Foreword in You've Got to Be Carefully Taught

Vonnegut wrote a Foreword in You've Got to Be Carefully Taught: Learning and Relearning Literature, a 2001 book by scholar and long-time Vonnegut friend Jerome Klinkowitz on the effective teaching of literature.

Summary

Despite being thirty years younger than Vonnegut, Klinkowitz has published three times as many books, "including novels and histories and memoirs", along with academic works that have praised Vonnegut himself. Like Klinkowitz, Vonnegut has taught English in an academic setting at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, Harvard, City College of New York, and now Smith College. In many of these English departments, professional academics often discuss the faculty politics unknown to the visiting writers. Although a successful academic himself, Klinkowitz attempts to point out that the way we educate has turned the study of great literature into "a solemn chore" instead of a pleasure, largely because the academics themselves view it so. He instead seeks to "befriend and celebrate writers who are still among us" before they become "embalmed... by theses and syllabi".