Wednesday
A fascinating article in the Los Angeles Book Review questions whether there was ever a golden age where most students were classically educated. According to Naomi Kanakia, it’s a myth that isn’t borne out by the facts.
Speaking as one who believes fervently that one should be well read and that classic literature enhances one’s life, I’m sad to say that she seems to have a point.
Kanakia starts with her own longing for that vision:
I’m an immense fan of books that bewail the state of the humanities and plead for a return to the educational system of yesteryear, when the average undergrad could, we are told, quote Homer in the original Greek, and when the US Senate was filled with philosopher kings who slept with Marcus Aurelius under their pillows.
She then reports that, for the past twelve years, her own reading choices have been shaped by her determination to achieve a “classical education.” She has done this, she says,
because I thought it was what you did: I thought all writers read Tolstoy and Euripides and Chaucer — that a writer would be laughed out of town if they weren’t familiar with the “the canon.”
Like the Vietnamese immigrant Phuc Tran, whom I wrote about recently, Kanakia used Clifton Fadiman’s The New Lifetime Reading Plan: The Classical Guide to World Literature to determine her reading choices. As a result, over the past 12 years she has read
Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Herodotus, Suetonius, Tacitus, Plutarch, the Bhagavad Gita, Defoe, Gibbon, Fielding, Richardson, St. Augustine, Rousseau, Voltaire, Cervantes, Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Gogol, Chekhov, Pushkin, Cather, Faulkner, Woolf, Waugh, Nabokov, and others.
Much of Kanakia’s article is about her realization that few people in the past have subscribed to such an ideal. They didn’t do so in ancient Rome or in Elizabethan England or in 19th century Oxford-Cambridge-Harvard-Princeton-Yale. Indeed, more periods of history than not have thought it “ungentlemanly” to pay too much attention to books. Nor, she reports, do most contemporary writers advocate such an education:
[A]fter I came into contact with the literary world, I realized that I’d been operating from a very mistaken — and hopelessly bourgeois — set of beliefs. I’ve only rarely met other writers who care about the Classics. When one National Book Award–winning author asked me my favorite authors, I responded, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Henry James, and he chided me, saying I should read more contemporary books (I read plenty of contemporary books, but I’d think it strange if someone’s favorite author of all time was still alive).
She discovered the same was true of her classmates in a Master of Fine Arts creative writing in which she enrolled:
Forget about reading Homer, most hadn’t read Middlemarch or David Copperfield. To the extent that they were influenced by literature, it was by recent American literature: Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson were popular influences. Virginia Woolf, at least, had some adherents, but even the modernists weren’t terribly popular, though most had some familiarity at least with Faulkner and Hemingway….According to the Classical model, this is essentially the same as being uneducated.
Kanakia wonders whether her vision was shaped by cultural conservatives like Harold Bloom and Allan Bloom—and whether they themselves were moved by wanted they wanted to believe than reality:
[M]ost books about the humanities take it as a given that we exist in a fallen time, that the golden age of the Classical education is in the past, but lately I’ve started to wonder if that time ever existed. In recollecting my own education, I’ve started to wonder if the contemporary notion of a “Classical education” is largely the product of a series of popular books that began with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and continued through Jacques Barzun’s The Culture We Deserve (1989), Walter Kirn’s Lost in the Meritocracy (2009), William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep (2014), and others. Like me, these writers were usually outsiders, many of them Jewish (which is to say, they were not themselves part of any notional WASP aristocracy), and they had in their youths at some point bought into the idea of a Classical education. They had pursued this ideal and now found the reality — the position of the Classics in our culture and our educational system — to be somewhat lacking.
Only twice in American history, Kanakia argues, has the ideal of a classical education ever predominated amongst those in power:
The ideal that haunts America is the notion of an educated elite: a political class that is also well versed in Classical literature and history. But it’s clear, at least to me, that whether such an elite ever existed in the United States is debatable. If it did, it was only at two moments: in late 18th-century Virginia and early 20th-century New England. The Virginian planters — the children and grandchildren of adventurers — used their wealth and leisure to study. In many cases, they were the first generation of their family to be formally educated. And the early 20th-century WASP elite, finally freed from the religious shackles their ancestors had worn, tried belatedly to catch up to the continental attainments that their great-grandparents had fled from….[T]he founding fathers were highly educated and well versed in Classical culture, as was the run of patrician presidents early in the 20th century: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt.
Kanakia’s conclusion: While the ideal of being well-versed in the classics has been around for a long time, for the most part those in power have only paid lip service to it. This had the effect, however, of motivating people who saw it as a ticket to joining the power elites. As I noted in my post on Phuc Than, that is exactly how he saw it. As a result, they often came closer to the ideal than those they strove to emulate:
As Richard Karabel documented in his monumental work The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (2005), the general raising of academic standards at elite universities is almost entirely due to the entrance of Jewish students at the beginning of the 20th century. Because Jewish kids took all this stuff seriously: they actually studied Latin and Greek; they actually studied and absorbed the Classics. In this devotion, they were continuing a process that’s occurred repeatedly throughout history: the children of the bourgeois exploiting brief periods when a Classical education might gain them an advantage in a changing world. They’re similar to the Florentine notaries who studied the secular Classics to improve their Latin and rise in the civil service. Or to the educated laymen of the 14th and 15th centuries in England, scions of gentle families impoverished by the Black Death or merchant families enriched by it, who turned their knowledge of Latin into influential positions at a court that had traditionally been the preserve of the priesthood. Or to Cicero, a fiery orator and novus homo (his family had never held a consulship) who put his talents in the service of an aristocratic party that needed a “man of the people” who could bear its standard and oppose the rising tide of populism.
And then she notes,
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.
And as is always the case, if strivers are too successful at adopting the culture of elites, the elites will simply change the culture:
In some ways, these Jewish students killed Classical education, because Harvard and Princeton and Yale realized that, if they were only to admit students on the basis of their knowledge of Greek and Latin, their entering class would be entirely Jewish.
By the end of the article, Kanakia arrives at a couple of discouraging conclusions. One is that a classical education will not produce leaders, at least in the current environment:
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 them. 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.
Another is that most Americans will not be helped by a classical education:
For the bulk of Americans, who are destined to be employees rather than bosses, and whose public role, even as citizens, has been increasingly devalued by the slipping-away of our democracy, there is little need to concern oneself with their education, nor do I think it will be possible to get them to ignore the fact that the wisdom conferred by a Classical education will be useless to them in the life of precarity and drudgery to come.
And further on,
The Classics can’t save us. They can’t generate wealth and opportunity from nothing.
I won’t spend time today talking about why I disagree—my daily essays are devoted to the many different ways that the classics can indeed “change your life”—but I nevertheless find Kanakia’s article very useful. It has me thinking about why I think the way I do. Tomorrow’s post will share those reflections.
For the moment, I’ll just note that she does make one important concession in her final paragraph:
[A]t the moments when [the classics] are most useful, the moments when ordinary people once more have a role to play in public life, they inevitably emerge to guide the way.
Kanakia doesn’t provides examples as to how exactly this guidance will work. Her piece is much more about classical education as a means of credentialing rather than as a way to learn vital life skills. Nevertheless, I’m glad to see her acknowledge that, at certain times, the classics can prove useful.