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to the classics
By Julia Duin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published in Washington,
D.C. 5am -- September 15, 1998
America's schools need to return to the great
books, according to several cultural critics, who argue that 3,000
years of Western civilization need to be cherished, not
forgotten.
Several authors have
produced books on classical education in recent months, among them
Vigen Guroian, a theology and ethics professor at Loyola University
in Baltimore, who has written "Tending the Heart of Virtue: How
Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination."
Gene Veith, dean of arts and
sciences at Concordia University in Wisconsin, and Andrew Kern,
director of classic instruction at Foundations Academy in Boise,
have co-authored "Classical Education: Towards the Revival of
American Schooling."
Os Guinness, a
senior fellow at the Trinity Forum in Burke, Va., and Louise Cowan,
dean of the graduate school at the University of Dallas, have
produced "Invitation to the Classics." This heavily annotated
365-page book was six years in the making, with contributions from
50 scholars.
Classics majors at
Georgetown University have risen from two graduating classics majors
in 1971 to 13 last year, says associate professor Joe O'Connor. They
tend to study ancient philosophy and Greek and Roman archeology as a
foundation for later studies in law and
medicine.
"There is a growth in
Latin studies in the high schools," he says. "A lot of baby boomer
parents think the old education was good." St. Albans and the
National Cathedral School in the District of Columbia both emphasize
Latin programs, he says, and the Latin program in the Fairfax
County, Va., public schools is one of the best in the
country.
Knowledge of the classics
was basic to America's
founders.
"The framers [of the
Constitution] ransacked the past in a self-conscious attempt to use
history to define history," Mr. Guinness says. "They knew all the
classical republics had declined and fallen, so they wanted to
create a republic that was free and would remain
free."
In his book, Mr. Guinness
assumes that most Americans are unfamiliar with the classics, which
is why he has assembled more than 60 vignettes on personalities
ranging from Aristotle to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The work, which
was published by Baker Books this spring, explains how great periods
of renaissance and reformation spring from a return to first
things.
It's the classic literary
works, he says, that have provided Western civilization with the
basis for its thought. He cites the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus,
which contains the passage, "You wish to be called righteous rather
than to act right." And then there's Herodotus' gloomy assessment of
life: "God gives men a gleam of happiness and plunges them into
ruin," from his "History of the Persian Wars."
"One of the reasons classics have
stood the test of time is their extraordinary depth of insight into
human experience," Mr. Guinness says, especially a belief in God,
which he calls a "Archimedean point outside of time." Archimedes, he
adds, is the third-century B.C. Greek mathematician who said, "Give
me a fulcrum and I can move the
world."
"A faith perspective gives
you a vantage point from outside history so you are not captive as a
child of your time," he
says.
Colleges and schools rooted
in religious faith are among the most committed to the liberal arts
and the classics, say Mr. Veith and Mr. Kern in their book,
"Classical Education," as classical education has always been
nourished by the Christian
church.
At its base, they say,
classical education is aimed at the apprehension of the true, the
good and the beautiful. Its curriculum was divided into the seven
liberal arts in the Middle Ages. Subjects were grouped into two
parts: the "trivium" of grammar, logic and rhetoric, and the
"quadrivium" of mathematics, music, astronomy and geometry. Once
these arts of learning were mastered, students were equipped for the
study of the sciences: natural science, moral science and
theological science.
The trivium
is the foundation of learning and most commonly applied to schooling
for young children. These students learn the basics of language
(grammar), how to reason clearly using language (logic), and how to
apply language personally in an effective way (rhetoric).
Many "back-to-basics" movements in
education emphasize grammar and logic because their proponents feel
modern education emphasizes the third leg -- rhetoric -- too
strongly by constantly encouraging students to share their feelings,
to be creative and draw on their own experiences.
Next comes the quadrivium, which
emphasizes the aesthetic perception of music, the abstract and
absolute thought of math, the perception of infinity through the
study of stars, and the relationships of objects in space in
geometry. In the medieval world, the two authors say, a man was not
considered truly educated unless he was well-versed in the
quadrivium.
However, they say,
classical education is not for the fainthearted, as it makes
pampered children work hard and requires the MTV generation to read.
Nevertheless, it's being tried at such places as Rivendell School, a
10-year-old private Christian school in Arlington, Va. The school,
for kindergarten through eighth grades, extensively uses the
classics to teach its 146 students. Curriculum is
literature-centered, says headmaster Steve Larson: Shakespeare for
first-graders and compulsory Latin for seventh- and eighth-graders.
"We're very high on questing types
of literature, such as King Arthur stories or 'The Pilgrim's
Progress' -- anything that will inspire our students," he says. "For
our upper grades, when we study the French Revolution, we read 'The
Scarlet Pimpernell.' As we study Greco-Roman history, we read
Homer's 'The Odyssey.'"
The
school's very name comes from an oasis called Rivendell in a
20th-century classic: J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
Tolkien's Rivendell, the headmaster says, was supposed to be a
stopping place for intellectual
refreshment.
At the Arlington
school, "We really want to inspire their imagination," Mr. Larson
says. He has also been inspired by Mr. Guroian's book, "Tending the
Heart of Virtue," which shows how to foster moral clarity in
children.
Mr. Guroian suggests
using fairy tales to stimulate and instruct the moral imagination,
citing Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" and C.S. Lewis'
"The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" as having shaped the
character of millions of
children.
Children think in terms
of black and white, which is the language of most fairy tales, he
writes. Unlike most other literature, fairy tales show what heroism
and courage look like, and what causes are most important. Children
want to be gallant and heroic, he says; as natural idealists,
children cling to such ideals as honor, duty, faithfulness and
integrity.
"Mostly we fall back on
the excuse that we are respecting our children's freedom by
permitting them to determine right from wrong and to choose for
themselves clear goals of moral living," he writes. "But ... we end
up forfeiting our parental authority and failing to be mentors to
our children in the moral life. This, I fear, is the actual state of
things."
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