Why ideas are important . . .

Many of my students come to classes wondering why in the world they should spend their time studying ideas--especially OLD ideas. So I have to get them thinking about why ideas just might be important. And what ideas are.

Here's how I start:

* When I talk about important ideas, I mean general statements about reality that are influential—they move people and convince them and activate them—but that are not based on historical or empirical fact. In many cases, important ideas are about the way things SHOULD be rather than the way they HAVE BEEN or ARE. For example, “All men are created equal” is an important idea. Why? Because it has shaped national policy, workplace regulations, and the conditions of life for Americans for the past 200 years. That is pretty important. But there was no basis in fact for the idea offered in our Declaration of Independence. Historically speaking, there was no reason to make such a claim. So an idea became a reality (or edged closer to becoming a reality) in America--and elsewhere.

* Many important ideas were “born” in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many others simply developed into their mature forms.

* The women’s rights movement, the civil rights movement, the battle between supporters of evolution and creationism, the development of modern media and industry, and the structure of our economy are all founded on what happened since 1750 or so. These things are all built on ideas about human nature, and where we came from, and how market relations should be managed.

I then ask students to come up with an important idea—for good or ill—that is still relevant to us today. Here are some that we talk about:

More is better.

Bigger is better.

Money is the highest value in the “real world.”

College will get you a job.

Poetry is boring and old-fashioned.

Jews are ruining the German economy. . .


Hopefully, by the time we finish this discussion, students are beginning to see that ideas are important, and that literature is a force that creates and re-shapes ideas.

When we read, we experience something. Experiences and ideas are always related. We experience things, and then we generalize ideas from that experience. In middle school, for instance, many of us have enough data to determine that school is essentially boring and pointless. That is an idea that comes from the facts of daily school life. But we can also have an idea that schools should be better than they are. And we can change things based on that idea. Literature is one place where we play with ideas—possiblities—ways of seeing the world. I try to get students to look at it that way.