2022-06-15_Intro_to_Climbing_Mount_Parnassus
00:00:00.000 | Anyone setting out to defend what Albert J. Nock once called "the grand old fortifying
00:00:07.480 | classical curriculum" (essentially Greek and Latin) does so knowing that he flies the
00:00:13.400 | tattered flag of a lost cause.
00:00:16.520 | Surrender to the victors has already been signed, the army dispersed, the guns are silent.
00:00:23.400 | That day is done.
00:00:25.040 | Why in the age of the internet and the global economy dwell upon the words and deeds of
00:00:29.460 | people long dead who spoke and wrote in tongues equally dead?
00:00:34.360 | Surely education should help us to enjoy our fair share of bread and circuses.
00:00:40.120 | Education should help us to get things.
00:00:41.960 | It's about the future.
00:00:43.920 | A recent American president, after all, made much ado about "building bridges to the
00:00:49.200 | twenty-first century."
00:00:51.800 | We had best be crossing.
00:00:54.160 | But the happy bands of those who fend for classical education, along with other tilters
00:01:00.060 | at windmills, are not so easily daunted.
00:01:04.140 | They would make a last stand for the barricades.
00:01:07.300 | They have wandered as exiles in occupied territory, but the land is worth fighting for even if
00:01:13.460 | the battle should yield but a few paces.
00:01:16.860 | Ralph Waldo Emerson once chided the brashness of a lost cause like this one.
00:01:22.300 | I proffer to him my apologies.
00:01:24.620 | "It is ominous," he wrote, "that this word education has so cold, so hopeless a
00:01:31.620 | sound.
00:01:32.620 | A treatise on education, a convention on education, affects us with slight paralysis and a certain
00:01:40.420 | yawning of the jaws."
00:01:43.540 | Ominous indeed, for ponderous books on education proliferate and provide what one historian
00:01:49.300 | has called a "dismal consolation to the misanthrope."
00:01:54.500 | We ought to cast a caustic eye on such trickery, for the utopian promises what he cannot deliver.
00:02:02.420 | Beware the man with a new truth to preach.
00:02:05.080 | He bids to do our thinking for us, better, in the words of Auden, "to read the New Yorker,
00:02:11.580 | trust in God, and take short views."
00:02:15.140 | The American soil is not naturally fertile for classics.
00:02:19.740 | The seed falls on hard clay.
00:02:22.780 | As another man of letters told us nearly eighty years ago, we as a nation possess "a weakness
00:02:28.280 | for new gospels, a vital but hazardous trait, as we stand in danger of discarding both the
00:02:35.180 | good and useful in a quest for the dubious and untried."
00:02:40.080 | We reconfigure our lives daily, we pride ourselves on our capacity to reach far and entertain
00:02:46.100 | the fantastic idea, and we think of ourselves more as "doers" than as thinkers.
00:02:52.720 | While others waxed about going to the moon, we went.
00:02:56.880 | We are forever on the move.
00:02:59.000 | But this restless drive which we Americans are wont to think unique to us also fuels
00:03:04.900 | the rest of the frenetic modern world, particularly in the West where, despite some multiculturalists'
00:03:11.720 | claims, our civilization supplies the model most peoples around the globe wish to emulate.
00:03:17.560 | We spell "PROGRESS" with a capital.
00:03:21.360 | Here the news is always better, the old worse.
00:03:24.580 | The new is always rich and relevant, the old threadbare and obsolete.
00:03:29.720 | Ours is the "shining city on a hill" in John Winthrop's memorable coinage, a city
00:03:35.400 | that could begin afresh because it had no past.
00:03:38.720 | We could start from scratch and travel lightly.
00:03:42.600 | Yet, having crossed the threshold of a millennium, we feel a few spiritual tremors.
00:03:50.560 | Impetuosity does not reflect.
00:03:53.340 | The superannuated, ever-changing mind cannot speak to the whole of life.
00:03:59.120 | It cannot contemplate.
00:04:01.360 | It cannot assign value.
00:04:03.360 | It can drive us to build new roads and bridges, but it cannot explain where we want to go.
00:04:07.920 | It can build rockets to Mars and beyond, but it cannot tell us whether it's wise to go
00:04:12.400 | there.
00:04:13.400 | It cannot answer questions it long ago lost the wisdom to ask.
00:04:17.820 | The life of the mind and soul it leaves bereft of standards, those talking points of judgment
00:04:24.320 | which are acquired only with time and patient effort.
00:04:28.660 | We appeal to the freakish in witless arts and entertainment.
00:04:32.900 | To serve the boring or the bored is not always clear, leading inexorably to the shocking
00:04:38.320 | that melts into a monotonous vulgarity in the public square.
00:04:43.800 | Even shock cannot shock indefinitely.
00:04:48.360 | Intellectuals are not immune.
00:04:50.160 | Scratch a believer in bold new ideas and find a slave to fashion, proving the adage that
00:04:55.120 | the newest is always the most quickly dated, whether it come from Madison Avenue or the
00:05:00.440 | Modern Language Association.
00:05:03.560 | Nor is our political life unaffected.
00:05:06.800 | We call for candidates with new ideas, votaries to a perpetually malleable future.
00:05:13.440 | Here is the spirit of El Dorado, the hope that riches and salvation wait around the
00:05:18.120 | next bend in the road.
00:05:20.480 | Old gospels lack the beckoning allure of the road not taken.
00:05:25.280 | But like explorers in the desert ever prone to mirage, we have had, along with remarkable
00:05:32.120 | discoveries, a few false sightings, and we are beginning to sense a certain lack of point
00:05:39.660 | and permanence in modern life.
00:05:42.680 | The new gospels have certainly delivered, but they have not saved.
00:05:47.680 | Education, that vague and official word for what goes on in our schools, has also been
00:05:53.680 | a trinket on the shelves of snake oil salesmen and a plaything for social planners in America
00:05:59.040 | for well over a century.
00:06:01.320 | They too have been driven by the spirit of ceaseless innovation, and we have paid a high
00:06:07.320 | price.
00:06:08.760 | The peddlers have shrouded the high and subtler goals of learning which former generations
00:06:14.100 | accepted and promoted.
00:06:16.720 | These bringers of the new have traded in the ancient ideal of wisdom for a spurious adjustment
00:06:24.200 | of mind, settling for fitting us with the most menial of skills needful for the world
00:06:30.280 | of the interchangeable part.
00:06:32.880 | They have decided we are less, not more, than wiser people have hoped humanity might become.
00:06:39.480 | We are masses to be housed and fed, not minds and souls seeking something beyond ourselves.
00:06:47.300 | Ask anyone today, for instance, to identify the aims of a "liberal education" and expect
00:06:54.440 | a long pause.
00:06:56.920 | Everett Dean Martin, he who informed us of our predilection for new gospels, wrote a
00:07:02.880 | book in 1926 titled The Meaning of a Liberal Education.
00:07:07.720 | And in 1973, another scholar produced The Uses of a Liberal Education.
00:07:13.200 | We might detect in the latter title a falling away from an older ideal.
00:07:18.280 | Instead of seeking to discern what a liberal education can bring to us, we now ask what
00:07:22.760 | we can get out of it.
00:07:24.680 | There's a difference.
00:07:26.860 | And the benefits accrued do not exist, apparently, if they cannot be measured, and measured by
00:07:32.500 | tools calibrated by craftsmen out to replicate themselves.
00:07:38.120 | Standards require standard makers.
00:07:41.040 | Nonetheless, on the face of it at least, the question of use is a fair one.
00:07:47.040 | Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead reminded us that any education not useful is wasted.
00:07:53.080 | An education, he said, must be useful because understanding is useful.
00:07:59.120 | But what must we understand?
00:08:01.940 | If education must be useful, what uses are to be served?
00:08:06.840 | And more importantly, are there differing kinds of use we should acknowledge?
00:08:12.820 | The modern mind, schooled to be practical, stands ill-prepared to wrestle with these
00:08:19.200 | questions because they are, at bottom, philosophical ones.
00:08:23.640 | Our practicality has, ironically, rendered us incapable of answering them.
00:08:30.520 | So, while thinking ourselves a knowing and enlightened lot, we stand deaf to our own
00:08:37.200 | ignorance, which has become a white noise.
00:08:40.960 | Gilded degrees hanging on our walls bear witness to our certified smarts.
00:08:46.640 | But we have stood Socrates on his head.
00:08:49.280 | Whereas the only thing that sage Athenian knew was that he knew nothing, the only thing
00:08:54.440 | we don't know, and with far thinner credentials it would seem, is that we know so very little.
00:09:01.760 | He knows nothing and he thinks he knows everything, George Bernard Shaw put it.
00:09:07.200 | That points clearly to a political career.
00:09:10.780 | We do not know, in other words, what more reflective ages have deemed the important
00:09:16.080 | things.
00:09:17.080 | And we don't know them because they have not been taught us.
00:09:20.840 | Our gentle prods to our self-esteem have spurred us to consult only our own druthers in deciding
00:09:27.320 | what is worth knowing.
00:09:29.280 | We have adopted the leveling assumptions we've inherited, whatever works for you, and fed
00:09:34.560 | off intellectual capital earned by others who, we presume, have already done the hard
00:09:40.260 | thinking for us.
00:09:41.960 | We pride ourselves on self-reliance while following uncritically the roadmaps of others.
00:09:48.240 | For an independently skeptical people, we ask few questions.
00:09:54.600 | Milton once wrote that the reform of education is one of the greatest and noblest designs
00:09:59.400 | that can be thought on, and many have been drawn to the drafting table as willing architects
00:10:04.280 | of the future.
00:10:06.040 | Within this workshop we have hammered out our highest aspirations and ideals.
00:10:12.220 | Yet few pursuits, however noble, promise so little.
00:10:17.140 | The wares are cheap, their shiny surfaces a veneer hiding shoddy work.
00:10:23.160 | As with most gospels, Martin observed, we are in such a hurry to save souls that we
00:10:27.880 | would begin proclaiming the new salvation to the nation before pausing to find out what
00:10:32.280 | education is.
00:10:34.560 | Unable to explain what education is or is for, we have created state departments of
00:10:41.820 | education out of a desperate hope that what we have not had the wisdom and intellectual
00:10:48.760 | fortitude to determine in the light of day might emerge miraculously from a flurry of
00:10:54.100 | committee reports, public opinion polls, and bureaucratic fiat.
00:10:59.440 | So to pen and read, still another tract such as this runs counter to that hope and makes
00:11:06.520 | for dreary work.
00:11:08.820 | We should shrink from more gospels, further means of deliverance from a predicament we
00:11:13.400 | do not fully understand, especially when the search is likely to prove less than edifying
00:11:18.680 | and close on unresolved chords.
00:11:22.680 | I do not intend to offer a new gospel.
00:11:25.440 | Instead, I hope to direct our gaze behind us so that we may more securely find our footing
00:11:31.160 | on the road ahead.
00:11:33.300 | If in fact the past is prologue, it is only the past that can instruct and guide us.
00:11:41.280 | The present is too close, and the future is but a haze of possibilities and dreams.
00:11:47.500 | The future does not yet belong to us.
00:11:53.120 | We do not lack defenses of traditional education.
00:11:56.640 | Disquisitions abound.
00:11:58.500 | They offer comfort and guidance to the seeking few.
00:12:01.920 | Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind set off a radioactive buzz in the late
00:12:07.320 | 1980s, with sales no doubt astounding author and publisher alike.
00:12:12.000 | It was an unlikely bestseller, at once a philosophical excursion and a gripe against a noisy, tawdry
00:12:18.920 | world.
00:12:19.920 | But we don't know who read the book.
00:12:21.560 | It was enough for many simply to buy it and add their voices to the swelling chorus of
00:12:25.960 | those suspecting a decline in the intellectual quality not only of educated people, but also
00:12:31.440 | of the world they plan and steer.
00:12:34.320 | Its presence on the coffee table advertised one's disquiet, becoming for a moment a badge
00:12:39.920 | of intellectual chic.
00:12:41.760 | E.D.
00:12:42.760 | Hirsch's Cultural Literacy described the paucity of hard information today's high
00:12:47.800 | school graduates are likely to know and to be taught about history, science, and literature.
00:12:54.120 | Illiterate and semi-literate Americans are condemned not only to poverty, Hirsch wrote,
00:12:59.440 | but also to the powerlessness of incomprehension.
00:13:02.880 | Knowing that they do not understand the issues and feeling prey to manipulative oversimplifications,
00:13:08.480 | they do not trust the system of which they are supposed to be the masters.
00:13:12.400 | They do not feel themselves to be active participants in our republic, and they often do not turn
00:13:17.360 | out to vote.
00:13:18.360 | And of course, for better or worse, many do turn out to vote.
00:13:24.640 | What we don't know can hurt us.
00:13:27.480 | With the blitzing of these two books, we began to talk openly not only about 15-year-olds
00:13:32.800 | who cannot identify the order of American presidents since Franklin Roosevelt, or the
00:13:37.360 | century in which the American Civil War was fought, but also about 18-year-olds who cannot
00:13:41.880 | read even with ground-level competence.
00:13:45.720 | Granting that the world has yet to see a golden age in education, we began to ask, what exactly
00:13:52.200 | are they doing in those schools?
00:13:53.980 | And why do our schools and colleges graduates
00:13:56.560 | so smart and promising in so many ways, not seem to know, really know anything of substance?
00:14:05.440 | They're heavy on proudly held opinions.
00:14:08.840 | Opinions are always in abundant supply, but light on knowledge.
00:14:14.000 | Is this, we wondered, the best we can do?
00:14:18.760 | This we can say.
00:14:20.960 | Publicly funded ignorance began to seem a positive liability.
00:14:26.160 | It became the family lunatic we finally consented to bring up in mixed company.
00:14:31.180 | But these books did another salutary thing.
00:14:33.680 | They directed us to question the uses of the tools at our disposal.
00:14:38.000 | On the one hand, there is the skill needed to use the proverbial wrench properly and
00:14:42.400 | efficiently.
00:14:43.680 | On the other, the judgment required to use it for right and good purposes.
00:14:49.120 | Bloom and Hirsch drew us back to fundamentals, throwing light not only on what ought to be
00:14:54.560 | taught in our schools and universities, but on goals, on the kind of citizens we wish
00:15:00.680 | to create and the kind of polity we wish to engender.
00:15:05.200 | For education is never neutral.
00:15:09.200 | Embedded within any course of study lie assumptions about what people ought to know and about
00:15:14.640 | human nature itself.
00:15:16.840 | Are we man or machine?
00:15:21.440 | Education is, in the end, an auxiliary of philosophy, an embodiment of aims and ideals.
00:15:27.920 | It was therefore fruitless for President Clinton to demand that politics stop at the schoolhouse
00:15:32.840 | door.
00:15:34.160 | Perhaps politics cannot stop there, because philosophy and idealism cannot stop there.
00:15:41.440 | And the anxiety spreads.
00:15:44.640 | With each new bit of bad news issued from think tanks and blue-ribbon commissions, the
00:15:51.360 | same dramatis personae pound out newspaper and magazine commentaries, taking to cable
00:15:57.360 | talk programs to spout their views and entertain rejoinders from viewers across the country,
00:16:04.120 | usually with no one understanding the essential matters at stake.
00:16:08.800 | Watching cable call-in programs is like listening to the desperate yapping of thousands mesmerized
00:16:14.760 | by the sounds of their own voices.
00:16:17.640 | Back in the mid-1980s, a National Commission on Excellence in Education, an instance of
00:16:23.360 | grandiloquent dubbing, released a study called "A Nation at Risk," which contended that
00:16:29.440 | "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational
00:16:34.760 | performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war.
00:16:39.400 | As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.
00:16:42.560 | We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking unilateral educational disarmament."
00:16:50.600 | Whatever the nature of our troubles may be, they are deeply rooted.
00:16:55.200 | But a backward glance at history reveals that we have been here before.
00:17:00.360 | Nor are our troubles confined to our shores.
00:17:05.120 | Sir Richard Livingston, once president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, wrote in 1944
00:17:12.360 | on the ferment in England for reform in education.
00:17:16.120 | The worries were many, he wrote, including the "obvious and increasing importance of
00:17:21.080 | knowledge to life, a sense of the great possibilities of modern civilization and of its disorders
00:17:26.840 | and dangers, the perception that our democracy is very ill-educated, a realization that in
00:17:32.220 | foreign politics between 1919 and 1939 we threw away a great victory with a rapidity
00:17:38.640 | and completeness perhaps unexampled in history, and that this has been partly due to political
00:17:43.240 | ignorance and the need of extending education if equality of opportunity is to be more than
00:17:48.400 | a phrase."
00:17:50.400 | The parallels to our own day suggest themselves.
00:17:54.300 | But they go further.
00:17:56.280 | Livingston added that the interest given to education in his time was "political and
00:18:01.280 | social rather than educational."
00:18:04.480 | Such interest was, in other words, not intellectual.
00:18:08.880 | It was not about the mind.
00:18:12.440 | Much the same may be said of contemporary schemes to "reform our schools," whether
00:18:17.280 | inspired by the left or right.
00:18:20.700 | Politics has come with a vengeance.
00:18:23.120 | But the modern political impulse, the outraged mania for incessant, stupid interference,
00:18:30.240 | has little to do with intellectual formation and higher aims.
00:18:34.760 | Those dealing the thrusts and jabs today do not seem fit with the calm, disinterested
00:18:40.000 | intelligence distinguishing those of true philosophical temperament.
00:18:44.920 | Battles rage out there.
00:18:47.160 | Partisans angle provocatively to "empower" hitherto neglected groups, but the struggle
00:18:52.180 | has become a play for power, not a sober philosophical or cultural inquiry.
00:18:59.040 | Whatever be the relative merits of these labors, we must not fail to note that markedly less
00:19:05.680 | light is now thrown on matters of actual learning, how students' minds will be altered, formed,
00:19:12.480 | and filled, and their abilities to think enhanced.
00:19:16.520 | This is modern short-sightedness at its most vexatious.
00:19:21.120 | The intoxication of politics has poisoned the debate, making it narrow, strained, and
00:19:27.080 | fraught with hazards to disputants' reputations.
00:19:31.080 | Dissent carries a high price, especially in the age of the open mind.
00:19:38.440 | But we are still dogged by a practical question.
00:19:42.800 | Why do our schools and universities seem to accomplish so little for individual minds?
00:19:50.120 | One answer is that instead of doing a few things well, we have tried to do many things
00:19:54.860 | and have done them badly.
00:19:56.840 | We have striven, historian Jacques Barzun has written, "to make ideal citizens, super-tolerant
00:20:03.200 | neighbors, agents of world peace and happy family folk at once sexually adept and flawless
00:20:08.880 | drivers of cars."
00:20:11.160 | Our schools have been a place where high hopes have gone to die.
00:20:16.200 | Education is the tabula rasa on which we inscribe all our social desires and expectations.
00:20:23.780 | But Isocrates, a Greek rhetorician of the fourth century BC, got it right.
00:20:29.520 | "If all who were engaged in the profession of education," he wrote, "were willing
00:20:34.480 | to state the facts instead of making greater promises than they can possibly fulfill, they
00:20:39.440 | would not be in such bad repute with the lay public."
00:20:43.600 | Many centuries later, a tale that ought to serve as an object lesson for today's evangelists
00:20:48.820 | for the new age in education, a German reformer out to amend the crusty old classical curriculum
00:20:55.880 | was eventually thrown into prison and released only after confessing that he could not deliver
00:21:00.600 | what he had promised, for he had promised too much.
00:21:04.520 | The Latin stayed.
00:21:06.040 | "Forget education," Barzun has written, clearing the board.
00:21:10.480 | "Education is a result, a slow growth and hard to judge.
00:21:15.180 | Let us talk rather about teaching and learning, a joint activity that can be provided for,
00:21:21.760 | though as a nation we have lost the knack of it."
00:21:25.320 | We have lost the knack of it as a culture too.
00:21:28.180 | We must limit our promises and rein in our expectations.
00:21:33.920 | But first, we must define our ideals.
00:21:37.920 | We need to describe the ideal type of human being we wish to see around us.
00:21:43.600 | Do we wish merely to produce better skilled, smoothly cut cogs in the elaborate machine
00:21:49.960 | we now call the global economy?
00:21:53.360 | Have we finally determined that super tolerant neighbors and sexually adept, flawless drivers
00:21:59.080 | are all we can hope to be?
00:22:01.500 | Is this the juncture to which 3,000 years of civilized life have brought us?
00:22:08.480 | Somehow we think not, and we sense that the ideals adopted from the previous couple of
00:22:14.080 | generations stand pale when compared to those of other ages.
00:22:20.200 | History and literature rebuke our self-sufficiency.
00:22:23.760 | That's one reason why we ought to study them.
00:22:26.760 | It's not so much that people of olden times were the finest exemplars of higher humanity,
00:22:32.600 | for they too fell short of their ideals, as must all who aspire to higher things.
00:22:39.360 | That's what ideals are for.
00:22:41.960 | It's that we have abandoned those ideals once animating our civilization, refusing
00:22:48.000 | to learn them anew with each generation.
00:22:50.800 | We have assumed their transfer to be automatic.
00:22:54.400 | We have not indeed jettisoned the hope and drive that keep us working for a better world.
00:23:00.200 | That's the good news.
00:23:01.560 | But we have forgotten to cultivate ourselves as individuals.
00:23:06.720 | We drive by autopilot.
00:23:09.560 | We measure our gross national product, but we are left with a hunch that getting and
00:23:14.380 | spending don't quite make for the fuller life we read about, and fear exists somewhere
00:23:20.200 | beyond our avarice and ennui.
00:23:24.000 | So we live in an era propitious for a reignited conversation not only about pedagogical methods
00:23:30.600 | – those quotidian details of teaching and learning – but also about the aims those
00:23:36.300 | methods serve.
00:23:38.320 | We need to ask first questions, and we need to answer them without political posturing
00:23:43.960 | – perhaps a Herculean task in a politically charged age.
00:23:50.640 | We need to freshen our vision, and at least momentarily put our modernity aside and try
00:23:58.400 | to see the world as others have seen it.
00:24:01.400 | We must try to transcend ourselves.
00:24:04.840 | We are not compelled in doing so to reject modern concerns, but simply to view them with
00:24:10.660 | new eyes.
00:24:11.960 | G.K.
00:24:12.960 | Chesterton once said that there are two ways of getting home, and one of them is never
00:24:18.780 | to have left.
00:24:20.640 | That last path is shut to us.
00:24:23.880 | We have strayed too far.
00:24:25.640 | We must circumnavigate the entire world until we arrive where we started, and, as T.S.
00:24:31.420 | Eliot wrote, "know the place for the first time."
00:24:35.520 | We need to shore up our foundations.
00:24:39.480 | Il faut cultiver notre jardin.
00:24:42.840 | But I have gone further than I am fit to go, for this is not a case for educational reform
00:24:47.560 | of the garden variety.
00:24:49.720 | We need sway no public officials.
00:24:51.560 | I have happily abandoned hope for change in that sphere.
00:24:55.480 | Yet we can lengthen our prospect, broaden our view, and clear a path back home.
00:25:02.960 | We need simply to recommit ourselves individually to a rich and humane heritage long neglected,
00:25:10.280 | the effects of which neglect appear in a diminished, if not impoverished, intellectual and cultural
00:25:17.520 | life.
00:25:18.860 | This is not to be another tiresome case for "educational standards," merely confirming
00:25:24.160 | assumptions of the intelligentsia about what must be known.
00:25:28.320 | Let them crunch numbers as they may.
00:25:30.720 | We must ask not only what ought to be known by educated people, but, given what can be
00:25:37.520 | known, what should be taught in our schools, and what left to acquire outside school doors.
00:25:46.000 | It's of paramount importance, for example, whether vocational courses like computer training
00:25:51.120 | or lifestyle courses like driver's ed and home economics should be placed on par with
00:25:56.960 | the "purer" (because cultural or theoretical) subjects like French and physics.
00:26:04.240 | Given the world's fixation on technology and all things financially gainful, that grand
00:26:10.000 | old fortifying classical curriculum requires not an uncritical re-adoption (of which there's
00:26:16.880 | no chance anyway), but a sympathetic reappraisal, if for no other reason than that so many men
00:26:24.240 | and women of centuries past, who established and refined the standards by which we live
00:26:29.440 | today, held that gem in such high esteem.
00:26:34.160 | Thus can we regain some sense of history and our place along its timeline.
00:26:39.720 | Gratitude, according to Chesterton, is the "truest sign of happiness in individuals."
00:26:46.560 | A safe corollary seems, then, to be that a happier society would feel a debt to the past
00:26:54.200 | and its treasures, and this debt would be paid gladly by those taught in the ways of
00:26:59.560 | respect and humility.
00:27:02.720 | For those without respect and humility stand to these riches as those without a knowledge
00:27:08.660 | of geometry once stood before the gates of Plato's Academy.
00:27:14.180 | They are forever excluded.
00:27:16.660 | Such respect, if not always such humility, classical education fostered for centuries.
00:27:24.140 | It lent an anchoring to intellectual life and provided all educated people, as we now
00:27:30.200 | say, with a common set of references.
00:27:34.540 | Or to switch metaphors, it placed a true north on our cultural compass.
00:27:39.800 | It maintained a horizon.
00:27:42.660 | We could see where we were.
00:27:45.140 | But before we trudge forward, let's clarify a few key words and terms.
00:27:51.120 | Just what is classical education nowadays?
00:27:55.200 | We find that, in an uninstructed age, the old regimen needs not only defending but also
00:28:02.880 | defining.
00:28:04.560 | Once classical education pointed to an elite course of instruction based upon Greek and
00:28:09.920 | Latin, the two great languages of the classical world.
00:28:14.040 | But it also delved into the history, philosophy, literature, and art of the Greek and Roman
00:28:18.960 | worlds, affording over time to the more perspicacious devotees a remarkably high degree of cultural
00:28:24.840 | understanding, an understanding that endured and marked the learner for life.
00:28:30.200 | Classical education was classical immersion.
00:28:33.400 | Students in the great and exclusive public schools of England were once made to learn
00:28:37.280 | far more about the archons of Greek city-states and emperors of Rome, and commit to memory
00:28:42.500 | far more lines of Greek and Roman poetry and drama, than they ever had to learn about Tudors
00:28:47.920 | and Stuarts, about Chaucer and Shakespeare.
00:28:51.400 | But the languages never took second seat.
00:28:54.360 | Mastering them came first, and doing so became the crowning achievement of a classical education.
00:29:00.320 | Why?
00:29:01.820 | Because knowledge and information were not quite enough.
00:29:06.940 | Classical education did not set itself to instilling knowledge alone.
00:29:10.740 | It also sought to polish and refine, and neither rigor nor beauty in one's use of language
00:29:16.040 | obtained firmly without Greek and Latin.
00:29:18.880 | Together, they provided both a mental gymnastic and a training in taste.
00:29:24.480 | Today we use the term licentiously.
00:29:27.680 | We apply "classic" or "classical" to anything we believe to be excellent and universal.
00:29:34.520 | Once I was asked my field of study.
00:29:36.840 | "Classics," I replied, to which my interlocutor responded, "Oh, you mean Dickens, Melville,
00:29:44.240 | and all that?"
00:29:45.240 | A response common and understandable now.
00:29:49.160 | Sic semper verbis, also the field of classics, while still signifying the old meaning, Greek
00:29:55.080 | and Latin, to most of the intellectually inclined, has been extended to embrace a study of the
00:29:59.840 | classical world innocent of the languages, a sense we readily recognize in university
00:30:05.000 | course catalogs as "classical civ" and "classical literature," both customarily
00:30:10.920 | indicating often fine courses of readings in translation.
00:30:15.500 | The chains have loosened.
00:30:17.200 | Thus, nowadays, may classical education refer to something not linked to the classical world
00:30:21.800 | at all, never mind the languages, and get equated with what might once have been called
00:30:26.200 | simply traditional or orthodox education.
00:30:29.840 | This is schooling based on "classics," on books of the great tradition, an education
00:30:34.880 | that serves to inform us of the best works of our civilization and to provide us with
00:30:38.560 | models for spotting ethical and aesthetic norms.
00:30:42.580 | These two functions the valuable "great books" programs try to perform.
00:30:47.880 | Used in this way, classical education describes the quest for what has also been called a
00:30:52.280 | liberal education, or, more particularly, an education in the humanities.
00:30:58.560 | And now, legions of well-intending homeschoolers rush to put dibs on the term and bask in the
00:31:03.440 | light of the glory they believe it to exude.
00:31:06.040 | To many homeschoolers, "classical education" simply means the opposite of whatever is going
00:31:10.400 | on in those dreaded public schools.
00:31:13.020 | We can sympathize with them.
00:31:14.600 | I will only say to all these good people that extending "classical" to mark an approach
00:31:19.160 | or course of study without reference to Greek and Latin seems an unnecessarily promiscuous
00:31:23.720 | usage.
00:31:24.920 | But I'm afraid we're stuck with it.
00:31:27.440 | Here I trust that the reader will allow me the archaism of reverting to the older definition
00:31:31.840 | of "classical education" as a curriculum grounded upon, if not strictly limited to,
00:31:38.040 | Greek, Latin, and the study of the civilization from which they arose.
00:31:42.720 | For though my allies have appropriated the term for good purposes, I can find no other
00:31:47.480 | agenda that carries the weight of classical study as does "classics," the pursuit
00:31:51.360 | of which results, if we're lucky, in a "classical education."
00:31:55.760 | To use any other term would also break my rule of respecting the past, not to mention
00:32:00.320 | causing a semantic severance with generations of men and women who use the term quite differently
00:32:06.040 | and, I think, more accurately.
00:32:08.800 | I'll stick to the antique ways.
00:32:12.280 | Mount Parnassus, a limestone mass hovering over the ancient shrine of Delphi, has stood
00:32:18.680 | as a prime symbol of poetic inspiration and perfection since the dawn of the West.
00:32:24.640 | It fixed anxious eyes on the heavens.
00:32:28.040 | The Castalian Spring, being a sacred source of life-sustaining water, trickled far below.
00:32:34.360 | The hushed tones of ritual echoed from its slopes.
00:32:38.400 | And over time, it came to embody those things which man, at his best, wishes, and ought
00:32:44.480 | to wish, to achieve.
00:32:46.960 | It became a sign of his better, divinely inspired self.
00:32:51.160 | To climb Parnassus was to strive after the favor of Apollo and the nine muses Calliope,
00:32:58.920 | Erato, Cleo, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polymnia, Thalia, Terpiscari, Urania, ensconced up there
00:33:07.640 | forever unseen.
00:33:09.720 | While representing the unattainable for most pilgrims, Parnassus also pointed to those
00:33:15.800 | treasures bestowed by the muses upon the faithful and diligent ones who wait and work.
00:33:24.000 | And among those gifts most sought was the civilizing, cultivating boon of eloquence,
00:33:31.040 | of right and beautiful expression.
00:33:34.320 | Throughout the centuries to come, this forbidding image got lifted from its geographical and
00:33:40.040 | mythological settings to be transposed, in the wake of Renaissance humanism, as an emblem
00:33:46.160 | of linguistic flair.
00:33:49.000 | Climbing Parnassus eventually became a code for the painfully glorious exertions of Greek
00:33:54.680 | and Latin.
00:33:56.440 | The hard, precipitous path of classical education ideally led not to knowledge alone, but to
00:34:02.640 | the cultivation of mind and spirit.
00:34:06.200 | Knowledge did not, in and of itself, justify the sweat.
00:34:10.960 | The climb was meant to transform one's intellectual and aesthetic nature as well.
00:34:16.360 | The classical course held sway over the Western mind for centuries, right up until three or
00:34:21.160 | four generations ago.
00:34:23.240 | Much of our intellectual history from the Dark Ages through the Renaissance and on to
00:34:26.720 | the modern world witnessed the assiduous spadework of clerics and lay scholars alike reaching
00:34:33.240 | back to the ancient world to retrieve, preserve, and propagate the wealth of learning and experience
00:34:39.560 | it held.
00:34:41.080 | And the classical languages enshrining that wealth had to be taught.
00:34:45.000 | Thus, a classical education was the queen of all scholastic endeavors.
00:34:50.120 | It constituted the original humanities curriculum.
00:34:53.640 | Whatever hodgepodge of diverse and disconnected topics humanistic studies have become, their
00:34:59.800 | emaciated children now simply called "the humanities," they were once, first and last,
00:35:05.560 | a prolonged inquiry into Greek and Roman achievements in literature, history, thought, and art.
00:35:12.480 | That path, as I hope to show, is still a valid one to tread.
00:35:16.360 | Yet this too we must admit all these centuries later.
00:35:20.040 | Classical claims, while bolstered by tradition and intellectual coherence alike, cannot be
00:35:25.520 | advanced with proof.
00:35:28.120 | They are not the stuff of Venn diagrams.
00:35:31.140 | We cannot cash them at a bank.
00:35:33.520 | A classical education is different in kind to the training of a technician, where the
00:35:37.880 | trained man demonstrates his training with a testable skill.
00:35:41.880 | This, we may say, is training in the narrow sense, not an education.
00:35:48.200 | But many people today, without admitting it, prefer training to education, and they must
00:35:53.720 | have their heart's desire.
00:35:56.080 | Much of the value of classics we must take on the witness of mellowed experience.
00:36:01.320 | Arguing this case now is partly an impressionistic exercise.
00:36:05.880 | It always has been.
00:36:07.320 | A firm knowledge of the classical languages, history, and culture will not of itself create
00:36:13.040 | virtue.
00:36:14.080 | It cannot shine a light into corners we have elected to keep dark, nor into those that
00:36:18.320 | cannot be illumined.
00:36:20.840 | But this knowledge can form the mind and light a path to understanding.
00:36:26.740 | For it is noble to rediscover and attend to the voices of the past.
00:36:31.560 | We ignore them to our peril and to the peril of all those whom we would presume to teach.
00:36:38.620 | Without a finely tuned and oft-nourished sense of the past, both near and distant, we have
00:36:46.260 | no culture.
00:36:49.440 | And immediately we are thrown into another thicket.
00:36:51.860 | What do we mean by these mushy words "culture" and "cultural"?
00:36:57.060 | This ubiquitous idea, too, requires clarifying, and maybe a little fumigating.
00:37:02.220 | I do not use these words exclusively as we hear them bandied about by many who rant from
00:37:07.060 | the ranks of the politically concerned when discussing ethnicity and multiculturalism.
00:37:12.500 | That is, merely to describe group identities.
00:37:16.820 | Everyone has a "culture" now.
00:37:19.460 | We have African-American culture, Hispanic culture, corporate culture, youth culture.
00:37:26.480 | This use of the word hails from the halls of anthropology.
00:37:30.540 | If only there it had stayed.
00:37:32.580 | But it slithered forth from the laboratory to infect us all.
00:37:37.380 | From the anthropologists, Barzun has explained, the public picked up the word "culture"
00:37:42.580 | in this overarching meaning and then proceeded to reapply it for various purposes.
00:37:48.100 | For example, the artist is "conditioned by his culture," meaning social circumstances.
00:37:54.420 | He also fights against his culture, meaning certain beliefs and mores.
00:38:00.220 | Culture was a word hot for serving up on a steaming platter to the over-degreed and half-educated.
00:38:07.300 | It not only exfoliates before our eyes, it excuses ignorance and inoculates the ignorant
00:38:13.300 | from any responsibility to know anything beyond their kith and kin.
00:38:18.080 | Culture now makes neurotics.
00:38:20.500 | They are the ones who can't fight back.
00:38:22.740 | Not long after such twists and turns, the term "culture" began to split like an atom,
00:38:28.000 | and we have had to cope with the two cultures, the counterculture, ethnic culture, and any
00:38:32.780 | number of subcultures.
00:38:35.280 | Culture now is any chunk of social reality you like or dislike.
00:38:40.660 | Occasionally I use it in this its sociological sense, though I trust rarely enough and judiciously.
00:38:47.980 | While I do not eschew this newer sense of the word entirely, I wish to restore the older
00:38:52.780 | parlance to a place in our social lexicon.
00:38:56.400 | Therefore my use of "culture" is often unapologetically evaluative.
00:39:01.260 | It refers to lower and higher, better and best.
00:39:07.100 | A cultural achievement elevates.
00:39:10.480 | It improves.
00:39:12.580 | Once we could talk unselfconsciously of symphony concerts, opera performances, museum exhibitions,
00:39:19.300 | and poetry readings as cultural events.
00:39:22.740 | They did not merely entertain.
00:39:25.080 | They exposed us to something better than we could find elsewhere.
00:39:28.740 | And we hoped that such exposure would make us better as well, healthier intellectually
00:39:33.200 | and emotionally.
00:39:35.100 | Now of course this older idea is not quite safe, or at least not safely expressed, because
00:39:41.360 | it attributes higher qualities to some people and things and not to others.
00:39:46.100 | Who are you to tell me what's good?
00:39:48.940 | Mozart's music is not better than rap, just different, we say today.
00:39:53.420 | It's the great democratic hedge.
00:39:56.900 | Here the anthropological invades a realm properly guided by the aesthetic, perverting both thought
00:40:03.280 | and sentiment.
00:40:05.100 | But some judgments cannot be made by a show of hands.
00:40:08.200 | The majority doesn't always rule, nor in some matters, and here's the rub, should
00:40:16.020 | it.
00:40:17.580 | Classical education was thought to improve the learner, not simply to make him more knowledgeable,
00:40:24.140 | or tolerant, or mentally skillful, but better and stronger, just as there survives today
00:40:31.300 | a residual belief that one who has, say, read and digested all of Shakespeare is better,
00:40:39.300 | more insightful than one who has not.
00:40:42.740 | Perhaps this very attribution of quality to those equipped with classical learning poses
00:40:48.300 | the most formidable barrier to its return.
00:40:51.580 | We talk no more about "better people."
00:40:54.860 | No one wishes, and I certainly do not, to revert to rigid class lines, to a time when
00:41:00.780 | only the well-to-do learned Greek and Latin and all they have to offer, leaving the lower
00:41:05.280 | classes to learn the trades and mop the floors.
00:41:07.980 | Again, no chance of that.
00:41:10.620 | But neither should we confuse contingency with necessity.
00:41:16.860 | That which may cater to the privileged in one period might prime the aspirations of
00:41:21.940 | democracy in another.
00:41:23.820 | Nonetheless, we ought not to shy away from confronting views of former ages simply because
00:41:28.840 | they don't conform to current notions, for doing so exposes us to the most blinding of
00:41:33.700 | parochialisms, the glaring assumption that one's own time, particularly our own with
00:41:39.620 | all its hypersensitivities, is always right.
00:41:44.420 | So here, "culture" often refers to "high culture."
00:41:49.260 | It's about cultivation and refinement, about what makes one thought or act or expression
00:41:55.980 | better than another.
00:41:58.320 | This kind of culture embodies, as I shall repeat later in the words of Farrow Leitz,
00:42:03.020 | the conscious ideal of human perfection and the habitual vision of greatness.
00:42:08.780 | I once heard a tweedy, bespectacled professor of archaeology pause during a lecture on primitive
00:42:14.780 | peoples to remind his class that when he spoke of culture he did not refer—holding to his
00:42:20.540 | eye an imaginary monocle—to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
00:42:25.940 | Sometimes I do mean it that way.
00:42:28.700 | Culture is that which climbs high on the scale of human achievement, is not easily apprehensible
00:42:34.100 | to all, and requires patient thought and sympathy.
00:42:38.320 | We are not born into culture.
00:42:41.060 | We acquire it.
00:42:43.140 | And we can lose it.
00:42:45.780 | Climbing Parnassus once helped to form the unformed mind.
00:42:50.500 | The arduous ascent fostered intellectual and aesthetic culture within those who had endured
00:42:55.420 | the strain.
00:42:56.780 | It helped to bring mental and even emotional order out of chaos.
00:43:01.700 | And a classical training still provides the surest footing for the educated mind and a
00:43:05.500 | high perch from which to view other periods and nations.
00:43:09.660 | The foundations of the modern world are viewed more competently from this height.
00:43:13.820 | Poetry, drama, democracy, idealism, scientific curiosity, and so much else furnishing our
00:43:21.140 | minds are better grasped and better judged.
00:43:24.840 | We drift without classics, floating on our own deracinated, exiguous islands.
00:43:31.140 | And we become fodder for demagogues.
00:43:34.160 | We need not a revolution, but a restoration.
00:43:38.380 | The classical pursuit fosters gratitude for the fruits of the past and feeds the sense
00:43:43.160 | that we stand on the shoulders of giants.
00:43:46.180 | The student of history gains a means of judging other times seriously and fairly.
00:43:52.140 | He learns to see that a civilized culture is a delicately poised edifice, a fragile
00:43:58.300 | creation, erected with monumental exertion, yet easily destroyed.
00:44:04.620 | The historian Christopher Dawson once wrote that culture, in the older sense here, is
00:44:09.580 | "an artificial product.
00:44:12.020 | It is like a city that has been built up laboriously by the work of successive generations, not
00:44:17.100 | a jungle which has grown up spontaneously by the blind pressure of natural forces.
00:44:22.160 | It is the essence of culture that it is communicated and acquired, and although it is inherited
00:44:28.100 | by one generation from another, it is a social, not a biological, inheritance, a tradition
00:44:35.220 | of learning, an accumulated capital of knowledge, and one, we may add, always in danger of perishing."
00:44:45.420 | The Greeks dreamed, in the words of Werner Jaeger, of "building a state so skillfully
00:44:52.020 | that it might keep strength and spirit in perpetual equipoise," while recognizing
00:44:58.420 | that "even the most solid of earthly powers must vanish into the air, and that only the
00:45:04.220 | seemingly brittle splendor of the spirit can long endure."
00:45:08.740 | The classical world is a richly instructive model of civilized life.
00:45:13.140 | We are bound as heirs to ask anew what made it great with all its faults, and why it expired
00:45:20.540 | with all its strengths.
00:45:22.620 | Who knows?
00:45:23.940 | We may find ourselves on the decks of our own listing ship someday.
00:45:30.620 | This journey takes us high into the uplands of thought.
00:45:33.940 | Whitehead claimed all modern philosophy to be mere footnotes to Plato.
00:45:38.560 | An expedition into the classical world will lead us to philosophy, that highest of human
00:45:42.980 | quests after the spiritual, and a pursuit Plutarch once called "the head and font
00:45:48.820 | of all education."
00:45:51.140 | We see philosophy wooed in those days when she still held a link, and perhaps a key,
00:45:57.260 | to wisdom.
00:45:59.060 | Matters of ethics, morality, and politics jostled as the vita beata, the good or happy
00:46:05.540 | life is delineated, as it so supremely was during the 5th and 4th centuries BC in Greece,
00:46:12.820 | an age that, according to Livingston, had to face the questions which, now veiled, now
00:46:18.340 | visible, now remote, now insistent, constitute the eternal human problem.
00:46:23.980 | What should men believe about life?
00:46:26.220 | How should they live it?
00:46:27.460 | In what state of society can the good life be best lived?
00:46:31.100 | And how can we create such a state?
00:46:34.620 | B. L. Gildersleeve, an American classicist who flourished a century ago, once said that
00:46:40.780 | while, for the ancients, the actual conduct of life took precedence over its contemplation,
00:46:47.260 | that is, to deep thinking about it, still, the wisdom in forming the good and fruitful
00:46:52.860 | life came of contemplation and humble learning.
00:46:56.900 | This is why we should sup at their table.
00:46:59.420 | It seems to be impossible, Gildersleeve said, to live in constant communion with the first
00:47:04.260 | minds of antiquity and not imbibe something of the spirit of moderation, of self-control,
00:47:10.740 | of cautious wisdom that breathes through their counsels.
00:47:14.700 | For there is no department of human thought or endeavor in which the counsel of antiquity
00:47:18.860 | is not directly or indirectly valuable.
00:47:22.660 | Even if all one has gained from a classical education were to be forgotten in later life,
00:47:28.140 | anyone trained, at least for a time, to view the worlds the Greeks and Romans saw it may
00:47:33.300 | learn to ask pregnant questions.
00:47:36.740 | And even if the ancient answers be rejected, the student, of whatever age, will know what
00:47:41.460 | they are and approach his own world with freshened vision, one no longer blinkered by ideology
00:47:48.660 | and the reigning fashion.
00:47:50.620 | He would have a liberal, because liberating, education indeed.
00:47:57.780 | No longer would he be imprisoned exclusively within the velvet walls of his own world's
00:48:02.260 | preoccupations and fetishes.
00:48:04.620 | No longer would he be just and only a child of his own time.
00:48:09.300 | He might even partake of the divine.
00:48:15.020 | Classical education again needs defending.
00:48:18.340 | We labor, after all, under the modern and, for this reason, rarely challenged belief
00:48:24.900 | that the classical world and its works have little to teach anyone but specialists, scholars,
00:48:31.380 | and teachers of classics.
00:48:33.460 | Let there be no mistake.
00:48:35.060 | For well over a century, classicists themselves have helped to create this fix.
00:48:40.540 | They have encouraged classical teaching, emulating the necessarily precision methods of technicians.
00:48:48.540 | They have tried to habituate classics to the halls of science, and in doing so have ignored
00:48:54.180 | or obscured those humanizing balms many of us believe classics to apply.
00:48:59.940 | If indeed classical study is to consist merely, and for everyone, in nothing but memorizing
00:49:06.460 | grammar or toting up the number of slaves lugging amphorae in the Athens of Pericles,
00:49:12.340 | then truly classics has become a domain of specialists only, warranting no more, though
00:49:17.940 | no less, reverence and respect than any other worthwhile scholarly pursuit.
00:49:23.680 | This is the way many professional classicists would have it be, to which we can say only
00:49:28.580 | that they have their reward.
00:49:31.140 | Here I should draw a distinction between classical scholarship and classical education.
00:49:38.660 | They are not the same thing.
00:49:40.820 | Classical scholarship inhabits a province in which few of us are equipped to travel,
00:49:44.740 | either by training or temperament, as scholarship requires not only devotion to a subject, but
00:49:49.820 | also entails years of painstaking preparation and the fine-tuning of precise judgment.
00:49:55.940 | Fine classical scholars, like fine nuclear physicists, are rare birds.
00:50:01.940 | Would that they were a little rarer.
00:50:04.320 | As with nuclear physicists, few are needed in a healthy, intelligent society.
00:50:10.940 | Classical education, on the other hand, comes as the result of a classical course of study,
00:50:17.020 | usually lasting several years, often though not necessarily through one's undergraduate
00:50:22.060 | days.
00:50:23.660 | Perhaps classical education isn't as profound or as exacting as classical scholarships,
00:50:28.940 | though one may suspect that many tenured classics professors today would be hard-pressed to
00:50:33.140 | compose Greek iambics the way classically trained adolescents once could.
00:50:38.980 | Classical education aims at larger numbers.
00:50:41.140 | It's fit to serve more people.
00:50:43.900 | Some of those blessed with the benefits of an early classical training may be well-suited
00:50:47.740 | to the scholarly life, even if they do not opt for it.
00:50:51.340 | Nonetheless, they will have been transformed by that training.
00:50:55.140 | I don't dismiss the importance of high scholarship.
00:50:57.980 | I owe too much to too many scholars, and there can be no classical education without classical
00:51:03.220 | scholarship.
00:51:04.220 | Indeed, I would hope that a select few of the talented would be attracted to the academy
00:51:07.740 | to teach the languages, edit texts, elucidate ideas, dig shards, and think great thoughts.
00:51:14.500 | But it is primarily classical education, parnassus, not scholarship I argue for in this essay.
00:51:22.520 | The world could do with fewer scholars and more cultivated people.
00:51:28.100 | If classical study is to survive to guide our intellectual life, we must reassert its
00:51:33.040 | cultural significance and value.
00:51:35.960 | Classics must make a difference not just in the way we think, but in the way we live.
00:51:40.780 | Its humanistic roots cut in an era hounded by utilitarian demands.
00:51:46.180 | Classics has found itself in recent decades jockeying to justify its place in the cluttered
00:51:50.700 | academic catalogs to a technologically driven age.
00:51:54.420 | Ours is a time and place where many have decided, through ignorance or neglect, that culture,
00:51:59.980 | whatever it is, will somehow take care of itself.
00:52:03.180 | Yet the Greeks and Romans taught us, by edict and example, the dangers of cultural complacency.
00:52:09.940 | Culture does not breathe on its own.
00:52:12.060 | It is preserved by those convinced of its value.
00:52:15.300 | This is not a new gospel.
00:52:17.100 | It is simply true.
00:52:18.780 | The classical vision has been renewed time and again down the long centuries after being
00:52:23.420 | threatened with extinction by prophets touting their new Jerusalems.
00:52:28.340 | But for students of history, the burden of proof must lie on the shoulders of those who
00:52:32.260 | would deny that vision's value.
00:52:34.980 | The case for classical education is not airtight, nor can it be.
00:52:40.100 | It contains too many provisos, but it deserves another hearing.
00:52:44.300 | Homage has been paid to it before our time, and by finer minds.
00:52:51.020 | Lastly, for a delicate matter, and here I part company with many apologists for classical
00:52:57.380 | education, especially in modern America.
00:53:00.620 | Greek and Latin, this unique and rarified base of education, revered so long by the
00:53:06.700 | best and brightest, is not for everyone.
00:53:10.260 | The tireless study of classics has always been, to put it bluntly, an elite pursuit,
00:53:17.180 | a privilege of a comparative few.
00:53:20.140 | We should not skirt this fact.
00:53:22.860 | Classical education must not be patronizingly defended, must not be sold for its democratizing
00:53:29.320 | traits the way some of our allies spearheading the "great books" have done.
00:53:35.020 | These traits exist.
00:53:37.280 | Knowledge and understanding and taste all serve splendidly the interests of a democratic
00:53:41.660 | people, but they are accidental, not essential.
00:53:46.940 | Classics serves no class.
00:53:49.380 | Tyrants and oligarchs can quote Cicero too.
00:53:52.940 | Critics of classical education have, in one sense, been right for centuries.
00:53:56.780 | Classics is, in at least one inescapable sense, elitist.
00:54:01.940 | But so what?
00:54:03.300 | We may admit this, while also saying that this does not tell the whole story.
00:54:07.900 | Anyone with a modicum of talent and energy can take on large dollops that classics offers.
00:54:13.780 | It is a mansion with many rooms and corridors.
00:54:16.800 | But the indisputable fact is that those of higher culture have perennially constituted
00:54:21.320 | those few at the top who, through their gifts and privileges, have influenced disproportionately
00:54:27.100 | the larger society of which they are members.
00:54:29.900 | Still, I believe that the size of this minority as a proportion of the larger literate populace
00:54:35.340 | need not be infinitesimal.
00:54:38.140 | While initiates into classical learning have always been small in number, that number was
00:54:42.980 | always too small.
00:54:45.180 | Talent is no respecter of social status.
00:54:47.740 | No one with the requisite ability need be left out.
00:54:50.860 | Parnassus can be scaled by anyone with intelligence and curiosity who is also possessed of a doggedness
00:54:56.620 | for detail.
00:54:58.260 | With so much of the climbing gear available now to the disciplined autodidact in the form
00:55:02.340 | of books, films, and computer software, the vistas have never been accessible to so many.
00:55:08.500 | Despite other disadvantages of a world unfriendly to the rigors and elevations of classical
00:55:12.380 | learning, we can in this day bypass the oversights and soft ignorance of the educational "experts"
00:55:19.020 | who have maintained a stranglehold on our schools for generations.
00:55:23.100 | We have the liberty of free agents.
00:55:26.360 | We should use it.
00:55:27.940 | Finally, a concession.
00:55:30.780 | Many wonder whether the classical languages themselves make for an absolutely essential
00:55:34.860 | ingredient in a classical education.
00:55:37.420 | Could someone be classically educated without a reading knowledge of Greek and Latin?
00:55:42.220 | This sticky question, despite dogmatic claims on both sides, should not be answered glibly.
00:55:48.580 | One must probe a little to discover precisely what kind of knowledge the questioner wishes
00:55:52.740 | to gain.
00:55:54.180 | The judgment of history is "no."
00:55:57.060 | And certainly I argue for the full package, the deluxe deal, declensions, conjugations,
00:56:02.180 | syntax, lexicons, verse exercises, and all.
00:56:05.620 | Nonetheless, it is safe to say that we can procure, with enterprise, certain intellectual
00:56:11.260 | and cultural benefits of classics by means other than a formal classical schooling.
00:56:16.820 | Not all knowledge worth having need be worn with scholastic exactitude.
00:56:21.540 | Acute intelligence matched to an active imagination can do wonders.
00:56:26.240 | Many paths can lead us home.
00:56:28.180 | If we can say anything with hopeful certainty about the future of classical education, it
00:56:32.580 | is that there will be many steep and dusty roads back to Rome.
00:56:39.620 | The essay that I have just read to you is the introduction to the book called "Climbing
00:56:44.820 | Parnassus, A New Apologia for Greek and Latin" by author Tracy Lee Simmons, published in
00:56:53.220 | the year 2002.
00:57:16.100 | [music]