The Villa of the Papyri

The following is my Letter from the Editor in the spring, 2018 issue of The Classical Teacher:

In 79 A.D., the catastrophic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in eastern Italy covered nearby towns in ash and completely buried many of them. Accounts of the ancient eruption paint a horrific scene: Volcanic pumice rained from the skies and waves of searing hot gas and debris swept over the nearby landscape. Thousands died where they stood, and others fell while in flight.

One of the towns that was buried in the eruption was Herculaneum, which at the time was a popular vacation spot for wealthy Romans. According to some historical accounts, Julius Caesar‘s father-in-law, Calpurnius Piso, owned an elaborate seaside villa in the town. He is reputed to have had one of the great libraries of ancient times.

For almost seventeen centuries the ancient town lay in darkness underground. Excavations of Herculaneum were conducted in the mid-eighteenth century, and Calpurnius Piso’s villa was located. But nearby landowners put a stop to the excavation, and the location was forgotten.

Then in the 1980s excavations were begun again, and special attention was given to Calpurnius’ villa. When excavators began their work they discovered numerous statues and other works of art, many of them in pristine condition.

Then they began to discover something else—scrolls, some of them in the boxes in which they had been placed for transportation during the panic, others littered on the floor. The scrolls were carbonized by the intense heat of the gas from the volcano and solidified into stone. They began to call Calpurnius’ Villa the Villa of the Papyri.

With the development of modern multi-spectral imaging, the burnt scrolls are just beginning to be deciphered. Some scholars are holding their breath over the works of philosophy and literature that might come to light, many of them unknown or lost. We only possess a small fraction of the works of ancient times. St. Augustine cites Cicero‘s Hortensiusas a formative book in his thinking, but all we know of it is what he and a few others quoted in their works. The vast majority of the works of the Greek tragic poets—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—were lost long ago.

Could these works lie hidden in ash in the library of Calpurnius Piso? It is exciting to think that they might.

But while we yearn for the discovery of heretofore lost works, what are we doing to learn the ones that have been preserved, and which we have yet to read? Are they not as much lost to us as the works in the Villa of the Papyri? Shouldn’t we wonder as much at the works we have but do not know as at the prospect of the discovery of others?

The treasury of our culture may be missing important things, but it is rich nevertheless. And in many ways, too, this treasury has been covered up by time and neglect. It has been buried in disinterest and distraction and hidden by layer upon layer of modern educational fads and gimmicks.

The work of classical education is to excavate the deep and rich tradition of wisdom and virtue that lies at our very feet, and to decipher the scrolls we have had all along.

We don’t need a spade or multi-spectral imaging. We don’t even need to go to Italy. The works are here at our fingertips. All we need to do is take the trouble to read them.

Don't believe the line that studying the humanities is a job killer

My newest post at Intellectual Takeout:

Zachary First, Managing Director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, opines at PayScale.com on just how misguided is the question: “Can we, in economic terms, justify investing in a degree in the humanities?”

Read the rest here.

What IS the Christian Worldview?: An Introductory Book List

An excerpt from my post on "What is the Christian Worldview?" at Exordium, the blog of the Classsical Latin School Association:

There is something deeper than just our surface beliefs that partly dictates what those beliefs will be. I think this is more reflective of what we mean by a worldview.

If you really want to get a grasp on what a Christian worldview is, you’re going to have to devote yourself to reading a little philosophy and literature, with an emphasis on the history of ideas. I will say, however, that there are some great writers and great resources out there to get you started on this endeavor. What follows are the books I have recommended to my youngest son, who is now a philosophy major at the University of Kentucky. I think he would tell you that they have benefited him a great deal. For the most part they are books that simplify a lot of the main issues involved in the question of why we think what we think. But, also for the most part, they avoid oversimplification.

Read more here.

Saving Western Civilization, starring Tom Cruise

The following is my "Letter from the Editor" in the new Classical Teacher magazine:

About a year ago, Universal Pictures released the movie "Oblivion," starring Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman. It is about a man and a woman (Cruise and Andrea Riseborough) stationed on a post-apocalyptic earth. They are charged with maintaining the drones which protect a number of orbiting installations, mining water for the human encampment now situated on one of Jupiter's moons.

Earth's moon has been blown up, devastating the earth, which is now barely livable. Cruise plays "Jack," who tries to keep the defensive drones operational in the face of constant attacks from roving bands of alien invaders called "scavs" (short for "scavengers"). Jack has had a memory wipe as a security precaution.

But one day while repairing a damaged drone, Jack is captured and knocked unconscious by the scavs. He wakes up tied to a chair under an intense light. A voice comes from out of the darkness:

And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods.

Jack knows these words because on one of his missions he has discovered an old library, from which he has taken several books (in apparent violation of policy). One of them is Horatius at the Bridge, by Lord Macaulay. The scavs have seen him do this.

From the direction of the voice, we hear the lighting of a match, and we see the face of a man, the light of the match reflected in his goggles. It is Beech (played by Morgan Freeman). "We've been watching you, Jack," he says.

Far from being aliens, Beech explains, the scavs are really human survivors of the alien invasion. They tell the at-first-unbelieving Jack the real story of what has happened to the earth, and allow him to leave their encampment to find out for himself.

As the story progresses, we, along with Jack, find out that he is just one of many Jacks patrolling various parts of the earth, all seemingly identical clones, unaware of the others. The scavs were telling him the truth: Earth was taken over by aliens who are bleeding it dry of its resources. The only humans left are the scavs, who are huddled in caves in the earth, protecting what is left of humanity.

Jack has been fighting for the wrong side.

Beech has let him live because he knows of Jack's secret passion for these books and suspects that they have awoken something inside him. In reading them, Jack has been transformed from a memoryless copy of himself, unquestioningly following the orders of what he now knows to be the very creatures who have destroyed his civilization. A man who was the servant of machines has become a master of his own soul.

In the end, the now fully humanized Jack sacrifices himself in defense of the scavs, uttering Macauley's lines as he does so.

We are now in the process of producing a whole race of Jacks. If you doubt the truth of this charge, go look at the recent federal social studies standards, which include no historical content whatsoever.
We have been taken over by cultural aliens. We are producing memoryless copies of ourselves.

Lost in the mindless devotion to so-called "critical thinking skills" and "college and career readiness"—not to mention our servitude to machines—are the ancient stories and venerable truths that schools once taught as a matter of course—ideas and values that made us human, not just cogs in an economic machine.

Classical education's purpose is not to teach job skills or to reform society, although without aiming at these goals it achieves them better than these other methods do. Classical education is about passing on our culture. If we don't do it, we risk a world as culturally desolate as the physical world Jack sacrifices himself to save.

Inoculate your children against cultural barbarism with a dose of Rosemary Sutcliff

As a new cultural Dark Age extends its shadow over our culture, it is good once in a while to transport yourself back to a time when the old virtues went unquestioned.

In an excellent article from one of the best blogs going on one of the great historical fiction writers for children, Rosemary Sutcliff. Our family read her Eagle of the Ninth (recently turned into a feature film) and other books about Roman Britain:

Though primarily a children’s author, the depth and quality of Sutcliff’s canon resonates strongly with readers of all ages. As with numerous British children’s writers (Alan Garner and Susan Cooper, for example) whose formative years coincided with the struggle against Hitler, Sutcliff’s work displays clear distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, civilized conduct and barbarism. There is no post-modern ambiguity, equivocating or hedging of bets here. We also find a firm commitment to the value of law and order (inherited from the Pax Romana) and an overarching belief in the significance and intrinsic worth of Judeo-Christian civilization. 

Her novels, at times, have a distinctly valedictory feel, almost as if Sutcliff herself was waving goodbye to what she recognised as civilization. 

Read more at the Imaginative Conservative.

Hebrew and Greek: Friendly or unfriendly rivals?

My new article, "Is Hebrew Better than Greek?" at Memoria Press:

One of the most common criticisms of classical education in the Christian education world is that it imports into Christian education ideas that conflict with the Biblical world view. According to this criticism, classical education tries to incorporate both Biblical/Hebraic thought and Greek thought, and in doing so unwittingly corrupts the process of Christian education and leads Christian students astray. This argument is based on the idea that there is an irreconcilable dichotomy between Biblical/Hebraic and Greek thought.

Hebrew thought, in many of these criticisms, is represented as manifestly good and Greek thought as irrevocably bad. This criticism has a long pedigree, and there are versions of it going back at least to Tertullian, an early Church father, who asked the question, "What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?"

While there are important distinctions to be made between the thinking of the Greeks and the Hebrews, this criticism not only oversimplifies the issue of competing world views, it fundamentally misunderstands many of these differences and draws mistaken conclusions from them. But before we draw any inferences from the differences between Greek and Hebrew thought, we should be very clear on what these differences are. And the first thing to acknowledge is that there are differences. In his book Culture and Anarchy, the great Victorian thinker Matthew Arnold talked of two rival forces, "rivals dividing the empire of the world between them":

And to give these forces names from the two races of men who have supplied the most splendid manifestations of them, we may call them respectively the forces of Hebraism and Hellenism. Hebraism and Hellenism―between these two points of influence moves our world ...

Read the rest here.

The Siren Song of Education Technology

The following article appears in the current issue of The Classical Teacher magazine:

In the world of education, there are many temptations that would lure us to our destruction, and none greater than the siren song of education technology. The computer is, of course, only one form of education technology, and education technology is anything but new.

Those of us educated in the 60s and 70s will remember the mimeograph machine, which spat out pages of blue type the teacher then handed to her students. Some of us still remember holding the fresh sheets of paper to our noses for the unique and pleasant smell of the ink. And some of us can still hear the distinctive sound of the film projector, rattling as it threw up on the screen some poorly animated attempt to inculcate a bit of knowledge or impart some important principle.

As Neil Postman has pointed out, even writing is a technology. In his book Technopoly, he recounts Plato’s story of Thamus, King of Egypt, who was said to have once entertained the god Theuth, the inventor of many things. Theuth exhibited his many inventions to Thamus, but his proudest invention was that of writing, which, Theuth claimed, would improve both wisdom and memory.

But Thamus responds to Theuth, saying:

You, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your offspring  attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: They will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.

In this older, oral culture, wisdom was upheld and informed by unaided memory. It is not recorded what Thamus (who spoke for and against each of Theuth’s other inventions) may have said in its favor. There is obviously much to say in favor of writing, but we cannot but admit that Thamus was wise in seeing the costs of the new technology.

Every technology has both its benefits and its characteristic costs, and before we can make intelligent decisions about computers in the classroom, we need to know both.

We all know what the benefits of education technology are ... or do we? In practical fact, education technology has become a fad with many schools. Some want it only because it is the newest thing―the educational equivalent of a fashion accessory.

One of the problems in the discussion of education technology is not just that we do not know the reasons why educational technology might not be a good idea—we have a hard time even saying why we want it in the first place.

 But what are the proposed educational benefits of education of technology? Larry Cuban, author of Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom, delineates three distinct goals for education technology: The first is to "make schools more efficient and productive than they currently are"; the second is to "transform teaching and learning into an engaging and active process connected to real life"; and the third is to "prepare the current generation of young people for the future workplace."

It is easy to see how administrators could use computers for more efficient record-keeping, how teachers could use them to more easily keep track of grades, and how students could conduct research more efficiently. Many schools already do this.

But it is more problematic than most people think for schools to use technology to prepare students for the future workforce. For one thing, because of bureaucratic red tape, elementary and secondary schools are themselves seldom outfitted or even familiar with the most recent technology. In addition, schools have shown themselves to be poor prophets when it comes to predicting what will be needed in the economy of the future. The students of my generation who were taught Fortran and Pascal can tell you how that came in handy when they graduated and discovered that those computer languages were already on their way out. Seymour Pepert once called the computer the "Proteus of machines": He can foretell the future, but will change  his shape to avoid having to.

Every technology has both its benefits and its characteristic costs.

And as for "transforming teaching and learning," how would computers do this? In fact, the goal of education technology in the classroom is about as hostile to traditional education as it is possible to be. Cuban, a progressive educator himself, laments that technology has not changed the teacher's role in the classroom. Cuban is one of many promoters of technology who want to move teachers out of their traditional role of imparting knowledge, understanding, and wisdom to being mere "coaches."

Both Cuban and Postman understand that the computer has an agenda and that it is not friendly to the traditional conception of the classroom. Cuban is disappointed that it has not weakened the role of the teacher and Postman is concerned that it will.

"What we need to consider about the computer has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool," says Postman. "We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning, and how in conjunction with television, it undermines the old idea of school." Postman is writing these words in 1993, and so perhaps he would now have more concern with technologies like the Internet.

Classical educators needn't be conflicted about the use of computers as tools that can enable more efficient administration, and they can have a limited comfort level with a limited use in preparing students for the workplace, but they should be positively alarmed by any technology that presumes to replace them.

Schools need to think through what education technology can and cannot do for them, and in the process of determining what it can do for them, they need to realistically assess what it can do to them. In this regard, classical educators especially should be concerned with a technology that aspires to disarm them from doing the very thing their students need them to do: make sense of their world.

One of the most important things we should expect education to do is to order our experience. The world has an inherent structure―not just the natural world, but the larger reality within which we live, think, decide, and feel. There is a natural reality we can apprehend through mathematics and the sciences, and there is also an ontological reality which we apprehend through literature and philosophy.

St. Thomas Aquinas defined the wise man as that man who "orders things rightly." It is in showing students how to do this that we make them wise. Ordering reality is an essential part of education, and that job has been helped by the advent of the computer, but it has also been made more difficult. Modern culture does not suffer from a lack of information; it suffers instead from the inability to make sense of too much information.

The very relation between information and human purpose, says Postman, has been severed:  "[I]nformation appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose."

These words were written in 1992, before the rise of the Internet, and the mention of only one word is required to show that Postman's prophecy has been completely fulfilled: Google.

Digital technology holds out to us the promise of power over information, but at the same time threatens to give information power over us.

The computer can help us order reality, but more often it does the opposite―and it is more likely to do the opposite if the teacher is sidelined by a machine. The computer has done a lot to open the floodgates of random information, and very little in the way of ordering and integrating it. When a school simply hands out iPads to its students, it has made it more likely that students will be buried further under the modern avalanche of disordered information, and less likely that they will be able to make sense of a complicated world.

The computer can help us order reality, but more often it does the opposite.

But it is not only the vertical order of truth that the unchecked use of the computer can separate our students from, but the horizontal ordering of time. In his book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, Douglas Rushkoff argues that the new technology has brought about what he calls "presentism." The digital age not only doesn't help, but actually militates against many of our stated educational goals, which include teaching a knowledge of the past and how to prepare for the future. It is a "diminishment of anything that isn't happening right now―and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is":

It's why the world's leading search engine is evolving into a live, customized, and predictive flow of data branded "Google Now," why email is giving way to texting, and why blogs are being superseded by Twitter feeds. It's why kids in school can no longer follow linear arguments; why narrative structure collapsed into reality TV; and why we can't engage in meaningful dialogue about last month's books and music, much less long-term global issues.

When we respond to the siren song of education technology, there are some things we should demand, and among these are that it not cut us off from the past―or the future.

There are two functions of technology in our schools. The first is as a means to teach other things, and the second is as a thing to be taught. The two things we should be most concerned to teach are wisdom and virtue. But the best means to teach these are not computers. The computer can help in a limited role, but it will not do the job for us.

The best education "technology" is the liberal arts: the set of language and math skills that allow us to learn everything else. If we spent half as much time talking about these technologies as we now talk about computers, our students would be a lot better off.

Zombie Logic: Should we be teaching our children how to think like computers?

The following article will appear in the upcoming Classical Teacher magazine.

In 1969, philosopher Henry Veatch wrote a book called Two Logics: The Conflict Between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy. It scandalized the philosophical establishment of the day. The book challenged the underlying assumptions behind the system of modern logic that had been taught in colleges and universities for over fifty years.

The issues addressed in the book were complex, but the main issue was clear: There was a difference between modern and classical logic, and this difference constituted a clash of worldviews.

Most people who have been to college have encountered modern logic somewhere along the way, usually in a mathematics class. While traditional or classical logic sticks close to human language, modern logic favors formulations such as

• "P ⊃ Q" (which means "If P, then Q")
• "P ∨ Q" ("Either P or Q")
• and "P ∧ Q" ("P and Q")

In practice, the systems look very different. The symbolic, mathematical look of modern logic is a striking contrast to the traditional logic's emphasis of ordinary human language. It was Veatch's point that the difference between the two systems was not just cosmetic—that, in fact, modern logic reflects a particular worldview, one much different than that assumed by traditional logic.

Modern logic was a product of the logical positivism that became popular in the 1920s through the work of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and A. J. Ayer (this was the "neo-analytic philosophy" of Veatch's title).

In one sense, logical positivism was an outworking in philosophy of the religion of science—the idea that the only legitimate avenue to truth was through either mathematics or natural science. In the case of the positivists, this took the form of the belief that the only logically meaningful statements were either statements that were true by definition or statements that could be empirically verified.

Under this belief, a statement like "A bachelor is an unmarried male" is logically meaningful because it is true by definition. And the statement "All crows are black" is logically meaningful because it can be checked out scientifically. But the statement "God exists" is not logically meaningful because it is neither true by definition nor can it be empirically verified. The statement "God exists," in other words, is neither true nor false: It is simply meaningless.

It was this view of meaning and language that flowed into the development of modern logic. Its central manifesto was the book Principia Mathematica, written by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, a book that became required reading in philosophy programs until the late twentieth century. And lurking in the authorial background was Wittgenstein, whose book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus had infiltrated the thinking of the two authors.

The Tractatus, as it came to be known, cast a sterile and frightening vision of a world bereft of meaning and purpose. "The world," said Wittgenstein, "is everything that is the case." In other words, the only meaning in the world is formal logical meaning, which consists exclusively of definitional and scientific truths as they are expressed in logical propositions.

For the logical positivists, truth was merely a property of propositions. Under this philosophical regime, "truth" became "truth value"—the assigning to a statement of either a "T" (True) or an "F" (False). In fact, it was Wittgenstein who invented "truth tables," a mechanism of modern logic whereby the truth or falsity of a statement could be determined solely on the basis of the truth value of its components.

In other words, the truth of a statement like "It is sunny (P) and hot outside (Q)" is true if, on the one hand, P is true, and if, on the other hand, Q is also true. But if either P or Q are not true, or if neither is true, then the whole statement is false. This works with some propositions (such as conjunctive statements like "It is rainy and cold outside"), but it does not work with many others (such as conditional statements like "If the moon is made of green cheese, then ducks can swim").

Quantifying language in this way allowed the positivists to make all meaningful language into a sort of calculus: You could "solve" for the truth in the same way you "solve" an equation in mathematics. In fact, all computer languages are based on modern logic.

The positivists, of course, were mostly atheistic as well, and so there was the additional benefit that religious language was rendered meaningless.

What Russell and Whitehead thought they had discovered was a purely scientific language what encompassed all meaningful statements which could then be used to solve all scientific problems. Such a language had been a dream of modern philosophers since at least Gottfried Leibniz in the eighteenth century.
Although this system of logic went on to displace the old Aristotelian system in colleges and universities, at least one of the original authors, as well as Wittgenstein himself,  later repudiated many of the key assumptions behind the Principia.

Not only that, but the philosophy that produced it (logical positivism) has since gone out of fashion among many professional philosophers.

The philosophical establishment never answered Veatch's challenge 40 years ago, and the system of modern logic he defied is still studied and taught today, but with little understanding of its now-mostly rejected foundation. It continues to live on in a kind of zombie existence: It has lost its soul, but it lives on anyway. It has become the philosophical equivalent of The Walking Dead.

Traditional logic is not a calculus by which we can "solve" for the truth. Modern logic speaks the language of the computer, which was created by men; traditional logic speaks the language of men, who were created by God. While modern logic is how computers think, traditional logic is how human beings think. We are not computational beings and our language is not some kind of mathematical calculus. When we think and speak and write, we do it not as human machines, but as logocentric creatures. And we need a logic that takes this into account.

The next battle in the academic left's War on Knowledge: Social studies standards

Another tentacle has reportedly grown on the Common Core monster that promises to suck even more knowledge out of the minds of your children.

We go now to Frederick M. Hess at the Enterprise Institute for an update:

Yesterday, on Constitution Day, a coalition of social studies organizations issued their “College, Career and Civic Life (C3) Framework for State Social Studies Standards.” One of the partner organizations was the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools co-chaired by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and former Congressman Lee Hamilton. Now, the exercise had more than a little irony, given that the organizations went out of their way to ensure that these “social studies standards” make no mention of the U.S. Constitution—or other historical events, dates, or persons. 

Susan Griffin, executive director of the National Council of Social Studies (NCSS), explained, “Many state standards in social studies are overwhelmed with lists of dates, places and names to memorize – information students quickly forget.” Instead, she said, the new framework would help states establish “fewer, higher, and clearer standards for instruction in civics, economics, geography, and history,” the standards emphasize “critical thinking, collaboration, and inquiry.” Without delving into what students should actually know, the new C3 framework, explains an accompanying fact sheet, “Intentionally envisions social studies instruction as an inquiry arc of interlocking and mutually reinforcing elements that speak to the intersection of ideas and learners.” 

... 

Frederick? Frederick? Are you still there? Well, we've lost Frederick. But you can get the rest of his report on the new social studies standards here.

I have said before that the people who talk the most about "critical thinking skills" are the least able to explain exactly what they are. But we may now have a breakthrough.

What the permissivist educational establishment appears to mean by "critical thinking skills" is the process of eliminating content knowledge from the minds of children. So when you hear them using contentless expressions such as "critical thinking, collaboration, and inquiry," pack up the minivan and flee to the hills before your children's minds are turned into mush by the Common Core monster.

Does Common Core lower the standards for some states?

The Common Core Standards, just the most recent attempt by the public schools to look like they are improving things when they're really not, are facing an increasingly hostile public. Here's Charles Chieppo and Jamie Gass at the Hechinger Report:

The bloom is surely off the rose of Common Core, the new English and math standards pushed by Washington, D.C. education trade organizations and the Obama administration. In the last few months, a number of states have paused or de-funded implementation of the standards; others have pulled out of the consortia developing tests tied to them. In a recent Boston Globe op-ed marking the 20th anniversary of the Massachusetts education reform law that triggered dramatic improvements in the performance of Bay State students, Tom Birmingham, one of the law’s principal authors, wrote: “the political vectors will all tend to push the new standards to a race to the middle … In implementing the Common Core, there will be natural pressure to set the national standards at levels that are realistically achievable by students in all states. This marks a retreat from Massachusetts’ current high standards.” 

...  Most high-performing states also had rigorous standards prior to Common Core. For them, the new standards represent a significant step down from the academic rigor that was the foundation of their success. 

Compared to Massachusetts’ previous standards, Common Core reduces the amount of classic literature, poetry and drama taught in English classes by 60 percent. Goodbye Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain and Edith Wharton.

Read the rest here.

HT: The American Conservative.

In Defense of Classical Education

Several years ago, a prominent homeschool personality, let’s call him “Mr. Jones” (The names have been changed to protect the mistaken), wrote a broadside in a popular magazine against classical education, leveling a number of charges against it. These arguments were representative of the criticisms you sometimes hear from those who have a misapprehension of what classical education is and how it is practiced. So I wrote a response. The following article is an abridged version of that response that appears in the new edition of The Classical Teacher. 

As classical education has become more popular among Christian educators, it has acquired not only friends, but a few enemies. Mr. Jones is one of these latter individuals, and he articulates a number of arguments against classical education. Let’s take each one of these arguments in turn.

Is classical education pagan? 
Jones’ first argument is that classical education has pagan origins. It “traces its roots to the pagan Greek philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle around 500-400 B.C.” This charge is absolutely correct. Classical education was the original invention of the Greeks and Romans. Only later was it taken by Christians and fashioned into the system of classical education that has lasted, in a few places, even to today.

The problem with this argument, however, is that these same charges could be leveled individually against mathematics, geography, music, astronomy, and history as a separate and distinct method of study. In fact, education as we know it—education itself—was an invention of the Greeks.

There are many things that originated with the pagans that we should reject. But we should not reject them because they are pagan: We should reject them because they are false. There are many truths the pagans discovered. Should we reject them just because a pagan discovered them?

Is classical education only for the upper class? 
Jones says, “It promised to make members of the upper class witty and interesting among their peers in any setting.” Maybe there are some people who educate classically because they are interested in becoming witty and interesting. I’m not sure I wouldn’t like to be witty and interesting myself (and there have been a few occasions when I would have liked to have been upper class as well).

“I have heard a number of parents boast about the highly intellectual books their children are reading,” adds Jones. Parents, of course, boast about a lot of things when it comes to their children, and it certainly doesn’t require the provocation of classical education to prompt them to do so.

Jones says that “knowledge without virtue produces arrogance.” Yes, but that is because anything without virtue can produce arrogance. That is no argument against knowledge per se: It is simply to say that anything can be used badly. When Jesus admonished the Pharisees for thinking that their strict adherence to the Law made them better than others, He didn’t argue against the Law; rather, He argued against the use they made of it. There is an old Latin saying: Abusus non tollit usum (The abuse of something does not nullify its proper use.)

It’s a saying thought up by a pagan, but it is true nonetheless.

Arrogance does not require a great deal of knowledge. Arrogance, in fact, works just fine with only a little of it. Any educational philosophy that decides to limit the amount of knowledge it imparts in order to solve this problem will do little to solve it. As G. K. Chesterton pointed out, you could solve the problem of pick-pocketing by eliminating pockets, but that’s probably not the best solution. Such a solution won’t necessarily create humble people, just ignorant ones. In fact, ignorance can produce its own sort of arrogance. And if that sounds far-fetched, then you’ve never seen today’s youth culture up close and personal.

Jones assails classical education because “it was never intended to prepare someone to make a living or support a family.” There is an element of truth here. Classical education does not share in the modern assumption that the purpose of education is to get a job. As former U.S. Department of Education Secretary Bill Bennett has pointed out, education is the “architecture of the soul.” The idea behind classical education (otherwise known as a “liberal arts” education) is that a person should be educated in such a way that he is fitted, not for a job, but for life.

A liberal arts education, in fact, does a better job preparing students for jobs because it fits a student for any occupation he might choose as an adult, not by teaching him job skills, which schools are singularly ill-fitted to do, but by teaching him how to think.

Classical education was, in fact, the education of the aristocracy. But that is largely because the aristocracy was the only class that received a formal education. The aristocracy was, historically and for the most part, also the only class that had any meaningful political freedom (or enough to eat). Classical education was the education required of political leaders. But in a democratic republic, we are now the political leaders, which is why we now need this kind of education.

Does a knowledge of Latin and Greek have practical value? 
Jones says of Latin and Greek: “Today there is very little practical reason to study either language.” While their study will certainly do little to help you to work on an assembly line, flip hamburgers, or sweep floors, Latin and Greek were and still are the languages of learning. Latin is the root of the vocabulary of the sciences, law, and theology. It is the origin of over 60 percent of our academic English vocabulary and was the very language of Christendom for over a thousand years. It is the mother tongue of Western civilization. It was the language of the Christian Middle Ages—and of the Reformation. It was also, along with Greek, the language of the Church fathers.

And let’s not forget that the New Testament itself was written in Greek. In fact, all of the Bible verses Jones quotes were originally written in the language he condemns as being of little practical use. With all the debate that goes on over which translation of the Bible is better, the one who knows how to read it in the original language is in the best position. Is it not a practical advantage to be able to read the Bible in the language in which it was written?

The benefits of studying Latin in particular are manifold and well established. A study of Latin is quite simply the best way to learn English; it is also the best thinking skills course that a young student can engage in because of the grammatical manipulations it requires. Because of its systematic and regular nature, it is an excellent study skills course, since it requires disciplined attention, an ability that must be cultivated and that has tangible benefits for other subjects the student might attempt.

Is classical education humanistic? 
Jones also argues that the content of classical education is humanistic. “Humanism,” he says, is its “central premise.” But what does it mean to say that a belief is “humanistic”? Does it mean something anti-Christian, as in “secular humanism”? Or does it mean something quite different, such as the “Christian humanism” of Church fathers such as Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzen, or later Christian humanists of the Renaissance such as Erasmus, Thomas More, as well as the great 19th century Christian educational thinker John Henry Newman?

Man, though not the “measure of all things” as the Greek Protagoras is reputed to have said, is nonetheless God’s highest creation. The kind of humanism that rejects God is certainly itself to be rejected. But the Christian humanism that sees man as the one creature created in God’s image and having the dignity consonant with that distinction is another story altogether.

Is logic merely the “reason of man”?
We have already discussed Jones’ arguments against Latin. He also assails logic.

[T]his phase [the dialectic stage] emphasizes the reason of man. According to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the wisdom of God is neither sought nor applied. ... Among other things, this concept teaches that we cannot believe what we cannot see and prove. Everything is to be questioned, and nothing is assumed to be true. How is this ‘scientific’ approach reconciled with God’s requirement that we have faith and believe what we cannot see or prove?

Ironically, the argument that logic excludes faith is one commonly made by atheist rationalists. But it’s no more true when it comes from the pen (or the keyboard) of a Christian. But even more ironic is this: If Jones’ argument is sound, then it must be rejected, since it is not (according to his own assertion) the wisdom of God. He is clearly attempting to set forth an argument (presumably a logical one). But can you use logic to argue against logic? This, of course, is completely self-defeating.

It is very hard to assess the reasons of those who profess to be opposed to reason.

If as Christians we are to avoid argument, then why does Jones argue against classical education? If reason is not the wisdom of God, then why should we accept Jones’ reasons?

But the problem does not end with the inconsistent nature of his reasoning. Jones makes a number of assertions that are either unsupported or unsupportable. It is simply false to say that, in logic, everything is questioned and nothing is assumed. In fact, this is precisely what premises in an argument are: assumptions. And the truth of the premises is a matter for either faith or science. You can reason just the same way about a truth known by revelation as you can about truth known by science. In fact, it has been done for over two thousand years.

If anyone wants to see logic used in the service of faith, he need only open up the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas to the first page. Or, for that matter, the Pauline epistles, which are filled with arguments on matters of faith. In fact, a simple perusal of Paul’s Mars Hill discourse would seem to indicate that the best way to deal with unbelievers is not to abandon logic, but to use it better than they do.

Jones says that logic is the “reason of man.” Does he mean that men invented the laws of logic? Is the law of non-contradiction, for example (that a statement cannot be true and false at the same time under the same circumstances), a human invention? In truth, the laws of logic are no different in this sense than the rules of multiplication, which, as Plato points out in the Republic, were discovered, not invented. They were already there, the products of an ordered universe created by a rational God.

In fact, I know of no pagan philosopher who would say what Jones says pagans believed about logic.

Jones also seems to suggest that Jesus avoided the use of logic. “On many occasions,” he says, “Jesus was silent when he could have argued persuasively.” Yes, and on many occasions Jesus argued persuasively when he could have been silent.

When asked about the woman caught in adultery, for example, the woman was brought to Him, and He was asked what should be done with her. If He followed the law and ordered her to be stoned, the crowd would have thought Him harsh; if He said to set her free, He would be seen as being in violation of the law. Instead, Jesus said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” This is a logical technique called “slipping between the horns of a dilemma,” and is one the three ways of responding to dilemmas.

Any good logician knows it.

When Jesus says, “Thou canst not serve both God and mammon,” he is articulating what, in traditional logic, is called a “conjunctive hypothetical” syllogism:

Either P or Q
Not Q
Therefore, P

When Jesus heals the paralytic, he is questioned by the scribes and Pharisees: “Who but God alone can forgive sins?” Jesus responds by saying, “Which is easier: to say ‘Thy sins are forgiven thee,’ or ‘Arise and walk’?” This is called an a fortiori argument: which means, in Latin, “from the stronger.” If you can do the harder thing, then you must be able to do the easier thing. Therefore, the easier thing must be possible. In other words, "You think my saying 'your sins are forgiven' is hard? Watch this.”

I’m not saying that Jesus was trained in logic, of course. When you are the Logos Itmself, there is very little need for formal training.

If, as Christians, we are not to engage in argument, then why does Jesus do it?

In fact, Jones seems to want to ignore I Peter 3:15 entirely: “But sanctify the Lord in your hearts and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.”

Is the practice of rhetoric immoral? 
Finally, Jones discusses rhetoric, the art of persuasion, the last leg of the classical trivium. Like logic, Jones assails rhetoric for being fundamentally amoral: “Like the grammar and dialectic stage,” he says, “it holds to no moral considerations.”

He quotes, as he does several times in his article, the Encyclopedia Britannica. He would have done better to consult the primary sources on this issue. If he had done this, he would know that the views he quotes as characterizing the discipline of rhetoric were the Sophists’ views of rhetoric, not those of its greatest classical exponents.

Quintilian, the greatest of the ancient teachers of rhetoric, considers virtue essential to the rhetor:

Proceeding to moral philosophy or ethics, we may note that it at any rate is entirely suited to the orator. For vast as is the variety of cases, ... there is scarcely a single one which does not at some point or another involve the discussion of equity and virtue, ... Again, in deliberative assemblies how can we advise a policy without raising the question of what is honorable? Nay, even the third department of oratory, which is concerned with the tasks of praise and denunciation, must without a doubt deal with questions of right and wrong. — Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, Bk I, Chs. 1-3, 12 

Quintilian makes a point later to say that the very purpose of rhetoric was to produce the “good man, speaking well.” Hardly an indictment of morality. But he could as easily have found the same belief expressed by Aristotle, the greatest theoretician of rhetoric, or Cicero, its greatest practitioner. He could also have found the ethical implications of rhetoric discussed by Augustine, whose book On Christian Doctrine applied the rhetorical teachings of classical thinkers to the teaching of Christianity.

Besides, if the art of persuasion is inherently anti-Christian, then why should we be persuaded by Jones? How, other than by persuasion, does he purport to persuade us that we should not teach rhetoric to our children?

For all of Jones’ criticisms of classical education for its tendency to create a questioning mind, he asks a surprising number of questions for which he provides no answer.

In his discussion of logic, Jones argues against it on the grounds that it produces a questioning mind that leaves things unsettled. “The premise is to question everything and accept nothing as certain.” Yet at the end of his article, what does he recommend? “There are many questions to answer, but the important thing is to ask them and then find peace with the answer.” The classical writers Jones criticizes for their lack of concern for the truth would never have left an issue with such an indefinite conclusion. And they never would have said that the goal of asking questions was “peace.”

The goal of asking questions, they would have said, was to find an answer. A true one.

How knowing Latin helped one reporter get the scoop of a lifetime

"Qui res mundi vellet scire linguam Latinam cognosciat."

If you don't know what that means, then join all the reporters who missed one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the 21st century.

When Pope Benedict XVI recently abdicated the papacy, he did it in a speech that was supposed to be about the canonization of three saints. But all of a sudden, he began almost whispering in Latin.

Giovanna Chirri, the Vatican reporter for ANSA, the leading news wire service in Italy, was covering the regularly scheduled speech. She immediately realized what the Pope was saying.

She knew Latin.

She quickly called Vatican spokesman Frederico Lombardi to confirm what she thought she had heard: that Benedict was going to do something that no pope had done for 717 years: voluntarily step down from his office. But Lombardi could not be reached.

Chirri then reported to her editor at the ANSA News agency that the Pope had just announced his abdication. But the editor got cold feet, and a heated argument ensued between the reporter and her editor, the editor doubting her story, and Chirri insisting that her Latin was good enough to understand what the Pope had said.

At 11:46 a.m. GMT, ANSA sent out the alert to a surprised world. Chirri had scooped the rest of the press corp because she knew Latin.

Oh, and that Latin sentence above? It means, "He who wants to know what's happening in the world should know Latin."

The Battle of the Red Books and the Blue Books: The literature of the town vs. the literature of the country

After the 2004 presidential election, someone posted a map showing, county by county, who voted for which candidate. Whoever made the map (I have forgotten now) chose to represent the counties that voted for George W. Bush, the Republican, in red, and the counties that voted for Al Gore, the Democrat, in blue. The map has become a familiar part of the American political lexicon, invoked now by pundits on an almost daily basis.

If you look at the map, the association is as clear as day: the denser the population, the more liberal the political leanings—and the sparser the population, the more traditional. But it is more than just politics that divides the red states and the blue states.

From before most of us can even remember, we are soaked and steeped in the distinction between the town and the country. As far back as Aesop, we are told that the ways of the city are not the ways of the country, and that, in fact, the country life is more solid, more stable, and more satisfying.

Aesop's Town Mouse, having visited the Country Mouse’s home and found the lifestyle too quiet and the cuisine too plain. He convinces the Country Mouse to return with him to the city, where there are “sweetmeats and jellies, pastries, delicious cheeses, indeed, the most tempting foods that a Mouse can imagine.” On its face, the city offers luxuries unattainable in the country, and the country mouse is dazzled. But as soon as he has availed himself of these delicacies he is confronted by the servants, the dog, and, worst of all, the cat. The Country Mouse stopped in the Town Mouse's den only long enough to pick up her carpet bag and umbrella.

"You may have luxuries and dainties that I have not," she said as she hurried away, "but I prefer my plain food and simple life in the country with the peace and security that go with it."

I think I understand the Town Mouse’s impatience with the country. Shortly after we were married, my pregnant wife and I moved from the suburbs of southern California to the rustic environs of small town Kentucky. When we first visited the small town in which we still live, we were charmed by the old-fashioned main street, with the bandstand in the park in front of the courthouse and the classic beauty of the little college in town—not to mention the lush green of the fields and horse farms that seem to go on forever.

But it wasn’t long after we moved when other things began to loom large: There was little in the way of restaurants, fewer choices at the grocery store, and if you wanted to shop for clothes, you had to drive for an hour to Lexington to do it. Everything seemed to close at 5:00 p.m. And don’t even ask about Sunday: Nothing was open, and you were on your own.

We traveled back home frequently with our two, three, and then four children. And, for a time, we might have moved back to what we perceived to be civilization if we could. We missed the luxuries and dainties.

But the years began to tell on our way of looking at things. The trips back to California became less frequent and less gratifying. The polluted air, the crowded roads, the endless asphalt—I don’t remember noticing them much when I lived there, but they came to seem chief features of the landscape. Where were the cows? Where were the corn fields? Where were the patches of woods and the occasional deer crossing the road? Why did no one wave to you when you drove by?

Our three boys had by then spent a good part of their childhood tromping through the creek that ran through our backyard (or fishing in it), and our daughter had already taken to horseback-riding (which eventually became her profession). We left as unwitting town mice, but every successive trip contributed to our transformation into country mice.

There was something about the country that seemed more solid, satisfying, and safe—and there was something about the city that was artificial, anxious, and threatening. And this was not our judgment only, but the judgment of time and civilization.

The ancient Romans loved to tell the story of Cincinnatus, who, after serving as Roman consul, retired to his country estate. When Rome’s enemies later began to rise against them, the Roman senate sent a delegation to his farm to beg him to return to lead the country out of its crisis. They found him, the story goes, at work with his plow. He returned to Rome and led it out of one of its darker moments and, as soon as he had accomplished his purpose, gave up the absolute powers they had granted him and returned to his farm in an act that George Washington consciously copied when he resigned after his second term as first president of the United States.

Washington, a farmer himself, saw in Cincinnatus the same agrarian virtues that animated the many Virginia planters who attended at the birth of this nation. In fact, if you visit the Capitol Rotunda today, you will find the famous statue of Washington. He is leaning with one arm on the fasces, the cylindrical bundle of bound rods and axes that represents civil authority, and behind him is a plow. Jefferson too extolled the virtues of agrarian life. If you ever visit the Jefferson Memorial, walk to the back of his giant bronze statue and notice the two things sitting behind him: a column of corn and column of tobacco.

Once you notice the prevalence of these symbols on almost every statue and pediment in this nation’s capitol city, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this nation’s founders saw the agrarian life as anything other than the seedbed of virtue.

And literature joins history in its testimony to these values. The story of the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse is joined by innumerable others in the case for the country. Children’s literature in particular is full of it. It is hard to imagine Laura falling asleep to the sweet strains of Pa’s fiddle in mid-town Manhattan. Wilbur was “some pig,” but would not have been so “terrific” in a place other than the barn in which he lived. And good luck finding blueberries for Sal in the cement jungles in which many of us live.

In fact, it is striking when you consider how few children’s stories take place in a city. The lessons which we are admonished to learn (or which, more frequently, are taught implicitly) are country lessons. When Almonzo’s father in Farmer Boy is showing him how to plant a wheat field, he tells him the story of a “lazy, worthless boy” who was sent to sow a field, but who instead poured the seeds on the ground and went swimming, thinking no one would ever know. “But the seeds knew, and the earth knew,” and in time, when the weeds finally grew, they would tell of his wickedness when even the boy had forgotten it.

It is hard to imagine what urban analogy could be employed to make a similar point. There is something about the fields and forests that allow the moral imagination to run free, and something too particular and artificial about the things of the city to allow what happens there to be universalized. What F. Scott Fitzgerald called the "urban distaste for the concrete" seems to militate against the poetic. For some reason we seem to know ourselves better when we are closer to the soil. In fact, it is worth observing that the word “human” comes from the Greek word humus, which means “earth” or “soil”—that from which, according to Genesis, we are made.

We are more and more in thrall to the artificial, as Levin, the protagonist of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina sees when his city-dwelling brother comes to visit him at his country estate. His brother sees it as a place to escape to for leisure, while Levin sees it as a place to work and live in. Shoulder to shoulder with the peasants mowing the fields Levin finds “a remedy … for every folly,” and finds in his wife, Kitty, who also loves the country, a down-to-earthness that grounds his life in reality. So too in Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, a story in which Stephen Kumalo, an old, Black Anglican priest leaves his tribal home in the country on a mission to find his son who has left for the fleshpots of Johannesburg, and who is in trouble. Johannesburg in Alan Paton’s story is a modern Babylon that has taken and corrupted his son.

Our modern lives are spent more and more in company with man-made things. We build man-made houses in man-made subdivisions in which we watch our man-made television sets and eat our increasingly man-made food, enabling us to lead our man-made lives and think our man-made thoughts. The country life, far from being “at odds with God and man,” as the pastor tells the reclusive Uncle Alp in Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, is a life closer to the things that God made.

There is a distinction made in the old material logic of the medievals between man-made artifacts, whose pattern and purpose are imposed on them from without, and natural objects, whose pattern and purpose are really in them. The wood of a tree has its formal and final cause buried within its very being, whereas a bed has its pattern and purpose imposed on it from the outside by man. This is why, said Aristotle, if you were to bury a wooden bed in the ground and it sprouted, it would sprout a tree and not a bed.

In the old classical conception of the cosmos, natural things not only seem more real, but really are more real. So when we surround ourselves with unnatural things, we should not be surprised when we find that we have been distanced from our natural selves.

Heidi, who is being raised by her grandfather in the mountains, is taken to Frankfurt, Germany to be the companion of Clara, a young disabled girl where she turns the house upside down with her impulsiveness, driving the stuffy Miss Rottenmeier to consternation and the more good humored servant Sebastian to fits of suppressed laughter. Used to going out first thing in the morning “to see whether the sky was blue and the sun shining, and to say good morning to the trees and flowers,” Heidi finds the doors of Clara’s house nailed shut and no view at all from the open front door. She was “like a wild bird in a cage, seeking a way through the bars to freedom.”

She is sorely unhappy there, and her very health deteriorates. Clara’s doctor recommends returning Heidi to her mountain home—and after later visiting Heidi and her grandfather, the same doctor ends up recommending that Clara too be taken to Heidi’s mountains.

There are stories set is small towns, but seldom in big ones. Small towns are towns in which humans not only live, but, being human-sized towns, they are towns into which they can comfortably fit. Margaret Wise Brown’s Mike Mulligan, Jane—Eleanor Estes “middle Moffat,” Robert McClosky’s Homer Price—all live in the kind of small towns that still dot the red state landscape.

The nihilist modern adult stories that make up so much a part of modern literature are set exclusively in the city. All the modern tales of alienation and despair—Gogol’s Overcoat, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment , Tolstoy’s "Death of Ivan Ilych," Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Sartre’s Nausea, Camus’ The Stranger—They all take place in an urban setting, far away from the hundred acre wood.

But the allure of the city is strong, and more and more of us eventually end up there at some point. The boy in Robert Penn Warren’s “Blackberry Winter” sees a strange man walking down the road and onto their farm. He is an outsider who asks for work, but he is a threatening presence, invading the innocence of the life of the boy and his family. He wears tattered city clothes and seems to represent the more modern industrial life. After he is told to move on by the boy’s father, the boy follows him for a ways down the road. Finally, the tramp turns to him, saying “You don’t stop following me and I’ll cut your throat …”

“That was what he said,” said the boy, “for me to stop following him. But I did follow him, all my days.”

There are exceptions to this thesis of course, even among children’s books. Curious George, Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, and Trumpet of the Swan are all set in the city, although even in these the country is often resorted to as a moral refuge and for spiritual relief.

In fact, much of the country life that once thrived in America has atrophied. Anyone who drives the side roads of America can see it: small towns which have been bled dry by the nearby interstate and commercial districts which have taken away the thriving commerce that the main streets of this country once enjoyed. In my home state of Kentucky, the demise of the tobacco culture has left ghost towns where there were once thriving townships .

Conversely, there are many cities which enjoy a more thriving culture, with their burroughs and smaller districts. In these places the very density of the architecture has prevented the larger stores like Wal-Mart from luring people away from the smaller businesses. Here small groceries and corner hardware stores still thrive in a way that is no longer possible in small towns, where the siren song of the strip malls lures many a shopper to her ruin. There is still a community in which you know the butcher at the market, and the waitress at the local coffee shop, and where you are on a first name basis with your doctor, and your mechanic, and where the barber who cuts your hair is the same one who cut it when you were a kid.

You can find a little bit of the country even in many cities.

When Heidi’s grandfather is asked what will become of Heidi if she never goes to school, he responds, “She’ll grow up with the goats and the birds. They won’t teach her any bad ideas and she’ll be very happy.” Most of us wouldn’t go that far. Still, some of us are sympathetic to the judgment of Beatrix Potter, who, after telling of Timmy Willie, the country mouse in The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse, remarks, “One place suits one person, another place suits another person. For my part, I prefer to live in the country, like Timmy Willie.”

Is Latin Worth Studying? A response to a Latin critic

Susan Evans at the Homeschool Channel has written a post entitled "Don't Study Latin," an admittedly provocative title, particularly to those of us who teach it. The post is a representative example of what many people think about Latin, and for that reason alone is worth responding to.

First, she says, "At the risk of ticking people off (and the more you're ticked off, the more it's probably true), I would like to say that people who study Latin are snobs." She invites her reader to throw tomatoes if they disagree with her. I will not stoop to hurling vegetables, but I will point out a few logical problems with her argument.

First, to call those with whom you disagree "snobs" is a clear example of the ad hominem fallacy, which involves a personal attack on the person you disagree with. I don't think Evans means this in any hostile way (in fact, I think she is partly just poking fun), but it is still a logical mistake--and one that has little to do with the merit of whatever position someone holds.

If we were to argue, for example, that all mathematicians were snobs, would that say anything substantive about the truth or usefulness of mathematical constants, differential equations, or the Pythagorean Theorem? Does the personal state of the practitioner of some discipline qualify that discipline in any meaningful way? If Einstein had been caught shoplifting, would that mean that E no longer equaled MC²?

Second, she says, "All I'm saying is that the study of Latin is dreadfully boring. You're punishing your children. Are you just checking off the boxes of what you should do for a classical education just to say you did it? Or worse, to boast about your children?"

The assumption here seems to be that we should not study subjects that are boring, and that the fact that some people might find a particular subject boring is the fault, not of the person studying it, but of the subject itself. Does that mean that if our children find math boring then we should not teach it to them? Or literature or history? Does the merit of the subject depend on how exciting our children happen to find it? And then, of course, there is the matter of whether it really is boring and, if so, why? Is the teaching of English grammar punishing your children? There are many students who find English grammar terribly boring.

Latin is like any other subject in this respect: if taught poorly it is boring; if taught well it is not. But, again, this has little to do with the merit of the subject itself.

In regard to people studying Latin "checking off boxes," Evans does not give us any evidence to believe that this is in fact the reason people study Latin. They are certainly not reasons anyone who promotes the study of it would give. Who are these people who are studying Latin to check off boxes? And are there other subjects which Evans would find valuable that are also taught in order to check off boxes? If there are, is that a sufficient reason to denigrate those subjects? And again, is Latin any different from any other subject in this regard?

If you are going to criticize something, you need to be careful not to mischaracterize it in the process. This is commonly called a "straw man" argument. It is much easier to attack a mischaracterization of a position than the real position. You owe it to your opponent to deal with the best arguments for his opinion, not the worst ones you can find.

The arguments for studying Latin are:

1. Latin is a better way to understand the grammar of your own language--and the system of grammar in general. It is always better to study grammar in a language other than your own, since you tend to see right through the grammar of the language you already know. It is particularly good to study the grammar in an inflected language, since it has an organized noun and adjective system in addition the the organized verb system all languages have. Familiarity with an inflected language is almost the only way to really understand grammatical cases, since, in non-inflected languages like English, Spanish, and French, the cases are essentially invisible. And it is even better to study an inflected foreign language that is also regular. Evans says that if you are going to study a classical language, you should study Greek. Greek would work for the purpose of learning grammar better, but the problem with it (and German and some other inflected languages) is that they have many exceptions to their grammar rules. Latin is the most regular of all inflected languages, and is therefore easier to study.

2. The study of Latin also assists greatly in the development of critical thinking skills. The first reason has to do with its sheer complexity. As with any foreign language studied using a grammar-based approach, it requires the understanding and use of important linguistic distinctions such as person and number. As an inflected language it also involves distinctions of case, gender, and number. There are other sophisticated distinctions involved in Latin such as those between quality and quantity in adjectives, those between the different kinds of ablative cases, and those between the different noun declensions and verb conjugations. Someone has observed that just matching a Latin adjective to the noun it modifies in case, gender, and number involves 17 mental steps. Making distinctions and seeing resemblances are the two basic thinking skills, and Latin is full of them. This may be why there is a high correlation between the study of Latin and high performance on college entrance exams.

3. It is the mother tongue of Western civilization, being the basis for English academic vocabulary in general, and the vocabulary of the sciences in particular. Fully 60 percent of academic vocabulary is Latinate. One and two syllable English words are largely Anglo-Saxon, but larger words are mostly derived from Latin. Consequently, a student who knows Latin has a much easier time negotiating academic English. He will know the meaning of words he has never seen before--and more deeply understand the ones is already familiar with.

Anyone who challenges the wisdom or utility of teaching Latin needs to deal with these arguments.

"Plus," says Evans, "the people of Greece actually speak Greek. I've been to Greece, and I've heard Greek being spoken. It's definitely a live language." This is true. The problem is that the Greek spoken in ancient times is quite different from that spoken today. I remember a Jehovah's Witness coming to my house, who I invited in. His Greek accent was thick enough so that he was hard to understand. When we began discussing the New Testament, I got my Greek New Testament out and we looked at it. He was clearly unable to understand it.

Evans says, "The bottom line is this: our time is precious and limited. Don't you want the greatest amount of good done in the least amount of time? If you can actually learn the Latin roots while at the same time learning a real live language that is the second language of our country, why not do it?"

For one thing, simply learning Latin roots outside of the language is an inferior means of learning the roots. You will know the roots much better if you actually study the language. Learning something in context always results in learning it better. I agree that our time is precious and limited. So why not study a language that teaches you grammar better, that, because of the mental training, is the best preparation for the later study of logic, and that is the root of the very language we speak--not to mention the foundation for the languages that Evans says we should study instead.

Latin primarily, and Greek secondarily, were once staples in any good school and only ceased being so when they were pushed out by the progressivism and pragmatism that has driven our schools into the ground. They were used because they were an essential part of the old, classical liberal arts curriculum--a curriculum that intellectually prepared students for any other subject because it trained students in the arts or skills that were common to all subjects. They were part of what we did to pass on the culture of the Christian West to each successive generation.

It is a system of education that deserves to be revived, not reviled.

The Egyptian Gold: Why we read the pagans

From my "Letter from the Editor" in the upcoming issue of the Classical Teacher magazine:

Moses had stood before Pharaoh more than once asking him to let his people go, and plague upon plague had been brought against the Egyptians as a result of Pharaoh's refusal. There were plagues of blood, frogs, and gnats; of wild animals, pestilence, and boils; and of hail, locusts, and darkness. Then the final stroke: "Yet one plague more will I bring upon Pharaoh and Egypt, and after that he shall let you go and thrust you out."

And this He did. When God was through with the Egyptians, they wanted nothing more than that their land be rid of the Hebrews and their God, Who had visited such calamity upon them: "And the Egyptians pressed the people to go forth out of the land speedily, saying: We shall all die."

It is here that something strange happens:

And the children of Israel did as Moses had commanded: and they asked of the Egyptians vessels of silver and gold, and very much raiment. And the Lord gave favour to the people in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent unto them: and they stripped the Egyptians.¹

On their way out of Egypt, the people showered the Hebrews with their gold and precious things. What happened to these things? Yes, the Hebrews lapsed into their Egyptian habits and made for themselves a golden calf, but, under the leadership of Moses, they used these things to fashion the articles of the Tabernacle. They took the things used for the worship of idols and turned them to the worship of the one true God.

Many hundreds of years later, in a different time and place, St. Augustine saw an important lesson in this story. Just as, by the command of God, the Hebrews despoiled the Egyptians of their treasures and turned them to the service of God, Augustine said, so we are commanded to take the intellectual treasures of the heathen and turn them to better use:

In the same way all branches of heathen learning have not only false and superstitious fancies and heavy burdens of unnecessary toil, which every one of us ... ought to abhor and avoid; but they contain also liberal instruction which is better adapted to the use of the truth, and some most excellent precepts of morality; and some truths in regard even to the worship of the One God are found among them. Now these are, so to speak, their gold and silver, which they did not create themselves, but dug out of the mines of God's providence which are everywhere scattered abroad, and are perversely and unlawfully prostituting to the worship of devils.²

Some people ask why we should read the pagans. If we are to separate ourselves from the world, shouldn't we do away with worldly things? But Augustine asks us to consider whether the learning of the ancients is, in itself, a worldly thing. If it is true, can it have its origin in anything but God? The treasures of the Egyptians are not Egyptian treasures, he says, for they are "dug out of the mines of God's providence." If this is so, then we are not only allowed to use them, but obliged to take them and put them into the service of the good.

If those who are called philosophers ... have said aught that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful possession of it.

As we look around us, we realize that we are in much the same position as Augustine, who died as Rome was falling to the barbarians. As the empire of Rome cane apart, its treasures fell into the lap of the Church, which preserved them through the Dark Ages for use in a better time.

We are witness to a new barbarism that works to destroy our culture through the very institutions of learning that were founded to pass it on. Our nation’s schools, which once took it as their mission to pass on Western civilization, are now as enthusiastic in wanting to rid themselves of their treasures as were the Egyptians. And once again the Church is in the position of preserving the Egyptian gold.

The Church, in fact, is the only institution with either the ability or the inclination to do this. "It is only Christian men," said Chesterton , who "guard even heathen things."<sup>3

1</sup>Exodus 12: 35-36
²St. Augustin, On Christian Doctrine, Ch. 40
³G. K. Chesterton