The College Fix

I’m not quite sure what to think of this:

Linguistics expert Martin Jacobsen used the song from 2000 [Iron Maiden] album Brave New World to teach sentence structure. The lesson included displaying visual diagrams of how the lyrics had been constructed while the music played.

Jacobsen, of West Texas A&M University, tells Amarillo.com: “The students were mad for it – they thought it was crazy and they loved it. I threw it out as an offhand comment one day: ‘What we ought to do is have a class in heavy metal.’ There was universal agreement from the students in the class: ‘Yes, we should actually do that.’”

And so they did. The professor explains:

“The thematic content of heavy metal lends itself to the same kind of thought processes that reading literature would bring up. IIt talks about things in ways that you have to unlock your mind to understand, just like reading classical literature or any other kind of literature.”

If I believed that the average West Texas A&M student had been well educated in the great books tradition, then a little heavy metal as a supplement might not be such a bad thing. But if this is, as I fear, just about the only exposure to “literature” that most of these students will have had, then we must shake our heads and mourn for Homer and Dante’s demise.

Come to think of it, “Dante’s Demise” sounds like a great name for a heavy metal band.

Follow Nathan on Twitter @NathanHarden

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