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 nessling 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 Escalus.

That clerk cannot be too badly off, he gets along.

And if education is not to promote material success, what should it do?

First 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?

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