Edutheria

What makes the present-day negligence of Greco-Roman classics in education particularly sad is how fun it can be to young people. The natural starting point to understanding the classical world is by reading Homer. And Homer, if explained properly, can be like comedy-filled super-hero stories. Right now, I’m working through the Iliad with 4 different students: not a “kid-friendly” paraphrase of the epic, but the epic itself in all its glory. When others hear of my program, they either think it must either be ridiculously ambitious or terribly boring. But if they were to walk in on one of the sessions, they would find 11 and 12 year olds laughing riotously at a 2,600 year-old narrative. I read the text aloud, while the students follow along with their own copies of the same edition. I’m good with voices, so I read it with various English accents, which the kids always find compelling. And I take frequent pauses to explain what particurly difficult passages mean. Most importantly, I take a pause to explain funny and ridiculous situations in the story. The kids always pick up this ball and run with it, with their own spins on the absurdities at hand. As we progress, the florid language of the text becomes ever less difficult, and the students are able to understand ever more passages without any help. As they become immersed in the universe of the story (of ancient Greek mythology), innumerable questions come to mind, which I can readily answer, because of my being so well-read in the classics myself. The net result of all this is that exploring what is idiotically considered a dry text to be unwillingly endured in a university class is, for 5th, 6th and 7th graders, a read as enjoyable as a Harry Potter book: but which also provides a basis for a budding classical education.

Albert Jay Nock on why abandoning classical education was a bad idea:

The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest and fullest continuous record available to us, of what the human mind has been busy about in practically every department of spiritual and social activity — every department, I think, except one: music. This record covers twenty-five hundred consecutive years of the human mind’s operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, politics, medicine, theology, geography, everything. Hence the mind that has attentively canvassed this record is not only a disciplined mind but an experienced mind — a mind that instinctively views any contemporary phenomenon from the vantage point of an immensely long perspective attained through this profound and weighty experience of the human spirit’s operations.

These words are just as true in 2007 as they were in 1931 when Nock spoke them. The perspective given by a classical education is just as important now as it was then. No young person should profess a religion without being first challenged by Lucretius; espouse a political ideology without considering Plato; or accept a scientific claim without reflecting on the epistemology of Aristotle.