Anyone setting out to defend what Albert J. Nock once called "the grand old fortifying classical curriculum" (essentially Greek and Latin) does so knowing that he flies the tattered flag of a lost cause. Surrender to the victors has already been signed, the army dispersed, the guns are silent. That day is done.

Why in the age of the internet and the global economy dwell upon the words and deeds of people long dead who spoke and wrote in tongues equally dead? Surely education should help us to enjoy our fair share of bread and circuses. Education should help us to get things. It's about the future.

A recent American president, after all, made much ado about "building bridges to the twenty-first century." We had best be crossing. But the happy bands of those who fend for classical education, along with other tilters at windmills, are not so easily daunted. They would make a last stand for the barricades.

They have wandered as exiles in occupied territory, but the land is worth fighting for even if the battle should yield but a few paces. Ralph Waldo Emerson once chided the brashness of a lost cause like this one. I proffer to him my apologies. "It is ominous," he wrote, "that this word education has so cold, so hopeless a sound.

A treatise on education, a convention on education, affects us with slight paralysis and a certain yawning of the jaws." Ominous indeed, for ponderous books on education proliferate and provide what one historian has called a "dismal consolation to the misanthrope." We ought to cast a caustic eye on such trickery, for the utopian promises what he cannot deliver.

Beware the man with a new truth to preach. He bids to do our thinking for us, better, in the words of Auden, "to read the New Yorker, trust in God, and take short views." The American soil is not naturally fertile for classics. The seed falls on hard clay. As another man of letters told us nearly eighty years ago, we as a nation possess "a weakness for new gospels, a vital but hazardous trait, as we stand in danger of discarding both the good and useful in a quest for the dubious and untried." We reconfigure our lives daily, we pride ourselves on our capacity to reach far and entertain the fantastic idea, and we think of ourselves more as "doers" than as thinkers.

While others waxed about going to the moon, we went. We are forever on the move. But this restless drive which we Americans are wont to think unique to us also fuels the rest of the frenetic modern world, particularly in the West where, despite some multiculturalists' claims, our civilization supplies the model most peoples around the globe wish to emulate.

We spell "PROGRESS" with a capital. Here the news is always better, the old worse. The new is always rich and relevant, the old threadbare and obsolete. Ours is the "shining city on a hill" in John Winthrop's memorable coinage, a city that could begin afresh because it had no past.

We could start from scratch and travel lightly. Yet, having crossed the threshold of a millennium, we feel a few spiritual tremors. Impetuosity does not reflect. The superannuated, ever-changing mind cannot speak to the whole of life. It cannot contemplate. It cannot assign value. It can drive us to build new roads and bridges, but it cannot explain where we want to go.

It can build rockets to Mars and beyond, but it cannot tell us whether it's wise to go there. It cannot answer questions it long ago lost the wisdom to ask. The life of the mind and soul it leaves bereft of standards, those talking points of judgment which are acquired only with time and patient effort.

We appeal to the freakish in witless arts and entertainment. To serve the boring or the bored is not always clear, leading inexorably to the shocking that melts into a monotonous vulgarity in the public square. Even shock cannot shock indefinitely. Intellectuals are not immune. Scratch a believer in bold new ideas and find a slave to fashion, proving the adage that the newest is always the most quickly dated, whether it come from Madison Avenue or the Modern Language Association.

Nor is our political life unaffected. We call for candidates with new ideas, votaries to a perpetually malleable future. Here is the spirit of El Dorado, the hope that riches and salvation wait around the next bend in the road. Old gospels lack the beckoning allure of the road not taken.

But like explorers in the desert ever prone to mirage, we have had, along with remarkable discoveries, a few false sightings, and we are beginning to sense a certain lack of point and permanence in modern life. The new gospels have certainly delivered, but they have not saved. Education, that vague and official word for what goes on in our schools, has also been a trinket on the shelves of snake oil salesmen and a plaything for social planners in America for well over a century.

They too have been driven by the spirit of ceaseless innovation, and we have paid a high price. The peddlers have shrouded the high and subtler goals of learning which former generations accepted and promoted. These bringers of the new have traded in the ancient ideal of wisdom for a spurious adjustment of mind, settling for fitting us with the most menial of skills needful for the world of the interchangeable part.

They have decided we are less, not more, than wiser people have hoped humanity might become. We are masses to be housed and fed, not minds and souls seeking something beyond ourselves. Ask anyone today, for instance, to identify the aims of a "liberal education" and expect a long pause. Everett Dean Martin, he who informed us of our predilection for new gospels, wrote a book in 1926 titled The Meaning of a Liberal Education.

And in 1973, another scholar produced The Uses of a Liberal Education. We might detect in the latter title a falling away from an older ideal. Instead of seeking to discern what a liberal education can bring to us, we now ask what we can get out of it. There's a difference.

And the benefits accrued do not exist, apparently, if they cannot be measured, and measured by tools calibrated by craftsmen out to replicate themselves. Standards require standard makers. Nonetheless, on the face of it at least, the question of use is a fair one. Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead reminded us that any education not useful is wasted.

An education, he said, must be useful because understanding is useful. But what must we understand? If education must be useful, what uses are to be served? And more importantly, are there differing kinds of use we should acknowledge? The modern mind, schooled to be practical, stands ill-prepared to wrestle with these questions because they are, at bottom, philosophical ones.

Our practicality has, ironically, rendered us incapable of answering them. So, while thinking ourselves a knowing and enlightened lot, we stand deaf to our own ignorance, which has become a white noise. Gilded degrees hanging on our walls bear witness to our certified smarts. But we have stood Socrates on his head.

Whereas the only thing that sage Athenian knew was that he knew nothing, the only thing we don't know, and with far thinner credentials it would seem, is that we know so very little. He knows nothing and he thinks he knows everything, George Bernard Shaw put it. That points clearly to a political career.

We do not know, in other words, what more reflective ages have deemed the important things. And we don't know them because they have not been taught us. Our gentle prods to our self-esteem have spurred us to consult only our own druthers in deciding what is worth knowing. We have adopted the leveling assumptions we've inherited, whatever works for you, and fed off intellectual capital earned by others who, we presume, have already done the hard thinking for us.

We pride ourselves on self-reliance while following uncritically the roadmaps of others. For an independently skeptical people, we ask few questions. Milton once wrote that the reform of education is one of the greatest and noblest designs that can be thought on, and many have been drawn to the drafting table as willing architects of the future.

Within this workshop we have hammered out our highest aspirations and ideals. Yet few pursuits, however noble, promise so little. The wares are cheap, their shiny surfaces a veneer hiding shoddy work. As with most gospels, Martin observed, we are in such a hurry to save souls that we would begin proclaiming the new salvation to the nation before pausing to find out what education is.

Unable to explain what education is or is for, we have created state departments of education out of a desperate hope that what we have not had the wisdom and intellectual fortitude to determine in the light of day might emerge miraculously from a flurry of committee reports, public opinion polls, and bureaucratic fiat.

So to pen and read, still another tract such as this runs counter to that hope and makes for dreary work. We should shrink from more gospels, further means of deliverance from a predicament we do not fully understand, especially when the search is likely to prove less than edifying and close on unresolved chords.

I do not intend to offer a new gospel. Instead, I hope to direct our gaze behind us so that we may more securely find our footing on the road ahead. If in fact the past is prologue, it is only the past that can instruct and guide us. The present is too close, and the future is but a haze of possibilities and dreams.

The future does not yet belong to us. We do not lack defenses of traditional education. Disquisitions abound. They offer comfort and guidance to the seeking few. Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind set off a radioactive buzz in the late 1980s, with sales no doubt astounding author and publisher alike.

It was an unlikely bestseller, at once a philosophical excursion and a gripe against a noisy, tawdry world. But we don't know who read the book. It was enough for many simply to buy it and add their voices to the swelling chorus of those suspecting a decline in the intellectual quality not only of educated people, but also of the world they plan and steer.

Its presence on the coffee table advertised one's disquiet, becoming for a moment a badge of intellectual chic. E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy described the paucity of hard information today's high school graduates are likely to know and to be taught about history, science, and literature. Illiterate and semi-literate Americans are condemned not only to poverty, Hirsch wrote, but also to the powerlessness of incomprehension.

Knowing that they do not understand the issues and feeling prey to manipulative oversimplifications, they do not trust the system of which they are supposed to be the masters. They do not feel themselves to be active participants in our republic, and they often do not turn out to vote. And of course, for better or worse, many do turn out to vote.

What we don't know can hurt us. With the blitzing of these two books, we began to talk openly not only about 15-year-olds who cannot identify the order of American presidents since Franklin Roosevelt, or the century in which the American Civil War was fought, but also about 18-year-olds who cannot read even with ground-level competence.

Granting that the world has yet to see a golden age in education, we began to ask, what exactly are they doing in those schools? And why do our schools and colleges graduates so smart and promising in so many ways, not seem to know, really know anything of substance? They're heavy on proudly held opinions.

Opinions are always in abundant supply, but light on knowledge. Is this, we wondered, the best we can do? This we can say. Publicly funded ignorance began to seem a positive liability. It became the family lunatic we finally consented to bring up in mixed company. But these books did another salutary thing.

They directed us to question the uses of the tools at our disposal. On the one hand, there is the skill needed to use the proverbial wrench properly and efficiently. On the other, the judgment required to use it for right and good purposes. Bloom and Hirsch drew us back to fundamentals, throwing light not only on what ought to be taught in our schools and universities, but on goals, on the kind of citizens we wish to create and the kind of polity we wish to engender.

For education is never neutral. Embedded within any course of study lie assumptions about what people ought to know and about human nature itself. Are we man or machine? Education is, in the end, an auxiliary of philosophy, an embodiment of aims and ideals. It was therefore fruitless for President Clinton to demand that politics stop at the schoolhouse door.

Perhaps politics cannot stop there, because philosophy and idealism cannot stop there. And the anxiety spreads. With each new bit of bad news issued from think tanks and blue-ribbon commissions, the same dramatis personae pound out newspaper and magazine commentaries, taking to cable talk programs to spout their views and entertain rejoinders from viewers across the country, usually with no one understanding the essential matters at stake.

Watching cable call-in programs is like listening to the desperate yapping of thousands mesmerized by the sounds of their own voices. Back in the mid-1980s, a National Commission on Excellence in Education, an instance of grandiloquent dubbing, released a study called "A Nation at Risk," which contended that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war.

As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking unilateral educational disarmament." Whatever the nature of our troubles may be, they are deeply rooted. But a backward glance at history reveals that we have been here before. Nor are our troubles confined to our shores.

Sir Richard Livingston, once president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, wrote in 1944 on the ferment in England for reform in education. The worries were many, he wrote, including the "obvious and increasing importance of knowledge to life, a sense of the great possibilities of modern civilization and of its disorders and dangers, the perception that our democracy is very ill-educated, a realization that in foreign politics between 1919 and 1939 we threw away a great victory with a rapidity and completeness perhaps unexampled in history, and that this has been partly due to political ignorance and the need of extending education if equality of opportunity is to be more than a phrase." The parallels to our own day suggest themselves.

But they go further. Livingston added that the interest given to education in his time was "political and social rather than educational." Such interest was, in other words, not intellectual. It was not about the mind. Much the same may be said of contemporary schemes to "reform our schools," whether inspired by the left or right.

Politics has come with a vengeance. But the modern political impulse, the outraged mania for incessant, stupid interference, has little to do with intellectual formation and higher aims. Those dealing the thrusts and jabs today do not seem fit with the calm, disinterested intelligence distinguishing those of true philosophical temperament. Battles rage out there.

Partisans angle provocatively to "empower" hitherto neglected groups, but the struggle has become a play for power, not a sober philosophical or cultural inquiry. Whatever be the relative merits of these labors, we must not fail to note that markedly less light is now thrown on matters of actual learning, how students' minds will be altered, formed, and filled, and their abilities to think enhanced.

This is modern short-sightedness at its most vexatious. The intoxication of politics has poisoned the debate, making it narrow, strained, and fraught with hazards to disputants' reputations. Dissent carries a high price, especially in the age of the open mind. But we are still dogged by a practical question. Why do our schools and universities seem to accomplish so little for individual minds?

One answer is that instead of doing a few things well, we have tried to do many things and have done them badly. We have striven, historian Jacques Barzun has written, "to make ideal citizens, super-tolerant neighbors, agents of world peace and happy family folk at once sexually adept and flawless drivers of cars." Our schools have been a place where high hopes have gone to die.

Education is the tabula rasa on which we inscribe all our social desires and expectations. But Isocrates, a Greek rhetorician of the fourth century BC, got it right. "If all who were engaged in the profession of education," he wrote, "were willing to state the facts instead of making greater promises than they can possibly fulfill, they would not be in such bad repute with the lay public." Many centuries later, a tale that ought to serve as an object lesson for today's evangelists for the new age in education, a German reformer out to amend the crusty old classical curriculum was eventually thrown into prison and released only after confessing that he could not deliver what he had promised, for he had promised too much.

The Latin stayed. "Forget education," Barzun has written, clearing the board. "Education is a result, a slow growth and hard to judge. Let us talk rather about teaching and learning, a joint activity that can be provided for, though as a nation we have lost the knack of it." We have lost the knack of it as a culture too.

We must limit our promises and rein in our expectations. But first, we must define our ideals. We need to describe the ideal type of human being we wish to see around us. Do we wish merely to produce better skilled, smoothly cut cogs in the elaborate machine we now call the global economy?

Have we finally determined that super tolerant neighbors and sexually adept, flawless drivers are all we can hope to be? Is this the juncture to which 3,000 years of civilized life have brought us? Somehow we think not, and we sense that the ideals adopted from the previous couple of generations stand pale when compared to those of other ages.

History and literature rebuke our self-sufficiency. That's one reason why we ought to study them. It's not so much that people of olden times were the finest exemplars of higher humanity, for they too fell short of their ideals, as must all who aspire to higher things. That's what ideals are for.

It's that we have abandoned those ideals once animating our civilization, refusing to learn them anew with each generation. We have assumed their transfer to be automatic. We have not indeed jettisoned the hope and drive that keep us working for a better world. That's the good news. But we have forgotten to cultivate ourselves as individuals.

We drive by autopilot. We measure our gross national product, but we are left with a hunch that getting and spending don't quite make for the fuller life we read about, and fear exists somewhere beyond our avarice and ennui. So we live in an era propitious for a reignited conversation not only about pedagogical methods – those quotidian details of teaching and learning – but also about the aims those methods serve.

We need to ask first questions, and we need to answer them without political posturing – perhaps a Herculean task in a politically charged age. We need to freshen our vision, and at least momentarily put our modernity aside and try to see the world as others have seen it. We must try to transcend ourselves.

We are not compelled in doing so to reject modern concerns, but simply to view them with new eyes. G.K. Chesterton once said that there are two ways of getting home, and one of them is never to have left. That last path is shut to us. We have strayed too far.

We must circumnavigate the entire world until we arrive where we started, and, as T.S. Eliot wrote, "know the place for the first time." We need to shore up our foundations. Il faut cultiver notre jardin. But I have gone further than I am fit to go, for this is not a case for educational reform of the garden variety.

We need sway no public officials. I have happily abandoned hope for change in that sphere. Yet we can lengthen our prospect, broaden our view, and clear a path back home. We need simply to recommit ourselves individually to a rich and humane heritage long neglected, the effects of which neglect appear in a diminished, if not impoverished, intellectual and cultural life.

This is not to be another tiresome case for "educational standards," merely confirming assumptions of the intelligentsia about what must be known. Let them crunch numbers as they may. We must ask not only what ought to be known by educated people, but, given what can be known, what should be taught in our schools, and what left to acquire outside school doors.

It's of paramount importance, for example, whether vocational courses like computer training or lifestyle courses like driver's ed and home economics should be placed on par with the "purer" (because cultural or theoretical) subjects like French and physics. Given the world's fixation on technology and all things financially gainful, that grand old fortifying classical curriculum requires not an uncritical re-adoption (of which there's no chance anyway), but a sympathetic reappraisal, if for no other reason than that so many men and women of centuries past, who established and refined the standards by which we live today, held that gem in such high esteem.

Thus can we regain some sense of history and our place along its timeline. Gratitude, according to Chesterton, is the "truest sign of happiness in individuals." A safe corollary seems, then, to be that a happier society would feel a debt to the past and its treasures, and this debt would be paid gladly by those taught in the ways of respect and humility.

For those without respect and humility stand to these riches as those without a knowledge of geometry once stood before the gates of Plato's Academy. They are forever excluded. Such respect, if not always such humility, classical education fostered for centuries. It lent an anchoring to intellectual life and provided all educated people, as we now say, with a common set of references.

Or to switch metaphors, it placed a true north on our cultural compass. It maintained a horizon. We could see where we were. But before we trudge forward, let's clarify a few key words and terms. Just what is classical education nowadays? We find that, in an uninstructed age, the old regimen needs not only defending but also defining.

Once classical education pointed to an elite course of instruction based upon Greek and Latin, the two great languages of the classical world. But it also delved into the history, philosophy, literature, and art of the Greek and Roman worlds, affording over time to the more perspicacious devotees a remarkably high degree of cultural understanding, an understanding that endured and marked the learner for life.

Classical education was classical immersion. Students in the great and exclusive public schools of England were once made to learn far more about the archons of Greek city-states and emperors of Rome, and commit to memory far more lines of Greek and Roman poetry and drama, than they ever had to learn about Tudors and Stuarts, about Chaucer and Shakespeare.

But the languages never took second seat. Mastering them came first, and doing so became the crowning achievement of a classical education. Why? Because knowledge and information were not quite enough. Classical education did not set itself to instilling knowledge alone. It also sought to polish and refine, and neither rigor nor beauty in one's use of language obtained firmly without Greek and Latin.

Together, they provided both a mental gymnastic and a training in taste. Today we use the term licentiously. We apply "classic" or "classical" to anything we believe to be excellent and universal. Once I was asked my field of study. "Classics," I replied, to which my interlocutor responded, "Oh, you mean Dickens, Melville, and all that?" A response common and understandable now.

Sic semper verbis, also the field of classics, while still signifying the old meaning, Greek and Latin, to most of the intellectually inclined, has been extended to embrace a study of the classical world innocent of the languages, a sense we readily recognize in university course catalogs as "classical civ" and "classical literature," both customarily indicating often fine courses of readings in translation.

The chains have loosened. Thus, nowadays, may classical education refer to something not linked to the classical world at all, never mind the languages, and get equated with what might once have been called simply traditional or orthodox education. This is schooling based on "classics," on books of the great tradition, an education that serves to inform us of the best works of our civilization and to provide us with models for spotting ethical and aesthetic norms.

These two functions the valuable "great books" programs try to perform. Used in this way, classical education describes the quest for what has also been called a liberal education, or, more particularly, an education in the humanities. And now, legions of well-intending homeschoolers rush to put dibs on the term and bask in the light of the glory they believe it to exude.

To many homeschoolers, "classical education" simply means the opposite of whatever is going on in those dreaded public schools. We can sympathize with them. I will only say to all these good people that extending "classical" to mark an approach or course of study without reference to Greek and Latin seems an unnecessarily promiscuous usage.

But I'm afraid we're stuck with it. Here I trust that the reader will allow me the archaism of reverting to the older definition of "classical education" as a curriculum grounded upon, if not strictly limited to, Greek, Latin, and the study of the civilization from which they arose. For though my allies have appropriated the term for good purposes, I can find no other agenda that carries the weight of classical study as does "classics," the pursuit of which results, if we're lucky, in a "classical education." To use any other term would also break my rule of respecting the past, not to mention causing a semantic severance with generations of men and women who use the term quite differently and, I think, more accurately.

I'll stick to the antique ways. Mount Parnassus, a limestone mass hovering over the ancient shrine of Delphi, has stood as a prime symbol of poetic inspiration and perfection since the dawn of the West. It fixed anxious eyes on the heavens. The Castalian Spring, being a sacred source of life-sustaining water, trickled far below.

The hushed tones of ritual echoed from its slopes. And over time, it came to embody those things which man, at his best, wishes, and ought to wish, to achieve. It became a sign of his better, divinely inspired self. To climb Parnassus was to strive after the favor of Apollo and the nine muses Calliope, Erato, Cleo, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polymnia, Thalia, Terpiscari, Urania, ensconced up there forever unseen.

While representing the unattainable for most pilgrims, Parnassus also pointed to those treasures bestowed by the muses upon the faithful and diligent ones who wait and work. And among those gifts most sought was the civilizing, cultivating boon of eloquence, of right and beautiful expression. Throughout the centuries to come, this forbidding image got lifted from its geographical and mythological settings to be transposed, in the wake of Renaissance humanism, as an emblem of linguistic flair.

Climbing Parnassus eventually became a code for the painfully glorious exertions of Greek and Latin. The hard, precipitous path of classical education ideally led not to knowledge alone, but to the cultivation of mind and spirit. Knowledge did not, in and of itself, justify the sweat. The climb was meant to transform one's intellectual and aesthetic nature as well.

The classical course held sway over the Western mind for centuries, right up until three or four generations ago. Much of our intellectual history from the Dark Ages through the Renaissance and on to the modern world witnessed the assiduous spadework of clerics and lay scholars alike reaching back to the ancient world to retrieve, preserve, and propagate the wealth of learning and experience it held.

And the classical languages enshrining that wealth had to be taught. Thus, a classical education was the queen of all scholastic endeavors. It constituted the original humanities curriculum. Whatever hodgepodge of diverse and disconnected topics humanistic studies have become, their emaciated children now simply called "the humanities," they were once, first and last, a prolonged inquiry into Greek and Roman achievements in literature, history, thought, and art.

That path, as I hope to show, is still a valid one to tread. Yet this too we must admit all these centuries later. Classical claims, while bolstered by tradition and intellectual coherence alike, cannot be advanced with proof. They are not the stuff of Venn diagrams. We cannot cash them at a bank.

A classical education is different in kind to the training of a technician, where the trained man demonstrates his training with a testable skill. This, we may say, is training in the narrow sense, not an education. But many people today, without admitting it, prefer training to education, and they must have their heart's desire.

Much of the value of classics we must take on the witness of mellowed experience. Arguing this case now is partly an impressionistic exercise. It always has been. A firm knowledge of the classical languages, history, and culture will not of itself create virtue. It cannot shine a light into corners we have elected to keep dark, nor into those that cannot be illumined.

But this knowledge can form the mind and light a path to understanding. For it is noble to rediscover and attend to the voices of the past. We ignore them to our peril and to the peril of all those whom we would presume to teach. Without a finely tuned and oft-nourished sense of the past, both near and distant, we have no culture.

And immediately we are thrown into another thicket. What do we mean by these mushy words "culture" and "cultural"? This ubiquitous idea, too, requires clarifying, and maybe a little fumigating. I do not use these words exclusively as we hear them bandied about by many who rant from the ranks of the politically concerned when discussing ethnicity and multiculturalism.

That is, merely to describe group identities. Everyone has a "culture" now. We have African-American culture, Hispanic culture, corporate culture, youth culture. This use of the word hails from the halls of anthropology. If only there it had stayed. But it slithered forth from the laboratory to infect us all. From the anthropologists, Barzun has explained, the public picked up the word "culture" in this overarching meaning and then proceeded to reapply it for various purposes.

For example, the artist is "conditioned by his culture," meaning social circumstances. He also fights against his culture, meaning certain beliefs and mores. Culture was a word hot for serving up on a steaming platter to the over-degreed and half-educated. It not only exfoliates before our eyes, it excuses ignorance and inoculates the ignorant from any responsibility to know anything beyond their kith and kin.

Culture now makes neurotics. They are the ones who can't fight back. Not long after such twists and turns, the term "culture" began to split like an atom, and we have had to cope with the two cultures, the counterculture, ethnic culture, and any number of subcultures. Culture now is any chunk of social reality you like or dislike.

Occasionally I use it in this its sociological sense, though I trust rarely enough and judiciously. While I do not eschew this newer sense of the word entirely, I wish to restore the older parlance to a place in our social lexicon. Therefore my use of "culture" is often unapologetically evaluative.

It refers to lower and higher, better and best. A cultural achievement elevates. It improves. Once we could talk unselfconsciously of symphony concerts, opera performances, museum exhibitions, and poetry readings as cultural events. They did not merely entertain. They exposed us to something better than we could find elsewhere. And we hoped that such exposure would make us better as well, healthier intellectually and emotionally.

Now of course this older idea is not quite safe, or at least not safely expressed, because it attributes higher qualities to some people and things and not to others. Who are you to tell me what's good? Mozart's music is not better than rap, just different, we say today. It's the great democratic hedge.

Here the anthropological invades a realm properly guided by the aesthetic, perverting both thought and sentiment. But some judgments cannot be made by a show of hands. The majority doesn't always rule, nor in some matters, and here's the rub, should it. Classical education was thought to improve the learner, not simply to make him more knowledgeable, or tolerant, or mentally skillful, but better and stronger, just as there survives today a residual belief that one who has, say, read and digested all of Shakespeare is better, more insightful than one who has not.

Perhaps this very attribution of quality to those equipped with classical learning poses the most formidable barrier to its return. We talk no more about "better people." No one wishes, and I certainly do not, to revert to rigid class lines, to a time when only the well-to-do learned Greek and Latin and all they have to offer, leaving the lower classes to learn the trades and mop the floors.

Again, no chance of that. But neither should we confuse contingency with necessity. That which may cater to the privileged in one period might prime the aspirations of democracy in another. Nonetheless, we ought not to shy away from confronting views of former ages simply because they don't conform to current notions, for doing so exposes us to the most blinding of parochialisms, the glaring assumption that one's own time, particularly our own with all its hypersensitivities, is always right.

So here, "culture" often refers to "high culture." It's about cultivation and refinement, about what makes one thought or act or expression better than another. This kind of culture embodies, as I shall repeat later in the words of Farrow Leitz, the conscious ideal of human perfection and the habitual vision of greatness.

I once heard a tweedy, bespectacled professor of archaeology pause during a lecture on primitive peoples to remind his class that when he spoke of culture he did not refer—holding to his eye an imaginary monocle—to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Sometimes I do mean it that way. Culture is that which climbs high on the scale of human achievement, is not easily apprehensible to all, and requires patient thought and sympathy.

We are not born into culture. We acquire it. And we can lose it. Climbing Parnassus once helped to form the unformed mind. The arduous ascent fostered intellectual and aesthetic culture within those who had endured the strain. It helped to bring mental and even emotional order out of chaos. And a classical training still provides the surest footing for the educated mind and a high perch from which to view other periods and nations.

The foundations of the modern world are viewed more competently from this height. Poetry, drama, democracy, idealism, scientific curiosity, and so much else furnishing our minds are better grasped and better judged. We drift without classics, floating on our own deracinated, exiguous islands. And we become fodder for demagogues. We need not a revolution, but a restoration.

The classical pursuit fosters gratitude for the fruits of the past and feeds the sense that we stand on the shoulders of giants. The student of history gains a means of judging other times seriously and fairly. He learns to see that a civilized culture is a delicately poised edifice, a fragile creation, erected with monumental exertion, yet easily destroyed.

The historian Christopher Dawson once wrote that culture, in the older sense here, is "an artificial product. It is like a city that has been built up laboriously by the work of successive generations, not a jungle which has grown up spontaneously by the blind pressure of natural forces. It is the essence of culture that it is communicated and acquired, and although it is inherited by one generation from another, it is a social, not a biological, inheritance, a tradition of learning, an accumulated capital of knowledge, and one, we may add, always in danger of perishing." The Greeks dreamed, in the words of Werner Jaeger, of "building a state so skillfully that it might keep strength and spirit in perpetual equipoise," while recognizing that "even the most solid of earthly powers must vanish into the air, and that only the seemingly brittle splendor of the spirit can long endure." The classical world is a richly instructive model of civilized life.

We are bound as heirs to ask anew what made it great with all its faults, and why it expired with all its strengths. Who knows? We may find ourselves on the decks of our own listing ship someday. This journey takes us high into the uplands of thought. Whitehead claimed all modern philosophy to be mere footnotes to Plato.

An expedition into the classical world will lead us to philosophy, that highest of human quests after the spiritual, and a pursuit Plutarch once called "the head and font of all education." We see philosophy wooed in those days when she still held a link, and perhaps a key, to wisdom.

Matters of ethics, morality, and politics jostled as the vita beata, the good or happy life is delineated, as it so supremely was during the 5th and 4th centuries BC in Greece, an age that, according to Livingston, had to face the questions which, now veiled, now visible, now remote, now insistent, constitute the eternal human problem.

What should men believe about life? How should they live it? In what state of society can the good life be best lived? And how can we create such a state? B. L. Gildersleeve, an American classicist who flourished a century ago, once said that while, for the ancients, the actual conduct of life took precedence over its contemplation, that is, to deep thinking about it, still, the wisdom in forming the good and fruitful life came of contemplation and humble learning.

This is why we should sup at their table. It seems to be impossible, Gildersleeve said, to live in constant communion with the first minds of antiquity and not imbibe something of the spirit of moderation, of self-control, of cautious wisdom that breathes through their counsels. For there is no department of human thought or endeavor in which the counsel of antiquity is not directly or indirectly valuable.

Even if all one has gained from a classical education were to be forgotten in later life, anyone trained, at least for a time, to view the worlds the Greeks and Romans saw it may learn to ask pregnant questions. And even if the ancient answers be rejected, the student, of whatever age, will know what they are and approach his own world with freshened vision, one no longer blinkered by ideology and the reigning fashion.

He would have a liberal, because liberating, education indeed. No longer would he be imprisoned exclusively within the velvet walls of his own world's preoccupations and fetishes. No longer would he be just and only a child of his own time. He might even partake of the divine. Classical education again needs defending.

We labor, after all, under the modern and, for this reason, rarely challenged belief that the classical world and its works have little to teach anyone but specialists, scholars, and teachers of classics. Let there be no mistake. For well over a century, classicists themselves have helped to create this fix.

They have encouraged classical teaching, emulating the necessarily precision methods of technicians. They have tried to habituate classics to the halls of science, and in doing so have ignored or obscured those humanizing balms many of us believe classics to apply. If indeed classical study is to consist merely, and for everyone, in nothing but memorizing grammar or toting up the number of slaves lugging amphorae in the Athens of Pericles, then truly classics has become a domain of specialists only, warranting no more, though no less, reverence and respect than any other worthwhile scholarly pursuit.

This is the way many professional classicists would have it be, to which we can say only that they have their reward. Here I should draw a distinction between classical scholarship and classical education. They are not the same thing. Classical scholarship inhabits a province in which few of us are equipped to travel, either by training or temperament, as scholarship requires not only devotion to a subject, but also entails years of painstaking preparation and the fine-tuning of precise judgment.

Fine classical scholars, like fine nuclear physicists, are rare birds. Would that they were a little rarer. As with nuclear physicists, few are needed in a healthy, intelligent society. Classical education, on the other hand, comes as the result of a classical course of study, usually lasting several years, often though not necessarily through one's undergraduate days.

Perhaps classical education isn't as profound or as exacting as classical scholarships, though one may suspect that many tenured classics professors today would be hard-pressed to compose Greek iambics the way classically trained adolescents once could. Classical education aims at larger numbers. It's fit to serve more people. Some of those blessed with the benefits of an early classical training may be well-suited to the scholarly life, even if they do not opt for it.

Nonetheless, they will have been transformed by that training. I don't dismiss the importance of high scholarship. I owe too much to too many scholars, and there can be no classical education without classical scholarship. Indeed, I would hope that a select few of the talented would be attracted to the academy to teach the languages, edit texts, elucidate ideas, dig shards, and think great thoughts.

But it is primarily classical education, parnassus, not scholarship I argue for in this essay. The world could do with fewer scholars and more cultivated people. If classical study is to survive to guide our intellectual life, we must reassert its cultural significance and value. Classics must make a difference not just in the way we think, but in the way we live.

Its humanistic roots cut in an era hounded by utilitarian demands. Classics has found itself in recent decades jockeying to justify its place in the cluttered academic catalogs to a technologically driven age. Ours is a time and place where many have decided, through ignorance or neglect, that culture, whatever it is, will somehow take care of itself.

Yet the Greeks and Romans taught us, by edict and example, the dangers of cultural complacency. Culture does not breathe on its own. It is preserved by those convinced of its value. This is not a new gospel. It is simply true. The classical vision has been renewed time and again down the long centuries after being threatened with extinction by prophets touting their new Jerusalems.

But for students of history, the burden of proof must lie on the shoulders of those who would deny that vision's value. The case for classical education is not airtight, nor can it be. It contains too many provisos, but it deserves another hearing. Homage has been paid to it before our time, and by finer minds.

Lastly, for a delicate matter, and here I part company with many apologists for classical education, especially in modern America. Greek and Latin, this unique and rarified base of education, revered so long by the best and brightest, is not for everyone. The tireless study of classics has always been, to put it bluntly, an elite pursuit, a privilege of a comparative few.

We should not skirt this fact. Classical education must not be patronizingly defended, must not be sold for its democratizing traits the way some of our allies spearheading the "great books" have done. These traits exist. Knowledge and understanding and taste all serve splendidly the interests of a democratic people, but they are accidental, not essential.

Classics serves no class. Tyrants and oligarchs can quote Cicero too. Critics of classical education have, in one sense, been right for centuries. Classics is, in at least one inescapable sense, elitist. But so what? We may admit this, while also saying that this does not tell the whole story. Anyone with a modicum of talent and energy can take on large dollops that classics offers.

It is a mansion with many rooms and corridors. But the indisputable fact is that those of higher culture have perennially constituted those few at the top who, through their gifts and privileges, have influenced disproportionately the larger society of which they are members. Still, I believe that the size of this minority as a proportion of the larger literate populace need not be infinitesimal.

While initiates into classical learning have always been small in number, that number was always too small. Talent is no respecter of social status. No one with the requisite ability need be left out. Parnassus can be scaled by anyone with intelligence and curiosity who is also possessed of a doggedness for detail.

With so much of the climbing gear available now to the disciplined autodidact in the form of books, films, and computer software, the vistas have never been accessible to so many. Despite other disadvantages of a world unfriendly to the rigors and elevations of classical learning, we can in this day bypass the oversights and soft ignorance of the educational "experts" who have maintained a stranglehold on our schools for generations.

We have the liberty of free agents. We should use it. Finally, a concession. Many wonder whether the classical languages themselves make for an absolutely essential ingredient in a classical education. Could someone be classically educated without a reading knowledge of Greek and Latin? This sticky question, despite dogmatic claims on both sides, should not be answered glibly.

One must probe a little to discover precisely what kind of knowledge the questioner wishes to gain. The judgment of history is "no." And certainly I argue for the full package, the deluxe deal, declensions, conjugations, syntax, lexicons, verse exercises, and all. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that we can procure, with enterprise, certain intellectual and cultural benefits of classics by means other than a formal classical schooling.

Not all knowledge worth having need be worn with scholastic exactitude. Acute intelligence matched to an active imagination can do wonders. Many paths can lead us home. If we can say anything with hopeful certainty about the future of classical education, it is that there will be many steep and dusty roads back to Rome.

The essay that I have just read to you is the introduction to the book called "Climbing Parnassus, A New Apologia for Greek and Latin" by author Tracy Lee Simmons, published in the year 2002.