I am not attacking classical education. I just don’t think it is all that special. Let’s do a thought experiment. What is it about reading Ovid that makes classical education superior? And don’t say Latin. You can learn that anywhere.
I am going to take a topic from the Great Books Series. I am then going to follow the references. The point that Mortimer Adler makes is that the Great Books (which are far from perfect) routinely generate questions about the great topics (e.g., justice, education, God, etc). My point is that such an independent education can do just as much or more as a Classical education.





To be fair, there isn’t anything profound about these, but if you spend a week working through the references, it starts to add up. And you have a curriculum of sorts ready. This isn’t to attack Classical Greece and Rome. I just don’t see the immediate cash value of reading about incest in Ovid.
And it may be fairly argued that
1) “Classical education” has become a Brand Name, commodified like everything else, and so has become enmeshed in the very great danger of losing it’s own soul to mere appearances of wisdom,
2) Some things calling themselves “classical education” today are just conservat-ized progressivism in the sense that they’ve substituted method for wisdom seeking and confused shallow inspectional reading of classical books with having seriously engaged said books.
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