Trojan Penguins: Beware of Secular Publishing Houses Bearing Gifts

What to Think, Not Just How to Think

Education is not just teaching students how to think; it’s teaching them what to think as well. The fully trained student, whose convictions and affections have been cultivated by the Word of God, whose loyalty to Christ has been proved through many different trials, both physical and spiritual, is equipped to sift through the dross of modern academia and find the nuggets of gold. And realistically, the student I have just described will never be the child in your classroom. Training takes years, decades even. It takes the multiplicity of life events, coupled with “a long obedience in the same direction” under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit. The very real value you are giving to your students is necessary. But as I am sure you will agree, it is not sufficient. Your students are, Lord willing, well on their way toward that end. However, right now they are still very impressionable and easily distracted by the wrong thing. Teaching them how to think (logic, socratic dialogue, the right set of questions) is like giving them a hammer. But if that is all we give them, they will start using that hammer in potentially dangerous ways. They need to know what the hammer is for, when to use it, when not to use it, what kinds of hammers go with what kinds of projects. More is needed than asking the right questions (the hammer); our students need the right answers as well (the instruction manual). And that is not something we should leave them to discover on their own.

Why am I emphasizing this? This seems fairly obvious, right? The problem is, if we don’t teach our students what to think, the world will. The world is simply not concerned with teaching your students how to think: they want to dispense answers as quickly and as attractively as they can, before your student has time to process what is happening. And our students are in the world far more than we realize. Every internet ad, every social media post, every new video game, every hit song, every magazine cover at the grocery store, is an answer being foisted on your student’s impressionable mind. Often, they don’t even know what the question is, or have time to figure it out, before the world’s answer has taken root. Put another way, if we are not consistently teaching truth, the lies will overwhelm them. If we are not daily drawing their affections toward what is true, good, and beautiful in explicit, demonstrable ways, their affections will be drawn toward whatever is shiny, attractive, and emotionally cheap.

Trojan Penguins

The importance of this was borne in on me recently after casually picking up my Penguin edition of Paradise Lost. As a teacher in the Classical Christian world, I value books. We all do. That’s why we are here, to read and enjoy these great works together with our students. But then I stopped and read the back of the book. In the center of the description, I found this:

Long regarded as one of the most powerful and influential poems in the English language, Paradise Lost still inspires intense debate about whether it manages to ‘justify the ways of God to men’ or exposes the cruelty of Christianity and the Christian God. John Leonard’s illuminating introduction is fully alive to such controversies…

To verify that this was true, I actually read the introduction. While Dr. Leonard is no doubt a very capable scholar, his introduction to Paradise Lost was seething with dismissiveness toward the Christian faith. His selection of critics to highlight, and godless commentators to feature, made it clear that he was telling the student what to think about Paradise Lost, clearly intimating that to argue Milton was a faithful Christian was ludicrous. This is not a unique stance. A friend of mine recently submitted an article to a prestigious Milton journal and was rejected because he, and I quote, “assumed Milton took Jesus seriously.”

While the lower prices and nice formatting of Penguin Classics make them attractive, more often than not they are Trojan horses, designed to infiltrate the classroom and destroy the student’s implicit faith in the sincerity of a certain author. Nowhere is this more evident than in the publication of classic works of Christian art (such as the very orthodox, Christian, and even Calvinistic Paradise Lost). And Penguin is not alone. The Oxford World’s Classics are no better. In the Introduction to their edition of Paradise Lost, I find this gem, “Paradise Lost barely allows its heretical views to be seen; it similarly suppresses its politics. If the poem managed to have an immediate afterlife it was as much due to what was being denied as to its recasting of the founding myth of Christian culture.” Do we want our students reading that? That the story of Genesis was a myth? That Paradise Lost is heretical? (Hint: it’s not. To the extent that we think so, we have imbibed the secular scholarship, thus proving my point.) Yes, there is opportunity to defend both Milton and Scripture against such statements, but do we want to spend our limited instruction time on defending against false claims instead of positively instilling a wonder in our students for the text itself? Personally, I do not think our students need to be exposed to these made up controversies, fabricated to undermine the reader’s understanding of the prima facie meaning of the text, which for Paradise Lost is the magnification of the Son of God. Our education should not just build walls of critical thinking to rebuff falsehood. We should also be filling our classrooms with what is actually true! A thriving love for truth, an affection for the good, and loyalty to what is actually beautiful is the most powerful defense against falsehood.

And don’t even get me started on the recent editions of the Norton Critical Editions series: once great collections of solid criticism and commentary paired with the text, now chock full of feminist and gender ideology, again, offering students answers. And so I ask again, is this the best we can do? Why do we allow these Trojan horses (or Trojan penguins) into our classrooms? Your students are not yet fully trained. They are not yet fully equipped to engage with the secular academic monolith that seeks to undermine the Christian faith wherever it may be found.

When Scholarly Meets Pastoral

The continually growing Roman Roads Classics series does no such mischief. Instead we introduce the text from a position that honors the intention of the author, without the literary revisionism of modern anti-theistic academia. Each of our texts include rich introductions, constructing a Christian framework for your students to bring to the work they are reading. The Roman Roads Classics and accompanying Reader’s Guides offer an alternative experience to the secular versions available today from godless publishing houses, combining scholarly yet pastoral commentary and notes that focus on the text, from Christian authors steeped in the historical Christian faith.

But…but… We can’t have our students believing what the great Christian authors like Dante and Milton believed! That would undermine the decades-long efforts of our secular project!!

To which we reply: Yes, that’s exactly right.

The Alternative

Here is where you can help. We are at the beginning of a grand project to topple the Penguin. You can help us by not only using our versions of Homer, Dante, Milton, Cicero and others, but suggest the texts that you think would be most helpful to you right now, texts that need a solid Christian introduction or Reader’s Guide, written from the perspective of teachers and professors who not only love literature, but love Jesus as well.

When it comes to texts for your classrooms, remember not only to consider your student’s minds, but their affections and their faith as well. We do this by training their intellects for the intellectual battle and by ordering their loves for the battle of their hearts. Secular introductions and in-text commentaries are an unrecognized and unseen no-man’s-land, where we often leave our students undefended. But the book we read should not be shrouded in such a war. They should be orchards of truth, deep behind our own front lines, nourishing the minds and hearts of our children, not only training them how to think, but giving them answers as well, answers that draw them to Christ.

Secular publishing houses are leaving gifts at the gate of your classroom. Don’t let them in.

About Joe Carlson

Joe Carlson (PhD Literature) lives in Moscow, Idaho with his wife and son. He graduated from New Saint Andrews College with a BA in Liberal Arts in Culture, and from the University of Dallas with an MA in Humanities and a PhD in Literature. He has managed a chain of coffee shops, published (micro) epic poetry, co-pastored a church, co-founded a university campus ministry, and taught many different kinds of classes over the years. Currently, he is an adjunct lecturer at New Saint Andrews College, a humanities teacher with Logos Online School, and a curriculum developer at Roman Roads Press. He is the author of, among other things, the Dante Curriculum, which includes an original blank verse translation of the Divine Comedy, published by Roman Roads.