George Saunders

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're exactly right.

As soon as you say this justifies art,

you've made it have to earn its dinner.

And some autocrat is gonna come in and say, oh, I don't think your art is doing what we want it to do.

So I agree with you.

And in the end, art answers to nobody.

I totally agree with that.

However, I think there are ways in which in our time,

We've sort of poo-pooed the power of literature and made it kind of a niche sort of quaint thing, even in our educational structure.

So I actually do believe, and this is, I'll reverse all my, but I do think, you know, imagine, okay, this is, imagine a world where fourth and fifth graders read a Chekhov story a week.

And you have to pick the stories, but there are some really beautiful ones that any fourth and fifth grader could get.

Then through that doorway, you teach them to unpack a text.

You teach them to have confidence, their own reading ability, their own perception of the world.

I think that would actually be an amazingly powerful thing as a culture if you could somehow build that into the curriculum.

And, you know, I can say anecdotally, you know, our daughters went to a really good school.

And at one point, this fifth grade or sixth grade teacher was teaching Ambrose Bierce.

Some of those really dark Civil War nonfiction pieces, beautifully written, very ornate and tough, and the subject material was dark as hell.

And some parents objected to it.

It was too hard.