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 a do about building bridges to the 21st 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 prefer 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.

This 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

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