Classics Education: A Manifesto for Today

My response to a prompt asking what we as classicists ought to do for the health of the present and future of our discipline.

I submitted an essay to a contest hosted by the Classical Association with the title as the prompt. I don’t have much hope that I’ll win due to the lofty nature of my suggestions, but because there was a cash prize on the line, I at least decided to dial back some of the language and sentiments as best I could to appease the judges. I feel more comfortable here expressing a full picture of what we need to do in order to restore our discipline to its once lofty reputation. The majority of the changes I’ve made here are additions to the text rather than alterations, so by reading this version you aren’t missing anything.

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The positive progression of technology has fooled many into believing that humanity itself naturally follows a similar curve upwards. It provides us with a certain sense of comfort to believe our era is the most virtuous, the most intelligent, and the most good of all time, and that any perceived dark patch is merely a point of stagnation before the next great moment. If these beliefs are axiomatic to one’s worldview, then it must be assumed that anything that sticks around long enough is better than what it replaced. This blind optimism has grown the more the study of the classics has been neglected, and the only way to combat it is to make Latin a requirement in schools instead of an elective subject.

The popular perspective that historians have injected into our classrooms puts modern man at the pinnacle of development in all cases. First came the wheel, then came the steam engine, then came the nuclear reactor, and now we have energy in abundance. This creates problems the further a student chooses to delve into their books (like in the case of the aeolipile), but is relatively harmless to the layman’s daily life. The real problem arises when this paradigm gets applied to other aspects of history. If people boil morality down to “first there was human sacrifice, then there was animal sacrifice, and now all we have to sacrifice is one workday to keep Sabbath,” then they permit themselves to get away with more than their conscience tells them they ought to worry about. On the other hand, if a certain behavior is present in the ancient world and has fallen out of cultural practice over the past two millennia, the public assumes our path to be the right one and theirs to be the wrong one. Though other parts of the world still practice rites similar to “xenia,” the concept of hospitality towards strangers is foreign to those in the so-called “western civilization.” Usury too used to be a crime tantamount to murder,¹ but systems like our market for shelter or higher education depend on loans with incredibly high interest rates. The layman participates in the shunning of the former and the acceptance of the latter as necessary evils because change risks upending the comforts they know in favor of benefits they cannot comprehend.

Of course, the ancients often got things wrong as well. One could prattle off a dozen or so statements from the Aristotelian corpus that were accepted as fact for centuries until basic experimentation proved otherwise, and that’s not even to mention the mess of information in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. Some modern people have an over-reliance on archaic practices from the ancient world, and label modern developments as inherently inferior. Luckily, proper study of the classics is also the solution to this problem as well. The dialectical method was the greatest invention of the Greek world because it allowed any previously held belief to be challenged by new information. If Aristotle said, for example, that “between the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject,”² it would be fairly easy to demonstrate that the circumstances of his ideas only observed life under a patriarchal society, and by broadening his horizons to a more egalitarian structure, he would have gladly left that line out of his teachings. Those who embrace the ancient world from a purely aesthetic standpoint will interpret such lines as set in stone, but it takes a well-studied classicist to understand that our disagreement does not mean rejecting his entire body of work.