Classical Education Needs to Be Defended

There is no department of human thought or endeavour in which the council of antiquity is not directly or indirectly, valuable. Even if all one has gained from a classical education were to be forgotten in later life, any one trained may learn to ask pregnant questions. We labor under the modern belief that the classical world and its works have little to teach anyone but specialists, scholars and teachers of classics. For well over a century, classicists themselves have helped to create this fix. They have encouraged classical teaching emulating the necessarily cisian methods of technicians. In doing so they have ignored or obscured those humanizing balms many of us believe classics to apply.