Hey parents join the la kings on saturday november 25th for an unforgettable kids day presented by pear deck family fun giveaways and exciting Kings hockey awaits get your tickets now at la kings.com slash promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones classical education that odd and antiquated custom setting generations of bewildered youth to suffering the Inky travails of learning greek and latin two languages.

They would never speak Can hardly be defended or even explained without a long look at the nature of liberal education Nor can we neglect to tap the roots of that distant descendant of humanistic learning the modern humanities Where we now find classics nestling obscurely in college catalogs For at the pinnacle of both sat the classical curriculum But while granting that once upon a time classical learning might have borne some relation to professional skills Surely we think it has failed to remain useful in an age.

No longer requiring the services of scholastic monks courtiers and imperial civil servants So does this curriculum remain at all relevant in a world that measures success in stock averages and megabytes? for as classical scholar gilbert murray once conceded Even if we neglect merely material things and take as our standard the actual achievements of the greeks in conduct and knowledge The average clerk who goes to town daily idly glancing at his morning newspaper is probably a better behaved and infinitely better informed person than the average athenian who sat spellbound at the tragedies of aeschylus That clerk cannot be too badly off.

He gets along And if education is not to promote material success What should it do? Must we lend any legitimacy to an older idea that education exists primarily to form the inner man As well as to impart those all important skills for making a living Have we in fact grown out of that ideal?

Or have we fallen so far short of it that we cannot even spy its majestic peaks? We praise liberal education zealously It's a term of marble grandeur But few of us know what it means It has become grist for commencement addresses and high-flown commentary expounding the true mission of our schools and universities Best used by people removed from the rough and tumble of life As with pornography we cannot define it, but we think we know it when we see it Liberal education rests comfortably in a haze where it no longer calls us to commit to anything exemplary hard or heroic For some liberal education has become synonymous with the humanities That free-for-all of open curricula where the dazed and confused spend irreplaceable years browsing among Survey courses taking ant bites out of whatever nuggets randomly lie among the crumbs learning little or nothing in particular The humanities provide a direction for the directionless a path for the pathless certifying ignorance in the guise of a knowledge too easily acquired This wandering listlessness can envelop teachers of the liberal arts as well The average figure being according to Mark Van Doren too often quote neither lay nor learned But a bored fellow who mixes prescriptions wherein all tastes are flat or bad So much knowledge about one thing and another and never the tincture of wisdom close quote To others liberal education has become wedded to the propounding of social grievances Freedom studies we might call them To others still it marks an expenditure of time and effort largely wasted when a technological world wants technologists liberal education in short means today whatever we wish it to mean in all our idealistic or disputatious moods It is like a loose constitution open to any fanciful interpretation of the moment But some contemporary thinkers have tried to spy its essence philosopher Leo Strauss wants to find a liberal education nebulously as one in culture or toward culture In doing so drawing on the ancient metaphor of agricultural husbandry Culture means chiefly the cultivation of the mind the taking care and improving of the native faculties of the mind In accordance with the nature of the mind just as the soil needs cultivators of the soil.

So the mind needs teachers further liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence of human greatness and in listening to the conversation among the greatest minds as heard through the channel of great books an idea owing more than a little to Matthew Arnold's ideal of culture as trumpeting forth the best that has been thought and said A Bartlett Giamatti a staunch defender of the principles of liberal education as he saw them described it again Not too clearly as an attitude of the mind toward knowledge the mind explores and creates Such education occurs when you pursue knowledge because you are motivated to experience and absorb what comes of thinking Thinking about the traditions of our common heritage in all its forms thinking about new patterns or designs Whether in philosophic texts or financial markets or chemical combinations Thinking in order to create new knowledge that others will then explore Here the new presides Knowledge is not to be learned so much as created indeed.

It exists almost for what it produces Broad claims like these typify the rhetoric of liberal education and such definitions can be both revealing and helpful But somehow they smell of formaldehyde. They seem just a bit sterile We are still daunted and challenged though by Everett Dean Martin's spirited declaration many decades ago That the best education is the organization of knowledge into human excellence An education he said is not the mere possession of knowledge, but the ability to reflect upon it and grow in wisdom Liberal education ought to aim not just at furnishing the mind with serviceable knowledge and information Nor even at habituating the mind to rational methods But at leading it to wisdom to a quality of knowledge tempered by experience and imbued with understanding It should in a word humanize unguided by such an aim education loses its true character and finds itself degraded to servile training for the world's daily drudgeries Liberal education Civilizes it transforms us We are better for having run its course Nonetheless, these flourishes of eloquence glow within the light of dying embers The case must be made but hope for the cause has long since waned We lose an opportunity if we accept defeat too quickly Not in decades perhaps at a time when our schools have lost the capacity either to kindle a passion for history Or even to teach it intelligently Has there been a better time to search out our roots and recover our identity as citizens of the west?

By reasserting an intellectual training that reminds us who we are Where we came from and the heights to which we have aspired and which we might aspire again We have a large and many branched family tree to trace So before we explore the history of a classical education Let's examine further the meaning and growth of liberal education And the subsidiary curriculum known as the humanities Winging a few theoretical flights along the way Take a classroom example Imagine we are teachers trying to define liberal education for students We may do so by shaving off its political barnacles and drilling down to its etymological source We say that liberal derives from a latin word for freedom So what makes an education liberal we plead our target in the scope It's an education that makes us free an education that liberates us Then we roll in the big guns Robert hutchins once explained that the liberal arts are the arts of freedom to be free A man must understand the arts of freedom much along these lines martin contended that Education is a spiritual re-evaluation of human life Its task is to reorient the individual to enable him to take a rich and more significant view of his experiences Yes education must be liberalizing But not in the political sense as if it meant half measures, but in its original sense Meaning the kind of education which sets the mind free from the servitude of the crowd and from vulgar self-interests Education is simply philosophy at work.

It is the search for the good life Education is itself a way of living Giamatti addressed the freshman class at yale in 1983 with much the same spirit I believe a liberal education is the liberty of the free mind to explore itself He said to draw itself out to connect with other minds and spirits in the quest for truth Its main goal is to train the whole person to be at once intellectually discerning and humanly flexible Tough-minded and open-hearted to be responsive to the new and responsible for values that make us civilized Although later proclamations may lack the older definitions strident vigor they agree Liberal education we tell our class fosters a mind that struggles against insularity It aims to make us better than our untutored natures lead us to be But usually at this point the discussion so usefully begun breaks down What do we need liberating from?

Ignorance is the hackneyed answer But of what exactly are we ignorant? Here the teacher confronts the often willful confusions of the immature easily suggestible mind we might strategically avoid Strauss's idea that education should act as a counterpoison to the corroding effects of mass culture one thing at a time But we have raised questions questions We hope will set patterns of inquiry and steer the students energies away from slavery to intellectual fashion and sense impressions to careful self-examination For whatever else it seeks to do a liberal education seeks not only to instill essential knowledge But also to prompt the asking of questions It both provides a content and confers a method And ideally the search will be for hard and hard-won answers which those students pupils of life can use For such an education is eminently practical So far we sail the stratosphere The air is thin and rarified.

We have yet to utter those great names of the western tradition Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Dr. Johnson Which shine as distant lights But something is happening Students learn that maybe answers are possible and that there may be ways of getting at them Keys available to all who find within themselves the humility to learn and are determined to search beyond sentiment and circumstance To a common base of truth about human life and history In this one crucial way will they adjust?

They will become responsible agents They will tap intellectual depths They will also learn to use words more responsibly They will learn how to paw an abstraction The concept of freedom for example is a stick of dynamite Books and life both teach that a freedom without discipline may not only be useless But a hindrance to grasping something true beyond the veil of illusion they may come to see with Milton that Liberty hath a double edge fit only to be handled by just and virtuous men To bad and dissolute it becomes a mischief unwieldy in their own hands Further the idea of equality held with catechetical reverence in a democratic society They begin to view as yet another social and political ideal that However good has nonetheless been created by minds that came before theirs minds formed by ethical and intellectual ideals Themselves handed down from still other minds and they will begin to spot complications Not everything is democratic in the modern sense of being equally accessible to or achievable by all They will begin to see what C.S.

Lewis meant when he said that equality Has no place in the world of the mind Beauty is not democratic She reveals herself more to the few than to the many more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless Virtue is not democratic. She is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men Truth is not democratic.

She demands special talents and special industry and those to whom she gives her favors Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demands for equality into these higher spheres ethical intellectual or aesthetic democracy is death These words merely elitist at first sight to the unseeing or electively blind Point us to a difference between those who view education as a matter of equal attainment And those who regard it as a result of highly individual and strenuous labor guided by logic experience and wisdom of former ages A search for the objective and knowable over the subjective and unknowable an assertion of the common over the eclectic The first more leveling view would seem the mandatory one today among those who teach and among those who teach the teachers Tis education forms the common mind wrote Alexander Pope just as the twig is bent the trees inclined At the heart of liberal education stands the conviction that the well-touted freedom of mind comes only by submission to standards external to oneself That the discipline precedes the freedom and that this kind of freedom can only be earned as a reward Not conferred as a right openness to new experiences the Experiential heresy is not sufficient One needs to know how to respond to experience not simply with an enlightened intellect But with an enlightened heart Understanding like this must be achieved.

It does not come without effort and it certainly cannot be assumed If only it were otherwise The struggle shown here in simple terms is not new it points up age-old Divergences in the theory of education and indeed radically differing notions of human nature These lead us into robust philosophical hair-splitting Philosophy stands on the doorstep bidding us to enter and make choices to make distinctions to discriminate generations of students have been taught that the very word education means the bringing out of children their native genius the word can just as easily sustain the opposite idea of Building up and even putting in of course any education worthy of the name will do all But at least the claims served place these ideas on their proper philosophical playing field Where we can begin to carve out a clear and defensible idea of what education Liberal or not is supposed to do For the true liberal ideal despite fulsome praise has found few buyers in the modern marketplace of ideas John Henry Newman a 19th century cleric and fount of crystalline clarity Bestowed the seminal statement of the aims of liberal education in his idea of a university He trusted a religious upbringing to inculcate virtue Formal education though is a different thing Perfection of the intellect he wrote is an object as intelligible as a cultivation of virtue while at the same time it is absolutely distinct from it and He described with axiomatic sagacity what the liberally educated mind looks like Instruction is one thing it has little or no effect upon the mind itself But education is a higher word it implies an action upon our mental nature and the formation of a character It is something individual and permanent and is commonly spoken of in connection with religion and virtue For Newman a proper education forms a habit of mind that Lasts through life of which the attributes are freedom Equitableness calmness moderation and wisdom all of which add up to what he called the philosophical habit Knowledge is to be sought for its own sake Irrespective of immediate and material gain any other attitude to knowledge betrays the servile mind All inquiry springs from the curious and rationally formed sensibility The principle of real dignity and knowledge its worth is this germ within it of a scientific or a philosophical process This is how it comes to be an end in itself.

This is why it admits of being called liberal By this kind of knowledge we come to know the relative disposition of things Such as the constitution of the human mind that any kind of knowledge if it be really such is its own reward For only liberal knowledge stands on its own pretensions is independent of sequel expects no compliment refuses to be informed by any end or Absorbed into any art in order duly to present itself to our contemplation liberal education is simply the cultivation of the intellect as such and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence The bar is high, but we can reach it with straining effort Here is a definition as fine as we are likely to find in this or in any other life Forming intellectual virtue is not the only task that liberal education has sought to perform along with imparting knowledge and Inculcating the ways of sound thinking it has also tried to transmit culture in both senses of the word This task often gets neglected now Unless its object be to raise the self-esteem of a particular minority and then of course the emphasis lies no longer on a common culture but on discrete separate ones Furthermore we have over time quietly adopted a truncated utilitarian notion of education As serving solely to help students get ahead So inured have we become to public demands to teach skills for tomorrow as though education has never done anything else Yet it was also largely to transmit culture that the brands of education we dub liberal and humanistic evolved Prior generations believed that citizens should know the meaning of justice for instance Not only so they might practice it in the streets, but so they might raise their children to practice it as well Thus perpetuating one more social ideal one both felt and enacted They also judged human instinct appetite unchecked by reason to be a perennial danger and Insufficient mental equipment to take through life We should certainly teach young people practical skills, but they must also take in our values ethical intellectual and aesthetic As we have already noted no system of education formal or informal can exist value free Even if children and adolescents were taught only technical know-how Such teaching would reveal the parts in the play we have assigned them The Greeks and Romans made sure to teach their offspring not only practical skill for getting along They made them memorize poetry commemorating the deeds of their mythological and historical heroes They filled their children's minds with useless Information by rote with one purpose among others to make them members of a people to make them one We cannot view classical education a right unless we factor in this element of culture classics served the role of To use the denigrated term of the day cultural gatekeeper a preserver of collective memories Where do we stand today?

This idea of conserving culture has not been lost on all modern minds nor have all those minds been politically conservative journalist Walter Lippmann an influential voice for political and social liberalism spoke to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1940 and described what he believed to be the state of American education His perceptive words raised to a higher power Likewise speak to our immensely greater shiftlessness today There is an enormous vacuum where until a few decades ago There was the substance of education and with what is that vacuum filled it is filled with the elective eclectic the specialized the accidental and incidental improvisations and spontaneous Curiosities of teachers and students there is no common faith No common body of principle no common moral and intellectual discipline Yet the graduates of these modern schools are expected to have a social conscience They are expected to arrive by discussion at common purposes When one realizes that they have no common culture Is it astounding that they have no common purpose that they worship false gods that only in war do they unite?

That in the fierce struggle for existence they are tearing Western society to pieces Lippmann observed that the modern world had established a system of education where everyone must be educated Yet where there is nothing in particular that an educated man should know Whether or not we agree with Lippmann's diagnosis let alone his presuppositions We can see that he saw a society that had already reached a critical fork in the road We ought to mark the spotlight on commonality The emancipated democracies have renounced the idea that the purpose of education is to transmit Western culture Thus there is a cultural vacuum and this cultural vacuum was bound to produce in fact has produced progressive disorder Lippmann described in effect the deliquescence of liberal education and the liberal intellectual ideal in America The consequences of which could not be foreseen easily before America's entry into World War two T.S.

Eliot a poet and critic with much to say about education was convinced that any culture worthy of survival must work unstintingly to preserve itself and resist the modern Ideologically driven tendency to create bodies of men and women of all classes detached from tradition alienated from religion and susceptible to mass Suggestion in other words a mob Which is no less a mob if it is well fed well clothed well housed and well disciplined he addressed the prickly matter in his notes towards the definition of culture a book written in an uncertain post-war England He too noted how much the fervor for educational reform Assumed education to be an instrument for the realization of social ideals Which are not always the same as cultural ideals Quoting a leading thinker of the time who said that the ideal most to be served is full democracy But education Eliot said has even more pressing tasks Ignored by many would-be reformers were the higher purposes informing the liberal and humanist Traditions in which Eliot himself had been nurtured and to which he appealed It would be a pity if we overlooked the possibilities of education as a means of acquiring Wisdom if we belittled the acquisition of knowledge for the satisfaction of curiosity Without any further motive than the desire to know and if we lost our respect for learning Most tellingly and most damning to the scheme of course electives obtaining in American schools and universities Eliot did not believe students competent to decide for themselves what they needed to learn the lights of tradition and reason must guide them No one can become really educated he wrote without having pursued some study in which he took no interest For it is part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude Eliot advocated a prescribed curriculum out with the cafeteria style of course selection We should not tailor our courses simply to our ease and ignorance or laziness But strive to grow into a state of mind, which is the object of a more rigorous Commonly directed course of study set by minds more mature and wise This was for Eliot the sanest of conservative tenets the conviction that a debt is owed to the past and that Conversely the past bestows a legacy on the present by teaching its lessons by a vicarious and finely sifted experience All of this of course violates dearly held modern beliefs in our self-sufficiency As well as the spirit of relativism in which all curricula are now arranged or left Unarranged on a level plane one course is as good as another all are valid in their own way Rejecting set curricula though ravages not only the older regime of classical education Which prescribed heavily but also any traditional form of liberal learning that has taken upon itself the splendid burden of Pointing up the knowledge most worth knowing Yet this curricular flea market also poses an aberration in the West It is we not they who have gone before us who cut a poor and disjointed figure in the eyes of history Indeed Eliot blamed the disintegration of Western culture on a form of cultural liberalism that Tends to release energy rather than accumulate it to relax rather than to fortify It is a movement not so much defined by its end as by its starting point away from rather than towards something definite By destroying traditional social habits of the people by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents by licensing the opinions of the most foolish by substituting instruction for education by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom the upstart rather than the qualified by Fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation the artificial mechanized or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos Here we have in one dose many of the modern world's ills told with vivid discomforting simplicity and This is not to repeat a matter for political partisans only Many political conservatives today fit the bill four square.

We are all liberals of this kind now Hardly, can we avoid being so this is the air we breathe The Greeks and Romans yearned for a common culture Paideia is the Greek word customarily translated to mean education but Enculturation better approximates its essence Paideia was about instilling core values enunciating standards and setting moral precepts H.I.

Moreau a French historian of ancient education held that Paideia Signifies culture not in the sense of something active and preparational like education But of something perfected a mind fully developed the mind of a man who has become truly man Modern views of education neglecting Paideia scarcely would have been recognizable to the ancients.

They would not have deemed them complete education applied a social glue a common set of ideals and Expectations the larger culture carried supreme weight with the Greeks and Romans often at the expense of the individual Paradoxically though they thought the surest path to the healthy society to be a course of instruction that appears to us the most Individualistic because it is inner directed and speculative Played to its finest pitch that course seeks to foster contemplation which is according to Aristotle the highest form of activity because the intellect is the highest part of our nature and the things Apprehended by it or the highest form of knowledge The vitality of any culture can be achieved only if there be enough souls to apprehend the beautiful and the good Cohesion by other means risks Eliot's mob The object was to educate autonomous men and women citizens not robots one historian has said that the history of education has been an interplay between conceptions of freedom and conceptions of value and That by these conceptions we place ourselves within our society Schools and their curricula have always reflected the values of the society they serve They still do and this should concern us If a society be rigid and authoritarian Children are taught obedience if it be Equalitarian they are taught first of their rights as citizens secondarily of their civil obligations likewise a vocationally minded commercial society will betray its priorities by placing training for jobs above all else Getting on is the goal the ancients recognized that a sound culture must strike a balance between rival claims of authority and liberty Whenever we talk about education we do well to keep this in mind Any curriculum presupposes a vision of the good well-run society Sir, Richard Livingston a profoundly astute observer of cultural requisites wrote Along with Elliot and Lippmann amid the dislocations of World War two to apprise Britons of the vast challenges Political and social awaiting them at the end of the war Much of what he highlighted applied only to the Great Britain of his day But we can see that most of what he had to say impinges upon us now We can also see how much Livingston understood Paideia from the inside and could transpose it for modern life What purposes should education at its most enlightened serve?

Livingston listed three functions to it to teach us to earn a living To teach us to be good citizens and to help us to understand the meaning of the good life The first objective he wrote we understand all too well and the second is treated with growing neglect But the third is almost irretrievably lost He was right When we peruse today's jargon laden manifestos that would tell us what we ought to teach and learn We search in vain for the third criterion But Livingston realized that philosophical even Spiritual formation is not extraneous to the task.

It is central Robert Hutchins wrote that a system that denies the existence of values denies the possibility of education relativism Scientism skepticism and anti-intellectualism The four horsemen of the philosophical apocalypse have produced that chaos in education, which will end in the disintegration of the West Though this was an outcome that Livingston thought we can counteract Spiritual matters press upon the secular world just as irresistibly as they do upon the sacred.

They just go by different names Spirituality embracing the entire personality cannot be severed from education As we are about to see the spiritual motive found an a special home in humanism Which had evolved to meet Livingston's second and third criteria Humanism seeks to help us understand our rights and duties as citizens but it also seeks to help us grasp the nature of human existence as it has been celebrated and implemented through time and perceived through literature philosophy and history Livingston said that the finest education before it can be judged complete must give everyone or everyone mentally able an intellectual attitude to life and a philosophy of life It must foster a right intellectual attitude seeking to find the world and life intensely interesting to wish to see them as they are and To feel that truth in Plato's words is both permanent and beautiful Not that we mustn't work for a living The efficiency of a community will depend on its technical and vocational education Its cohesion and duration largely on its social and political education But the quality of its civilization depends on something else.

It depends on its standards, its sense of values Its idea of what is first-rate and what is not Words that swerve further from current dogmas of educational theory would be hard to imagine We don't speak the same language Yet any man of learning of the last several centuries would have found himself simpatico with the ideals even while finding them hard to live by What about the role of moral training in formal education?

It's there in theory as it remains today in secular practice Though moral concerns now creak with the weakened politically approved language of tolerance and respect for diversity But even these aims critical as they may be for the building of character still fall short of another One is apt to think of moral failure Livingston wrote as due to weakness of character More often it is due to an inadequate ideal We detect in others and occasionally in ourselves the want of courage of industry of persistence Which leads to defeat but we do not notice the more subtle and disastrous weakness that our standards are wrong That we have never learned what is good Here is the crux of Livingston's critique of modern education It is leery of seeking out and acknowledging distinctions between good and bad Better and worse it does not teach the arts of discrimination We suffer from an atrophy of the judging faculty The most indispensable viaduct for the journey of life is a store of adequate ideals And these are acquired in a very simple way by living with the best things in the world The best pictures the best buildings the best social or political orders the best human beings The way to acquire a good taste in anything from pictures to architecture from literature to character From wine to cigars is always the same be familiar with the best specimens of each We must educate the head and heart alike The sight of goodness in life or in literature or history gives a standard at a challenge If anyone has been able to compare the first rate with the second rate His criticism will not be merely bitter and barren but creative born of a vision perceiving the good Dominated by it and desiring to bring it to birth We must train the intellectual and aesthetic judgment without which life for reflective educated people cannot be deemed whole without which we cannot awaken the mind of a man who has become truly man and any judgment presupposes a standard a guiding principle external to oneself a Principle in Robert Frost's words to stay our minds on and be stayed Common culture common standards those standards show us where we stand on the grid of human experience Livingston and TS Eliot both stood at a crossroads in the cultural and intellectual history of the West For theirs was the last generation to receive stout drafts of the old humanistic rigorous liberal schooling bestowed as a matter of course on those privileged to attend the better schools they would live to see that tradition dissolve and With the passing of that tradition a cultural ideal began to lapse as well here again as we did before we must distinguish in Werner Jaeger's words between culture as an ecological concept which means the entire way of life or character of a particular nation and culture as the conscious ideal of human perfection a Worthy compliment we find in a phrase from Alfred North Whitehead who wrote that moral education is impossible without the habitual vision of greatness Both the conscious ideal of human perfection and the habitual vision of greatness speak to those acts and thoughts betokening the acme of human achievement Especially those so judged by successive generations of discerning spirits These are the seeds of humanistic endeavor to climb the heights of human possibility To reflect on man's will to know and understand himself Placed as he is in a turbulent world made all the more violent and chaotic by his passions and by his perpetual Fight to free himself from their fetters We are on this planet to rise above lower nature So far so good But what do we mean by humanism if we crack this nut Greek and Latin in the age of Microsoft might begin to make some sense Humanism has never enjoyed a sure definition Nor has its anti religious press earned and unearned done the word any favors But if classical education is hard to understand without grasping the goals of liberal education It is absolutely incomprehensible without a firm hold on this idea of humanism So what is it?

To some it's an optimistic belief in the capacity of human beings to solve those problems uniquely theirs or as Livingston once wrote humanism is the belief that man is more important than his environment or his possessions and That his fundamental business is not to understand physical nature Though that is one of his problems nor to earn a livelihood though That is one of his duties but so to lead his life is to make the best of human nature and above all what is characteristic of peculiar to and highest in human nature or as the Greeks put it to achieve the arete or excellence of man Critics have asserted its profaneness as a philosophy of secular power in defiance of a divine creator Those especially who espouse certain religious tenets have made humanism in full dress as secular humanism a term of pure denigration Both understandings bear traceable roots yet none exhausts the word or the idea the Fowler's concise Oxford Dictionary sums up the meaning most usefully as a devotion to human interests a System concerned with human not divine interests or with the human race not the individual religion of humanity literary culture especially that of the humanists who are themselves defined as students of human nature or human affairs they are students, especially in the 14th to 16th centuries of Roman and Greek literature and antiquities The devotion to human interests endures in the popular mind However, little that idea can be said to mean certainly as does the idea of humanism constituting a kind of religion But the emphasis on the human race not the individual represents the predominant modern view Conditioned I believe by the more outward-looking humanitarian impulse We can look back a couple millennia though and amuse ourselves to see that the confusions Stretch back all the way to the classical world itself The 2nd century AD Roman Aulus Gellius himself keen to capture the meaning of the Latin root humanitas Noted that common people understood it broadly while those who spoke pure Latin the educated elite restricted its meaning Those who have spoken Latin and have used the language correctly do not give to the word humanitas the meaning which it is commonly thought to have Namely what the Greeks call philanthropia Signifying a kind of friendly spirit and good feeling towards all men without distinction But they gave to humanitas about the force of the Greek paideia.

That is what we call eruditionem institutionemque in bonas artes or education and training in the liberal arts Those who earnestly desire and seek after these are most highly humanized For the pursuit of that kind of knowledge and the training given by it have been granted to man alone of all the animals And for that reason it is termed humanitas He went on to clarify the related humanior as Meaning not good-natured and amiable and kindly which was its usual sense But is applying to someone of some cultivation and education eruditiori doctorique Someone that is who has learned not only from books possessing knowledge of letters But also one who has taken on the cultivation that comes of the contemplative life Thus wrote modern philosopher and man of letters Irving Babbitt Humanitas really implies doctrine and discipline and is applicable not to men in general But only to a select few it is in short Aristocratic and not democratic in its implication it faces outward but inward first Humanitas seeks to amend the self before amending the world around Babbitt's pivotal distinction arose out of the jumble he spotted between humanism and Humanitarianism two words that had come to mean and still mean a century later practically the same thing in the popular mind and his division illuminates a person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump faith in its future progress and Desires to serve the great cause of this progress should not be called a humanist But a humanitarian and his creed may be designated as humanitarianism Peculiar mischief crops up from the muddle the humanitarian lays stress almost solely upon breadth of knowledge and sympathy the poet Schiller for instance speaks as a humanitarian and not as a humanist when he would clasp the millions to his bosom and Bestow a kiss upon the whole world But the true humanist Babbitt said is more as selective in his caresses For he like the eminently humanistic Cicero knows that what is wanted is not sympathy alone nor again discipline and selection alone, but a disciplined and selective sympathy Sympathy without selection becomes flabby and a selection which is unsympathetic tends to grow disdainful set over against the humanitarians the Humanists concern lies in perfecting the individual rather than in schemes for the elevation of mankind as a whole And although he allows largely for sympathy.

He insists that it be disciplined and tempered by judgment Tellingly when Babbitt contradicted Bruntier who believed he had found the perfectly apt definition of humanism in the Roman poet Terence's assertion that I consider nothing human alien to me Babbitt did so because of the entire absence of the idea of selection for here stands the Humanitarian busybody with whom we are all so familiar nowadays who goes around with schemes for reforming almost everything except himself Selection was both a cultivated ideal and a counterweight to mere sympathy Here the difference is sealed with wax humanism selects humanitarianism doesn't Liberal education and the humanities then are not synonymous terms Though the source of their confusion is not hard to spot The goals of humanism and the goals of any curriculum fairly called liberal have shot at neighboring targets They aim to broaden enlighten deepen Although humanism did not dawn its familiar clothing until the Renaissance Its ideals took shape 2,000 years before in the hands of the Greeks.

They drew the blueprints for right education The Romans finally codified the system which they dubbed the liberal arts That legacy has been maintained to this day Though the muddy accretions of bad teaching and misdirected good intentions have covered over the roots liberal arts derives directly from artes liberales and Designates those activities promoting freedom and leisure But we must add that for Greeks and Romans leisure carried none of our overtones of idleness leisure referred to those arts even techniques reckoned conducive to the contemplative or reflective life to an expansive freedom of mind Opposed to the artes liberales were the artes serviles the obligatory backbreaking work performed to earn bread and ale Artes serviles were necessary for any society Artes liberales for a higher more varied culture the venerable seven liberal arts of the trivium grammar rhetoric logic and quadrivium astronomy music geometry arithmetic were enshrined in the Middle Ages as those mental arts promoting leisure But prior to leisure or the liberal arts came the articulation of the virtues Moral muscle being not inborn must be firmed up before the good society can be achieved goodness in the polis But first goodness in individuals the ancients knew that any society marked by unbridled appetites competing for control and Satisfaction would quickly reduce itself to barbarism the morally sound state was a prerequisite to the fruitful practice of the liberal arts and the liberal arts required a measure of social tranquility Now for the sinews the gristle of those liberal and humane ideals The Greeks and Romans while capable of great superstition Nonetheless placed great faith in the power of reason and it was the object of the artes liberales to discover truth Yet they did not live solely in their brains Plato believed in the fundamental unity of the good all the virtues amounted to a rate excellence which signified the best quality appropriate to any act or actor thought or thinker it Pointed toward the best of anything to its perfection Conduct should be informed by knowledge of the virtues and evil comes naturally of ignorance Morality is rational.

It can be divine by the instructed mind. It isn't purely subjective. It is discoverable Evil is a disease a cancer of the mind and soul healable by philosophy One healed the soul by leading the mind to knowledge of values which in turn leads to aletheia or truth itself Nothing short of this would produce the virtuous life for the quality of life could be neither more nor less than the soul made it How strange said Socrates on the eve of his execution that any citizen of Athens?

The greatest of cities and the most famous for wisdom and power Would not be ashamed to care for the acquisition of wealth and for reputation and honor When you neither care nor take thought for wisdom and truth and the perfection of your soul Socrates claimed his life's mission to be nothing else than urging you young and old Not to care for your persons or your property more than for the perfection of your souls The Western mind elevated this mighty philosophical aim into an ideal The inner takes precedence over the outer the mind and soul compose an inseparable whole and both are fed or starved together No option exists to train the mind alone without producing soul deep consequences But how is the inner to be instructed?

Here was the question posing the greatest challenge to Greek education to Piedia. How best to fit theory to practice? The Greeks also knew the tension between teaching for skills training and teaching for cultural and intellectual strength liberal education Aristotle on the heels of Plato by a generation admitted that it is not clear whether pupils should practice pursuits that are practically useful or morally edifying Still the Greeks reached an impressive accord on the role of education in promoting virtue One we see spun out richly in the works of Plato and Aristotle they came to believe that education ought to change who the learner is an Operation such as this and an analogy to surgery doesn't come amiss Must be undertaken with care but the rewards were great and indelible Protagoras had proclaimed man to be the measure of all things and an exploration into man's nature was proclaimed the highest pursuit We can make along our journey through life Certainly the most sublime work ever penned on Piedia and the building of common culture is Plato's Republic said by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau to be the finest treatise on education ever written and indeed one cannot talk intelligently about education without having sat at the feet of Socrates and his companions as They wrestle with ways and means to build the well-run state We need not detain ourselves with a detailed précis of Plato's thoughts But we would serve our purposes with a glance at his view of the ideal state for that is what the Republic describes Not so much a feasible political program Socrates gave his name to the Socratic method a teaching device seeking as its object to make all knowledge personal By rigorous questioning to make it more than a nod of lazy assent The novices thereby led through the bracken of his assumptions and biases to the clear light of knowledge The teacher holds him responsible for all words and ideas.

He utters Pressing him to define them with greater exactitude. Just what do we mean by justice? freedom courage Virtue are they achievable in this life or are they beyond the grasp of even the most righteous and this method remains a cardinal? means of testing intellectual metal the pupil isn't so much taught as guided first to recognize his own ignorance and Second to spring from this illumination to true knowledge and understanding Thus does knowledge rise out of ignorance thus can knowledge lead to wisdom How our human relations structured in this ideal world?

Plato's view of humanity reveals distinctly hierarchical Scaffolding the Republic of Plato's fancy is composed of three tiers Living on the bottom are most of us the great mass of people from the poor through prosperous farmers Artisans and merchants they put food on the tables and keep the wheels of commerce turning But by dint of their desire merely to make a living untroubled by higher aspirations They are to exercise no political power over others because they have not been taught to wield power with justice and magnanimity next up come the administrators and the military those charged with carrying out the policies set by the rulers on top and The rulers of course are the philosopher princes who alone possess the knowledge and wisdom to rule This is not a democratic vision.

It is guided by an assumed inequality throughout the populace It is therefore shamelessly aristocratic the rule of the best and most able One abiding difference though from the more familiar and historical sense of aristocracy Lies in the absence of any belief that the aristocrats Those who man the upper tiers gain their ascendancy from inherited privilege Rulers rule only after their characters have been judged meritorious This idea wrote Jaeger Plato thought to be a principle in harmony with nature and which is therefore absolutely inevitable in the state of divine perfection The poor and laboring masses haven't had the education for enlightened rule Yet more significantly the plutocrats out for nothing beyond lucre are also expressly forbidden power Souls like these are also unequal to the task of ruling What curriculum must one complete before he is deemed worthy to rule over others in this theoretical state?

Primary schooling stipulates a course of mathematics literature music and gymnastics Later students learn logic as adults some set off into the upper reaches of philosophy Significantly not till they reach their 30s are they fit for leadership Not till 50 or so will they be asked finally to turn Upwards the vision of their souls and fix their gaze on that which sheds light on all For when they have thus beheld the good itself They shall use it as a pattern for the right ordering of the state and the citizens and themselves Throughout the remainder of their lives each in his turn devoting the greater part of his time to the study of philosophy Philosophy is not a fine thing but a necessity Plato claimed another tripartite split in human nature One not surprisingly reflecting the three classes of the state first appetite all physical and sensual wants including avaricious desires for material gain then the spirited element which is formed by habit and will and finally the philosophic element which can perceive virtues like sympathy and selflessness and If it's properly formed can apprehend goodness beauty and truth order of whatever kind is Hierarchical all this may strike us as fanciful But the value of these ruminations to us resides in the theory not the applicability they crystallize CS Lewis best summarized this model for the modern mind as The king governs by his executive he wrote so reason and man the Philosophic element must rule mere appetites by means of the spirited element the head rules the belly through the chest the seat of Magnanimity of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments the chest magnanimity sentiment these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and Visceral man it may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man For by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal For devotees of this classical Greek view of the human mind and human nature the supreme goal of education was happiness which was conceived of as health of soul the ultimate good man can hope to attain during his lifetime and From this health of soul they believed would come eudaimonia literally the good God within a Harmonious balance of the whole personality, but once more how to achieve it early humanistic education began with the cultivation of character Whatever intellectual feats a man might bring off they were of scant value if he had not first achieved a goodness and tranquility of soul Socrates had said that According as the sons turn out well or the opposite will the whole life of their father's house be affected depending for better or worse on their character Character determined the health of the state in this sense the purposes behind education were also political each man and woman would be of either the rulers or the ruled and Here the aristocracy must carry its own weight a ruler must be distinguished from a subject by his superior character Not merely by the accidents of birth and wealth Therefore his education must differ from theirs.

He must care about supra intellectual qualities Jaeger explained the goal Distinction between the two kinds of training extends even to food and regimen The infant prince must learn to ignore physical needs and desires in order to fulfill urgent duties Must be master of his own hunger and thirst must be used to short sleep late to bed and early to rise Must not be afraid of hard work must not be lured by the bait of sense Anyone who cannot do all that is a subject not a ruler Socrates gives this education in self-control and abstinence the Greek name for training ascesis There can be no happiness without this idos this training in self-control modesty and reverence for that judged worthy of revering Education began with principles such as these People must first achieve the good Individually before going on to serve the larger social good the healthy society begins with healthy souls and The healthiest souls are not formed without intellectual and most of all spiritual labor We approach the heart of the matter the souls quest for health began with the inculcation of right habits Read book three of the Republic.

We see that the platonic scheme far from being over intellectualized approached the task with sobriety the child is to be reared on music and Gymnastics both corresponding roughly to the training of the mind and body Many of us now tend to think of music merely as diverting entertainment But to the Greeks music formed the spirit Plato believed that the soul needs training in the aesthetic and spiritual good and that music reflects those microscopic spiritual states with melody harmony and rhythm more readily than any other activity it will either purify or corrupt the soul The rhythms of a life must be orderly and brave Why?

Because in just this way does good speech and good grace and good rhythm wait upon a good disposition Not that weakness of head which we euphemistically style goodness of heart But the truly good and fair disposition of the character in the mind for in all these there is grace or gracelessness and evil rhythm and Disharmony are akin to evil speaking and the evil temper, but the opposites are the sober and the good disposition one speculation holds that education in music is most sovereign because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and Take strongest hold upon it imparting grace so anyone so trained would praise beautiful things and take delight in them and Receive them into his soul to foster its growth and become himself beautiful and good The results for the student are indelible The ugly he would rightly disapprove of and hate while still young and yet unable to apprehend the reason But when reason came the man thus nurtured would be the first to give her welcome for by this affinity.

He would know her Near the end of his life Plato expounded more broadly upon the theory of right education when pleasure and love and pain and hatred spring up rightly in the souls of those who are Unable as yet to grasp a rational account They will consent thereunto through having been rightly trained in fitting practices this consent viewed as a whole is Goodness, the student is rightly trained in respect of pleasures and pains So as to hate what ought to be hated right from the beginning to the very end and to love what ought to be loved This isn't just reading and writing and counting.

This is paideia Likewise Aristotle saw the cultivation of virtue first as a matter of encouraging habits of Learning to like what is worth liking and reason and habit alike have roles to play He thought of virtue as a mean a midpoint a balance of competing appetites and claims Which the well-directed mind develops over time moral virtue is concerned with emotions and actions in which one can have excess or deficiency or a do mean for example one can be frightened or bold feel desire or anger or pity and Experience pleasure and pain in general either too much or too little and in both cases Wrongly whereas to feel these feelings at the right time on the right occasion Towards the right people for the right purpose and in the right manner is to feel the best amount of them Which is the mean amount and best amount is of course the mark of virtue At the same time Aristotle sensed as do we the muddle of nature and nurture Can such virtue be inborn?

He had an answer Some thinkers hold that virtue is a gift of nature Others think we become good by habit others that we can be taught to be good Natural endowment is obviously not under our control It is bestowed on those who are fortunate in the true sense by some divine dispensation Again theory and teaching are not equally efficacious in all cases The soil must have been previously tilled if it is to foster the seed and the mind of the pupil must have been prepared by the cultivation of habits so as to like and dislike a right For he that lives at the dictates of passion will not hear nor understand the reasoning of one who tries to dissuade him Passion seems not to be amenable to reason but only to force Education is often compared to the cultivation of soil in ancient writings as well as in those of the Renaissance as Plants are cultivated to grow strongly so as to be fruitful or beautiful So must the human mind be pruned and weeded if it too is to become cultivated Right habits once planted are not expected to form the soul on their own Those habits are products of vigilant husbandry Saying much the same thing in a slightly different way four centuries later Plutarch wrote of the responsibility of a tutor in this way Just as nurses mold a child's body with their hands So tutors by the habits they inculcate Train the child's character to take a first step as it were on the path to virtue So the Spartan when he was asked what he affected by his teaching said I make honorable things pleasant to children the Roman Emperor Vespasian described the best teachers as those who Train the souls of the young to gentleness and civic virtue Aristotle said there are two kinds of virtue intellectual and moral intellectual virtue is for the most part both produced and increased by instruction and therefore requires experience and time whereas moral or ethical virtue is the product of habit ethos a Natural faculty like sight and hearing serves us without our exertion There's nothing natural though about the virtues they come by effort and must be reinforced by habit We acquire them by first having actually practiced them just as we do the arts We learn an art or craft by doing the things that we shall have to do when we have learned it Men become builders by building houses harpers by playing the harp Similarly we become just by doing just acts brave by doing brave acts Here the political implications become most acute This truth is attested by the experience of states Lawgivers make the citizens good by training them in habits of right action This is the aim of all legislation and if it fails to do this it is a failure This is what distinguishes a good form of Constitution from a bad one What was to be the result of all this strenuous philosophical effort?

The wise citizen fit to govern first himself and then and only then to govern others Precisely in this way does one become free through liberal learning first by acquiring right habits second by intellectual strain by learning to apprehend the beautiful and the good with the mind and The mind then confirms what the soul has already learned One can become intellectually powerful of course without those right habits, but what good is that?

The object of the ancients was not a programmable Ratio-sensitive machine it was the cultured man or woman The Romans taking their cues from the Greeks built on this legacy While they were a practical people they also came to revere the philosophical bent But within their milieu orators replaced philosophers as the cultivated ideal men of speculative ability who yet matched that ability to a high sense of civic duty of enlightened service to the state Quintilian was the ultimate authority on creating the perfect orator the first essential for such a one is that he should be a good man and Consequently we demand of him not merely the possession of exceptional gifts of speech But of all the excellences of character as well For I will not admit that the principles of upright and honorable living should be regarded as the peculiar concern of philosophy The man who can really play his part as a citizen and is capable of meeting the demands both of public and private business The man who can guide a state by his councils give it a firm basis by his legislation And purge its vices by his decisions as a judge is Assuredly no other than the orator of our quest Once more we find a tall order for the ideal citizen And once more we find that skills are not placed above learning and moral rectitude Character still helps to form the liberal mind the mind that is with the ability to reflect upon its assumptions and sense Impressions a mind able to make sound judgments When describing this ideal orator Quintilian says he is compelled to speak of such virtues as courage justice Self-control in fact scarcely a case comes up in which some one of these virtues is not involved This ideal orator this renewed paragon of the cultured mind Was to be placed on par with a philosopher because of his predilection and ability to reflect To contemplate this Roman synthesis stands in some ways as an even greater Affirmation of the Hellenic vision than the schemes of the Greeks for life is no longer framed within Plato's ideal garden Walled off from the world's squalor and chaos the ideal takes on the trappings of a practical program Philosophy gets brought down to the street Meanwhile though how fair the purpose of perpetuating culture in the Roman world if We can answer this we can also answer the question Why Greece and Rome and then why Greek and Latin?

As the Sun set on the Roman Empire during the long decades of the 5th century AD The upper classes still possessed the confidence of a matured culture. They knew they had something valuable enough to preserve Education throughout the vast bulk of the Mediterranean and in the distant northern places ruled under the eagle was despite unevenness in practice marked by extraordinary uniformity a Uniformity that had arisen out of the Hellenistic world The civilizing net was cast widely during the latter years of the Roman Republic and stayed that way for centuries Throughout the breadth of the Empire even as the world grew more and more unstable politically the educated man was still honored Just as important he was recognizable Culture held enough people agreed on what was vital to a thriving civilization There was still a cultural faith a belief in that intricate web of value and association Drawing together diverse peoples and making them one Perhaps the greatest legacy of the Greeks was their belief in the goodness of what they were and what they had to give to the Rest of the world, but it was the Romans not the Greeks who ensured the survival of that intellectual heritage Underlying liberal learning and classical education the Romans created much of the intellectual tradition.

We appeal to today Rome too had emerged with a massive confidence in the strength and integrity of that tradition Inherited from the Greeks and the Greeks had no doubts about their cultural superiority They could be skeptics, but they were not tormented by self-doubt Something new had entered the cosmos with them and they knew it later the Roman world was filled with many clashing nations the unity the Romans achieved out of that diversity is amazing to ponder as Maru has observed Unity could come only from sharing a single ideal a common attitude Towards the purpose of existence and the various means of attaining it in short from a common civilization or rather culture Fighting armies alone did not create this unity Unity was also engendered in those far-flung schools Early on in their history the Romans had no cultural center of gravity capable of attracting other peoples They had little to envy they were a rural people living close to the soil and deriving their ideals of virtuous action from it Although they would eventually dominate the Greek lands politically and militarily they knew of their cultural shortcomings Centuries passed before Romans could sport their own first-class literature and culture But even as they did they remained under the long shadows of Hellas Cicero once asked is there in fact a man among those Greeks who would credit one of the Romans with understanding?

Rome assimilated Greek things the Roman poet Horace would one day famously concede Captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought civilization to barbarous Latium The historian Arnold Toynbee wrote without exaggeration that the Romans were Greek cultures most celebrated converts and most effective disseminators and This conversion brought with it a profound linkage of the two cultures All educated people were to be versed in the treasures of both their languages Whereas the Greeks had learned only Greek the Romans went on to learn both Latin and Greek and the pattern was set To be a fully educated and culture aided man in the Greco-Roman world One had to know both tongues It was not Petrarch in the 14th century who first insisted on a mastery of both Latin and Greek Cicero did that over a thousand years before Quintilian later codified this proviso as holy writ promoting this formal bilingualism pragmatically I Prefer that a boy should begin learning with Greek because Latin being in general use Will be picked up by him whether we will or not While the fact that Latin is derived from Greek is a further reason for his being first instructed in the latter this linguistic approach to acculturating Assimilating diverse peoples spread throughout the Roman provinces making the classical world a truly cosmopolitan one the learning of language leads to literature and Melding the high literary achievements of both the Greeks and the Romans helped to create a cultural unity Letters are the beginning of wisdom So one Greek Maxim had it with letters Standing for knowledge of language the ability to convey the complexity and subtlety of thought and sense with words the Hellenistic Age strengthened the consensus that mastery of language defined the highest reaches of cultivation as Maru has reminded us when we speak of classical education today We really mean Hellenistic education for it was during the Hellenistic Age Roughly from the death of Alexander in 322 to the first century BC That curricula throughout the Mediterranean congealed The word was in the ascendant the cultivated man was in a real sense the literary man the man of words It was during this period too that the conscious ideal of human perfection Made itself felt more widely as a culturally shaping force One was moved Maru wrote to recreate oneself from unmolded clay and to produce from the childish Material and from the imperfectly formed creature one is born the man who is fully man whose ideal proportions one can just perceive Such became every man's life work that one task worthy of a lifetime's devotion Living contemporaneously with Plato Isocrates might well be called the father of rhetorical or oratorical culture as opposed to philosophical culture It was Isocrates who had pressed the importance of one cohesive Hellenic culture in a multicultural age Instructing people of his time that a culture must be built and maintained it does not materialize out of ether Images of building and tilling were native to his way of thinking for him culture was a matrix of conventions points of agreement delicately woven and easily torn apart Civilization itself emerges from a web of myriad laws written and unwritten creating unity out of disunity social cosmos out of chaos to live as an educated being in any higher culture is to act both as a builder of the house and as a weeder of the garden Isocrates thought we must do two things primarily as a people we must consolidate culture and we must educate our rulers We need rulers armed with a body of knowledge a basis for common discourse and common sentiment creating again in Maru's words a common devotion to a single ideal of human perfection from the fact that they had all received the same kind of upbringing devoted to the same end We need in a word an elite Reflexively disparaged today an elite to the Greeks and Romans was not only inevitable in a sound society But the desirable fruit of the highest thoughts words and deeds Thoughts words and deeds to which most of us are simply not equal Again, a high culture reaches upward to the better and best Distinctions arise.

They are sought not derided as signs of intellectual and cultural health Isocrates carried the day and in a not too fanciful sense set Hellenistic and thus classical education on its way He stamped the template. It was Isocrates Significantly who gave traditional Western education its literary tenor Some wise or clever sophists could teach without writing a word Their thoughts and spirits be held forever through the prisms of others after Isocrates though Intellectual culture became scribal it depended on books written words Collections of which over time would form an authoritative list of best works Culture meant books because from books we learn about what is best William James once wrote epigrammatically that the purpose of education is to help us to know a good man when we see him Isocrates had some standards of his own What does the man know?

How has that knowledge changed him? And how common is that knowledge to that which is held by other knowledgeable people? Discovering the books that that man had read would tell us much other expressions of culture fade away They're fragile But the artifacts of culture enduring the longest come adorned with words With those fleeting yet hard missiles of meaning that can keep alive a thought or feeling for millennia Sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures We too keep our memories until very recently generations of American schoolchildren were made to memorize the Gettysburg Address mainly for two reasons One reason was the potency of the words themselves for the speech is a masterpiece of eloquent brevity.

It has literary value But another reason was the belief that those words Furnishing the minds of young people would confirm their citizenship serving as a living reminder of what their country stood for memorizing them made for better citizens Reflect on the fortunes and accidents which befall men and kings for if you are mindful of the past you will plan better for the future History keeps the tablets Tell me what eloquence Socrates had said could be more righteous or more just than one which praises our ancestors in a manner worthy of their excellence and of their achievements This routine wasn't just political.

It was cultural it claimed an Inheritance for even then the idea was not just the free-thinking man but the truly cultured man one who had earned by knowledge and loyalty a Place within the ranks of those fit to be citizens and perhaps even a seat among the rulers Once again, are we reminded that one cannot be born into a culture of the higher kind Automatically equipped with all its watchwords and prerogatives one grows into it and is formed by it All of this is the stuff of humanistic culture if we wish to discover the genesis of the West's Civilizing ideal as well as the origins of classical education.

We look more profitably perhaps to Isocrates than to Plato and Aristotle For it is Isocrates who represents the original fountainhead of the whole great current of humanist scholarship He is the source as Werner Jaeger said of this humanistic culture calling attention to the preserved verbal artifacts of his day as both defining and informative He taught all who came after that anyone before he can be called civilized has to read his culture's books The curriculum of humane schooling began to take shape with Isocrates the idea of a canon arose for the first time that is a Body of written works acting as passwords to culture with which all of the educated were expected to be familiar Ideals became less idiosyncratic and more public for the Greeks and Romans both Education was essentially an initiation into the Greek way of life Molding the child and the adolescent in accordance with the national customs and submitting him to a particular style of living The style that distinguished man from the brutes Greeks from the barbarians Theirs became a bookish culture and neither brutes nor barbarians can read here we see that a key purpose of education is a fundamentally conservative or preservative one education should preserve and transmit the past so that cultural memory is lengthened and So that descendants will not be left to rediscover human truths already endured and expressed by eloquent forebears this was the spirit of the Hellenistic age a Preservative epoch when men's aim everywhere was to keep poetry alive rather than to challenge the great masters Originality was not prized so much as reverence Great libraries were established at Rhodes Antioch and Pergamon the greatest one at the Greek city of Alexandria in Egypt containing hundreds of thousands of papyri rolls Philology the science of language was launched at Mytilene Textual criticism at Ephesus the Alexandrians put in place the rules of Greek Accentuation that continued to ease our reading of the texts men studied the admired works of the past and strove to imitate them Here in this period of assimilation the difference between learning for culture and learning for skills is most sharp It's not that the ancients cared nothing for practical skills or for what we call critical thinking But anyone systematically exposed to the best that's been thought and said will also analyze it Cutting his intellectual teeth on the minds that brought it forth Acquiring culture under this rigid regime though comes by the avenue of literary learning Universal agreement did not obtain on all vital matters Isocrates argued with some in the Socratic school over whether virtue can be taught entirely Plato thought it could Isocrates did not Believing a sound judgment to be the proper and realistic aim The best one could hope to do is to point up the finest examples in the annals of virtuous thoughts and deeds Later the Roman philosopher Seneca took Isocrates side the teacher cannot instill virtue He can only prepare the mind for it Isocrates plan though best perpetuated the memory of culture It came to be called rhetorical as it aimed to train men who would lead people not by force but by moral suasion This was a new aristocracy The aristoi of the knowing and eloquent the orators set out in turn to train Logographers writers of speeches it is speech after all that separates man from the beasts by speech Man is able to reflect and to relate his reflections The power of words suits him for a life lived sub specie a eternity tis for all time Knowledge was not for him a matter of Gnostic exclusivity, but the sum of contemplated experience and it was there to be told One finds Isocrates said that among our public men who are living today those who give most study to the art of words are the best statesmen who come before you on the rostrum and Furthermore that among the ancients it was the greatest and the most illustrious orators who brought to the city most of her blessings the word reigned The Greeks and Romans not only gave birth to Western civilization They bequeathed to us their categories of thought and models of action They bestowed a vocabulary for the inquisitive and just mind they laid the foundations of culture and Jaeger's second fuller sense the conscious ideal of human perfection by defining more sharply the good life Worthy of a free man a man unfettered by servile obligations to other masters One who had been trained to use his mind by ordering his affections and by learning to ask the right questions of the world around him This man at once independent and civilized became the model of the humanist liberal education and its rational humanizing ideal Traces its roots back to the rocky soil of Attica and the straightways of Rome Man is an ideal forming animal wrote historian WG de Burgh stirred at every stage of his development by aspirations which transcend the level of his actual attainment and His civilization at any given epoch comprises also the world of his religious Moral and economic values his intellectual outlook upon life his personal beliefs as to his function and destiny His standards of moral goodness and social welfare It is in the light of such ideals determining our conception of human progress that we distinguish civilization from barbarism or at least we used to Life is unknown and unknowable without Intellectual depth and despite the changes wrought by centuries the education of the free mind has changed little in form It has kept its anchorage Objectives have shifted through time man is the measure of all things in one century God in the next Yet two elements of this cultural legacy one mental one material have been handed down to us in trust first the belief that the human mind is capable of apprehending the truth and Second though much was lost a solid corpus of ancient writing that has ensured the survival of classical learning It's all there for us to enjoy and pass on this heritage has kept before our eyes the habitual vision of greatness The beacon shines still though it flickers.

We are not especially keen to preserve anything nowadays Culture is cheap. We're not completely degraded. We can only guess what the ancients might think of us With our rockets shooting off to moons planets and other pieces of celestial driftwood. We might assume their breathless wonder but Wh out and might have been on to something when he wrote that The bewildered comment of any fifth century Athenian upon our society from Dante's time till our own would surely be Yes, I can see all the works of a great civilization But why cannot I meet any civilized persons?

I only encounter specialists artists who know nothing of science scientists who know nothing of art philosophers who have no interest in God Priests who are unconcerned with politics politicians who only know other politicians For anyone who knows the Western tradition and the bright lights emanating from it down the centuries Oudens guess would seem as plausible as any other Somehow we are no longer large enough or whole enough to embrace so much of the world Diogenes Laertius writing in the third century AD celebrated the value of a civilization that exalts the feat of individual cultivation as the highest earthly attainment in his oft repeated tale of the Magaran philosopher Stilpo Demetrius Polyorsites wished to restore Stilpo's fortune after the pillage of Magara and he asked Stilpo to count up what he had lost Stilpo replied that he lacked nothing that had belonged to him before For he retained his culture his paideia and he was still clothed with learning and eloquence To see him through life Quiet confidence such as that our anxious age seeks in vain.

It's an echo from a stronger clearer bracing age and it haunts us our curious view that changing times must always alter or Overtake hard-won wisdom, of course would have amused a man like Stilpo who saw man's short sojourn on earth primarily as a time for cultivation We're here to tend our gardens.

He would have looked quizzically upon any epoch Endlessly reinventing the wheel searching for happiness where better minds and spirits have already discovered. It cannot be found Stilpo might see in ours an accomplished world But not a wise one. He might see a comfortable people a smart and ingenious people but perhaps not a free people That reading was taken from Chapter one of the book called climbing Parnassus a new apology for Greek and Latin by author Tracy Lee Simmons The book was published in the year 2002 by ISI books The book itself is dedicated to making the argument as to why students should acquire The classical languages of Greek and Latin that's less my intent I'm not seeking to persuade you of that particular position rather to expose you to Some writers ideas on what is a good education One of my long-standing Frustrations with the term is that we don't ever Acknowledge that it needs to be defined very carefully.

It needs to be discussed People will say oh my child is in a good school Great what is a good school? What does that mean? Right, or I want my children to get a good education agreed, but what is a good education and so by exposing you to some of the history of classical education and liberal arts education I'm hoping to inspire in you your own thinking and Contemplation upon the actual definition of a good education So that in the days to come as you're making decisions for your own children, you would know how to guide them Jack Cassie's la temporada de fiesta cien JCPenney tenemos de todo para ti tu familia Ya se que este sen modo fiesta fuera de casa o en casa tenemos el estilo que buscas como vestidos para salir de noche o lindos looks para la foto con santa y no olvides las pijamas coordinadas para lucir en familia tus marcas favoritas te esperan durante toda la temporada looks increibles a precios impresionantes JCPenney celebraciones que valen la pena (upbeat music)