Los Angeles Review of Books

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Author: lareviewofbooks.org
Full Title: Los Angeles Review of Books
Category: #articles
URL: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-myth-of-the-classically-educated-elite/

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Notice, I leave aside the question of whether knowledge of the Classics makes you a better thinker or more capable leader. I would argue that it probably does but that, in most eras, the wisdom conferred by the Classics is more likely, as Tocqueville noted, to discourage you from pursuing paths to power. As we can see in our own culture, nuance and wisdom are nowhere particularly desired. This is a time for anger, action, and black-and-white thinking.
The impossible ideal of a collegiate Classical education — an idea so beloved of so many university professors — has killed the spirit of autodidacticism that allowed many 19th- and 20th-century Americans to achieve the same result.
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To a large extent, it’s simply not possible to give a Classical education to an unwilling student. Although 10 years of steady reading will get you through most of the canon, it’s impossible to compress that decade into a four-year college career. I’m not sure that Allan Bloom et al. have really thought through the mechanics of how they might impart a Classical education to a college student without it taking over their entire university experience.
But when evangelists harken back to some golden age of cultural literacy, to the extent it ever existed, this is what they are remembering: a time when a Classical education seemed both desirable and attainable by the masses. That time is over. To a certain extent, it’s a victim of widespread college enrollment. The middle class is largely defined now, as it wasn’t in the 19th century, by college attendance. By the time people in the middle class graduate, they are ready to put learning aside. The growth in and prestige of scientific knowledge has also taken its toll: people are more likely to read works of popular science or psychology now than they are the Classics.
With a broad middle class fighting for a large, but finite, number of positions of authority, the idea of a Classical education took hold. Americans bought encyclopedias and Great Books collections by the boatload. They signed up for lecture groups and read learned periodicals.
When critics of Classic literature emphasize its relationship to power, they are getting at the heart of the issue. Literature tended to be composed, in ancient times, by those who were within spitting distance of power but not currently wielding it themselves. Literature was a tool for influencing society and their own position in the world. Generally, the tool was ineffective, but it usually bore some relationship to the problems faced by powerful people.
What proponents of the Classical education misunderstand is that people never learned Latin and Greek merely because it would “make you a better thinker” or “give you access to the world’s knowledge.” They learned those languages because, at certain times and places, it offered a concrete way of getting ahead. Generally, those were times and places when there was strong growth in a nation’s management responsibilities and when the traditional aristocracy was unable to meet those responsibilities. The middle class, to prove itself, would adopt the culture of the aristocrats, and do it better than they ever could. At most other times, the Classics would languish: they would either be actively disdained, as in early medieval Britain or high Republican Rome, or they would be given mere lip service, as during most of American history. It’s only the active engagement of the middle class that has ever renewed knowledge of the Classics.