Misplaced Homer

On the campus of Columbia University is Butler Library.  Its neo-classical design, with fourteen imposing columns supporting the names of famous ancients, immediately draws the eye of any passerby. The names etched into stone above these columns are of great classical writers: Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, and Vergil.  Interestingly, one of these names is not like the others: Homer.  Homer’s name appears carved into the building because its designers thought him to be a great ancient writer.  Homer, most historians now agree, was no writer.  He was a singer–an oral poet–and probably the amalgamation of many bards over many years.  I use Homer as an example because his eternal presence on the facade of the library bespeaks a point of tension in the histories of education and literature, not to mention the current culture of the prior.  Why has speech–orality–become so marginalized in education?  What has happened to the heard spaces of the ancients?  Have they disappeared, or perhaps subverted the dominant written culture in which we educators now find ourselves?

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