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Victor Davis Hanson: ‘The Odyssey’ Is Disappearing From American Education

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Jack Fowler: If we were transported back 50 years, Victor, I wonder how many—not even college students—high school students may have read some of “The Odyssey,” may have read “The Iliad,” known who Aeneas was, knew who Agamemnon was, and would know these great characters from classical literature. 

But my gut tells me if you’re entering Harvard, this is news. 

Well, actually, what you were talking about with Sami on the most recent podcast, the actress who’s the star of the new movie—and she’s a Yale graduate. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. Lupita Nyong’o. She said something I couldn’t quite believe. 

She got her master’s in theater arts at Yale, and she said she had never read “The Odyssey” before, and she’s 42. I thought, “How is that possible?” Her undergraduate institution, I’ll remember in a second, was excellent. She went to Yale, but she’s never … 

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I taught 21 years at Cal State Fresno, Humanities 10, Introduction to Western Humanities. We started with Homer, so I would either have The Iliad, but mostly I taught “The Odyssey” because it was much more of an adventure story and easier to understand for most students. 

I think I had 50 students, and I repeated it in the spring semester. That was 100 a year, and for 10 years that would be 1,000. 

So, I had 2,000 students at Cal State University taking that class, and most of them were from families below the median income. Most of them were either part of the poor Oklahoma diaspora, Mexican American, first- or second-generation, or from Southeast Asia during the influx after the Vietnam........

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