Introduction Teaching Paradise Lost in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This book places moral education in Paradise Lost in the context of Milton’s educational method, Puritan educational practice more generally, and my own experience as an educator and a parent. I have spent the past twenty years teaching Milton’s poem at small liberal arts colleges: first at Mount Holyoke, then at Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus, and now for eighteen years at Hamilton. The experience of teaching in these communities, and raising two sons in the process, has provoked the discovery that I work with an “age-group”—nineteen-year-olds, to be exact. That discovery has forced me to consider the way I should teach the poem to them. It has also influenced what in the poem attracts my attention. When Adam stands before the Son at the opening of Book 10, he attempts to excuse himself by the very logic that my students use: “it was her fault”; “I couldn’t help myself ”; “you should have stopped me.” When I teach Paradise Lost to college sophomores I focus on the way the poem addresses directly the issues of self-determination and personal responsibility that they face in their lives: peer pressure, sexual desire, the pursuit of happiness, the choice of life work.

Let all things be done unto edifying.

—1 Corinthians 14:26