Prophet and His Worlds

The article formulates a question about the future of education within the range of critical literary reading matter in a universal, i.e. school edition. While avoiding the controversy dealing with the canon and curriculum of teaching the author poses the problem differently, by situating it in an extra-school sphere, namely, within the domain of the political outcome of literary studies education. The "prophetic" dimension of those reflections is embedded in the assumption that reading matter will become scattered within and outside the school, while the canonical list of books will survive as an emblem of a project impossible to realise. The merit of future schooling could turn out to be the heterogeneous nature of reading, which will become a civic exercise of sorts in constructing a community composed of the divergent and the dissimilar. Thus devised future school reading could prove to be the only universal process preparing to live in a political community of controversies, disparity, and ambiguity.