, our roles, and our relationship to the larger world that, intact, insistent and powerfully established, receives us at our birth.

Themes like these concern youth and elderly alike. They focus our attention, speak to our personal experience, and when they are incorporated into the classroom, themes like these release us from an all too common, prophylactic, thought stifling instructional format: the dryness of literary anthologies that group works and ideas into national, curatorial or culture specific compartments that are walled-off from universal concerns.

Secondary students are not interested in specialized literary debates; are not interested in tracing the origins of this or that poem to some local, social or political concern of the eighteenth century.

The students that we teach need big pictures, not narrowly focused graduate school specificity that serves professorial or thesis writer dead-ends. They need an introduction to universal ideas; they need to learn to read patterns between works that span cultures and epochs; and they need opportunities to discover the personal significance of the questions that humans have always been concerned with.

Our goal at the secondary level should be to equip students to engage in meaningful and personally relevant activities:

•Thoughtful reflection about history and progress

•Thoughtful reflection about the trade-offs between personal desires and social obligations

•The ability to read carefully and to make intelligent, evidentiary connections between apparently diverse narratives

•And the ability to confidently answer big picture questions such as: “how does literature present us with an image of the forces and events that shape our lives? And how does it achieve it respective ends?"

The simple answer to this latter question is: literature is the medium through which thoughtful writers attempt to interpret and attain some measure of understanding--and hopefully, control--over our ontogenetic and phylogenetic histories.

Before written language, these efforts were the impetus behind the sympathetic magic of the cave paintings such as we see at Altamira. After written language, these same efforts were undertaken by a new class of artists: writers, who gave us the Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Hamlet and The Scarlet Letter, to name a few.

In this thematic curriculum, questions such as "what is literature concerned with" can be continuously applied to any work that might be read; and students find themselves at the center as they mull the similarities and differences between works that explore the same big ideas.

The center of this literature course is about extracting meaning; about interpretation; about using the comparative mode to read carefully; and about coming to understand the ways that all stories converge around—and reinterpret—universal themes.

An approach like this is what makes the journey through this course both meaningful and purposive for students.

What is Contained In This Program & Its Duration

"...Virtually every story that has ever been written features this pattern; and with the emergence of written language that accompanied the birth of civilization, such story-telling continues the tradition of sympathetic magic."

"...Orpheus comes very close to achieving his goal. But he must fail for the very same reason that Isis cannot immortalize the son of the King of Syria, and for the very same reason that Osiris must fit--and must want to fit--into Set's coffin."

"...Stories that feature this pattern not only replicate seasonal cycles, but also re-tell the story of the long and difficult journey undertaken when our ancestors made the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture."

"...It is clear that Daedalus contravenes deep laws, but he does so out of necessity..."

"...Highway 77 is not an Eden. The Dionysiac wildness of the place suggests something other than Ovid's Golden Age. Certainly, Highway 77 represents the world before civilization; or the world we shall return to when nature reasserts domination over the 'city of man': a time when 'roots will have cleft the rocks and made them crumble.' Further, its denizens--not unlike the wild hunters in Golding's Lord of the Flies-- behave recklessly."

"...Yet, if we were to overlay the Greek myth onto the Egyptian, we could ask: If the Poughkeepsie is the River Styx, and if the 'Polacks' are the composite Charon, then do they row Kip to the land of Death, or from Death to Life? From which shore have they embarked, and upon what shore shall they land?"

"...Osiris floats down the River Nile in a coffin; and Kip floats down the Poughkeepsie in a racing shell. Kip has been figuratively slain--for to act as coxswain for the new crew puts Kip in a socially 'dangerous' situation. In this story, the role of the Egyptian god of dessication, Set, would be played by the dread hand of tradition, and by the ethical dilemma posed by Kip's own ambivalence. Mary, his girlfriend, plays the role of Isis—for while Kip's social life in the Ivy League rowing world will probably not be resurrected after his crew's embarrassing defeat, her powerful presence guides Kip, and guarantees that he shall be 'resurrected.'"

"...If Updike's A&P is a symbol for the Garden of Eden, then Lengel must be its Jehovah. Explore with students the parallels that we have been pursuing ever since Level 1. Certainly the 'apple' and the 'temptation' are present here--though we may be invited to consider fancy herring snacks as the new forbidden fruit. An interesting question to pose: do the girls play the role of Eve to Sammy's Adam; or are they the serpent or sirens who lure Sammy to a shipwreck in the parking lot? Remember that while Icarus crashes into the sea, Sammy executes his adolescent swan dive through the electric eye door."

"...We are led, therefore, to question the 'beach.' While it seems to be a paradise of independence and freedom, it may actually represent the world of obligation that all adults must enter. Ulysses and the sirens again. Adam and Eve leave the Garden in order to till the fields and bring forth children in pain; Sammy leaves the store (expulsion) to enter a harsh and indifferent world (heat waves rising up off of car hoods, crying children). As he looks back through the window (remember that Orpheus looked back at Eurydice and lost everything) he discovers the true cost of his gesture. What is more, the girls (like Eurydice) have vanished. At the conclusion of the story, Sammy is doomed to wander the parking lot maze in search of the actual memory--or of the mirage."

"...Regarding the Ovidian myth of history, Ayn Rand positions herself both as a futurist and a capitalist--and declares war upon collectivist/romantic notions that would return the world to a state of primitive simplicity and love. The world of the Brotherhood seems to be devoted to the Golden Age in that it attempts to suppress the dangers of Ovid's 'Iron Age.' But oddly--and this is central to Ayn Rand's thesis--the means that it employs to return humanity to paradise requires an increase in governmental power, rather than a decrease. This contradiction inverts Ovid's myth of history. And necessarily so, Ayn Rand might add. The myth of the Golden Age is just that: a myth...and its false promises could only be achieved by a resort to fascism or communism. Here, she takes on Plato's Republic and the Lycurgan constitution--and would be in full sympathy with the ideals that Pericles enunciates in his Funeral Oration--the full text of which is reprinted below."

"...But we feel even more sharply that Bradbury's world is a world of limits. The ramp is not to be left; one visits, almost without visiting, the past. What is important—and what must be preserved intact—is the present: the here and now of immediate reality in real time. The "escape" is full of risk, furtive and constraining. In a sense, the journey to the past is a step into the coffin of Osiris: a time machine that whirls those who are lost to the world back through the currents of the river of time. Canute has returned triumphant, and someone must pay for this Pyrrhic victory.

"...How astonishing Bradbury's mix is: we return to Eden; but the act of returning to Eden is a 'temptation' and 'fall' that causes an incredible 'expulsion' (rhymes with explosion!). Dorothy Simple's Primanproper seems rather attractive, when compared to the 'wild roses' of the Jurassic.