40 years after Thos. Dewey weaponized Columbia Teachers’ College, there were no teachers left who’d themselves received a basic Great Books education. One Doesn’t Give What One Doesn’t Have. But residual culture could still be gleaned by kids from libraries until the mid 1990s. Now that’s gone. Only a kid with an unusually strong sense of truth and beauty can now stumble upon goodness.
That was how I read them. I devoured every book in our school library, then got approval to spend the afternoons in the Dallas Public Library downtown.
The memories of going through the aisles of books and pulling one down and being transported to “anywhere” else.
It was pretty good until I found that they also kept all of the old Playboy magazines in a separate area.