The Grammar of Our Civility: Classical Education in America

FOREWORD

FOREWORD This short book has been a long time in the making, although the actual writing of it occupied me for only five years, from 1999 until the summer of 2004. Its genesis, though, can be traced to the autumn of 1984, when I found myself enmeshed very much against my will in a power struggle of the kind that too often disfigures academic life at the University of Texas and elsewhere.1 During the rest of that long academic year in Austin, I sat down nearly every morning with my friend Carl Rubino to discuss the situation before us. Our conversation turned again and again to an old, difficult question: what was the connection between knowledge and action? Specifically, what was the connection between knowledge of classical literature and culture, which we agreed was profound and beautiful, and moral action in society? This book is an attempt to answer that question. My answer takes its departure from a remark of Werner Jaeger: “Without the continuing prestige of the ancient idea of humanity in human culture, classical scholarship is just a waste of time. Whoever does not see this ought to come to America and let himself learn from ix 1 Briefly described by Robert Gutzwiller in Culham and Edmunds, Classics: A Discipline and Profession in Crisis? 355–57. the way classical studies have developed there.”2 I argue that Jaeger was right. Classics, the study of ancient Greece and Rome, has never developed, as other academic subjects and disciplines have, a distinctly American form in response to American social and cultural conditions. Instead, Classics in this country has imitated European models and patterned itself after forms of education and scholarship developed in a cultural context where, as Jaeger saw, the prestige of Humanism guaranteed the cultural value of classical study. This American dependence on European models of classical education followed naturally from the place that study of Greece and Rome had in American higher education from its beginning. Because classical languages formed the ground of higher and secondary education in America from Colonial times, classics could hardly be seen in anything but traditional terms and so was unable to negotiate successfully the transition at the end of the nineteenth century from what Gerald Graff and others have called the Old College to the modern university . Classics retained much of its predisciplinary, untheorized character and as a result became, and continues to become, marginalized among the professionalized disciplines of modern American universities . Finally, I imagine the contours of a distinctive form of classical education grounded in American personal and social reality as firmly as European classical studies were grounded in the society they served. In writing about this predisciplinary, untheorized academic practice , I have tried to resist the temptation to beg questions by offering a unitary definition that would limit my investigation to the answers that I hoped to find. I speak therefore sometimes about Classics (a singular noun), sometimes about classical studies or classical education, and sometimes by metynomy about Latin, Greek, or classical languages. I find this imprecision unsatisfying but necessary, and I hope to clarify it in a more theoretical work whose outlines are only now beginning to emerge. This book is not only for classical scholars, a few thousand of whom still practice their craft in America; indeed, much of what it says will not x / Foreword 2 Jaeger, Scripta Minora, vol. 1, xxvi. be news to them. Instead I have written for the body of educated Americans who may have some vague recollection of high school Latin, or of a college humanities course, and who may believe, without knowing exactly why, that there is something important about the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome and the languages that convey them. I am conscious that after twenty years away from university life, I write now as someone for whom it has become almost a foreign country , albeit one that I visit regularly. I hope, however, that this point of view has allowed me to notice and comment on things that those who live there take for granted, and that my comments will be taken not as those of an alien, but as those of an expatriate. No one writes alone. It is a pleasure here to thank a few of the people who helped in the creation of this book. My two academic homes, The Episcopal Academy and Bryn Mawr College, have given me...