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May 16, 2005
For Mungo - Nock on Classical Education
At twelve or thereabouts, for my sins I was sentenced to do time over the "standard authors" which a schoolboy at my stage of progress was supposed to read, -- Caesar, Xenophon, Homer, Virgil, Cicero, -- and God wot it was the dullest, dreariest, most unrewarding task I ever set my hand to. If the language-difficulties attendant on it had been even a shade more obstructive than they were, I would have thrown Greek and Latin to the winds forever. These were the least of my troubles; my tribulations rose from the substance of what these wretched men wrote about; it was all so far over my head. I was not interested in bridge-building, in Ariovistus or Vercingetorix, or in what the father of the gods and king of men had done for Aeolus. ...The schools in our town were somewhat worse than none, and I did not attend them, but had hitherto gone on with my studies in the same happy-go-lucky-fashion as in Brooklyn. My readings in Greek and Latin had consisted of scraps culled from various works; they were mostly short, and all were appropriate to my age. They dealt with matters well within the compass of a child's understanding, affairs of ordinary life, ordinary experience; many of them were light, amusing, humorous. This slipshod curriculum was invaluable to me in one respect. It set me on my way to see the men and women of antiquity as I have always since then seen them, not as story-book heroes and heroines, but as people exactly like us. ... This may seem a commonplace observation, perhaps a stupid commonplace; yet it does point straight to the enormous difference between knowing history and understanding history. ... Nine-tenths of the value of classical studies lies in their power to establish a clear commonsense, matter-of-fact view of human nature and its activities over a continuous stretch of some twenty centuries.
I wish he went into more detail about those casual scraps of Greek and Latin. Later he mentions "Aulus Gellius's scrapbook, Pliny's letters, bits from Cornelius Nepos and Eutropius; epigrams of Martial, Ausonius, the Anthology; fables out of the Graeca Minora, stories out of the Vulgate ..."
Er ... whatever those are. I know the words "Pliny" and "Vulgate" and "Graeca Minora."
He continues:
The authors whom tradition has lebelled "preparatory" have a great place in literature, but that is far out of a child's reach. My notion is that Caesar and Cicero come in with Tacitus, Sallust and others, far along in one's course, as topical reference-reading in a critical study of Roman political history, and Homer and Virgil should in a critical literary study based on Aristotle's Poetics. Taken thus, the student will read and re-read them with understanding and pleasure, but taken as a corpus vile of "preparatory" material he will detest them.
Thoughts? Mungo?
I would certainly like my kids to read Latin and Greek that they find interesting, at least at first - though I would guess that my particular children would actually like Caesar. It's frustrating to not be able to make these judgments myself; through my own ignorance I have to depend on what others hand me as appropriate for teaching. Yes, yes, I'm working on it. Where did I put that Henle grammar?
Posted by lynx at May 16, 2005 8:55 AM
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Comments
I think reading choices in Latin and Greek do depend a great deal on the student's interests and the teacher's skill in making them "tasty." It sounds like your boys would *love* Caesar, and I even found that I really got into Xenophon, which I didn't expect. The difficulty lies in finding texts that are at the right level linguistically and that also interest the student. The fit is rarely perfect, but I do think there's a great deal of wisdom in the standard progression of Caesar-Virgil-Cicero-Catullus (or other lyric poet).
The other authors he mentions are ones that show up in older Latin readers - basically the Latin version of McGuffey's.
The other thing is that reading these things once when you're 14 or 15 in order to pass an exam or what have you might well lead to hating them. But I think the classical paradigm assumes that this is just the *first* time a student will read Caesar or Virgil. Those are authors to revisit throughout a lifetime (well, maybe Virgil more than Caesar!). And the sense that these were real people is very important - and very humbling.
Posted by: Mungo at May 16, 2005 12:08 PM
Keep up the discussion! This is the coffee, cake, and chat with other adults that I've been craving.
Dy, chatting w/ her mouth full and a pencil in hand
Posted by: Dy at May 16, 2005 10:32 PM